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Trial by jury

Fist Fun

13:01 / 17.07.03

Should the right to trial by jury be restricted?
The idea being to have judge only rulings in cases where a jury would have difficulty applying the law justly.
Seems to make sense. If we are dealing with a complex fraud case can we really expect a non-specialist jury to come to a fair result?

We're The Great Old Ones Now

13:17 / 17.07.03

And when a murder case hinges on complex psychological issues regarding the sanity of the accused, or sophisticated forensic evidence?

Fist Fun

13:25 / 17.07.03

Yeah, I suppose you would get in experts to explain everything.

All Acting Regiment

13:42 / 17.07.03

What it all hinges on is the bent-ness of the judge and the jury. It should be a totally fair decision. What people in jurys have said is that they were being threatened and bribed into lying.

What we have to remember is that a lot of people who are judges are often totally removed from the world in which their accused lives in. Example the judge that got on a bus for the first time and asked to go to 118 notting hill.

Fist Fun

13:51 / 17.07.03

Well making sure that judges are competent is always going to be important. Just like many other professions. Maybe the question is whether one professional judge is likely to be less removed than a group of random members of the public. Take the example of a complex fraud. Perhaps we could have judges who are experts in finance. Then they wouldn't be removed from situaton on which they have been called to judge. Perhaps being removed is a good thing sometimes, though. Objectivity and all that.

SMS

16:14 / 17.07.03

The right to a trial by jury can be waved in certain cases. Anyone who has signed the paypal agreement has agreed to binding arbitration, for instance.

However, the theory behind trial by jury is that there is a way to ensure that the jury has objectivity in most cases. A pool of potential jurors is selected by lot, the quickest way of lowering the odds that anyone has any direct knowledge of the case in question. Then, both prosecuting and defending attorneys ask questions of the pool of potential jurors to eliminate any bias towards either side. And they pick twelve, so even in cases where a mistake is made, there is a buffer of eleven other jurors.

I imagine that, if judges are fair, it is because they do not hold sole power to make decisions in criminal and other cases.

We're The Great Old Ones Now

16:21 / 17.07.03

Let's see the case, then.

What is the value of removing the right to trial by jury? And in what cases is this being proposed? What are the possible negative consequences?

My first reaction is that it's a retrograde step - essentially, in response to a worry about getting convictions, the government proposes to restrict civil liberties. A better way might be to simplify financial law and give juries the proper protection - maybe even anonymity.

Fist Fun

07:38 / 18.07.03

The desired outcome of a trial is a just application of law. The idea is that in certain cases a jury would not be the best method to achieve this. The two examples I have seen quoted are cases where the jury might be rigged or complex fraud cases.

The potential value would be a just legal system where appropriate methods are used to get to get to a fair result. The potential negatives would be one point of failure, the judge, questions over who decides when a case should not go before a jury, potentially tricky cases being referred immediately to a judge in order to recieve the correct result...

We're The Great Old Ones Now

09:13 / 18.07.03

Well, as I said, anonymity might serve better than replacing a jury with judges who could also be threatened by criminals. And yes, such people could be protected, but would having to live under guard lend itself to a just approach to crime? And in the event of threats being made against a judge, would that make them more likely to convict?

Also, as Chris observes, judges tend to be woefully out of touch - a legal/aristocratic group, predominantly white, male, and oxbridge. Yes, we should be addressing those issues anyway, but a certain amount of differentiation will inevitably remain.

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