Against a Jury System

One of the most famous aspects, probably, of American trials is the jury system. As court movies are popular in the United States, and most things that are popular in the US get broadcast in Europe, Asia and Oceania as well, the way American trials are run are better known to the general public in these countries than any other trial system, including their own most of the time. The jury system, a remnant of common law, with the deliberations, the objections, the solid businessman declaring on behalf of the jury "not guilty" in a solemn voice: all this has been imbued with an appeal and a heroism that fits mythology better than basic court procedure. From a cultural point of view, jury systems are a definite success.

However, the same unfortunately does not apply from a legal point of view. There are several basic problems with the idea of jury systems and the procedure that inevitably is a part of it.

The basic philosophy behind the idea of juries, an ancient Greek invention originally, nowadays is that everyone has the right to have his guilt judged by his peers. This fits the democratic tradition (also an ancient Greek invention) of the people ruling over the people, and not granting such powers to any one man alone, as such is very susceptible to abuse and corruption. A jury will decide whether or not the defendant is guilty based on secret jury proceedings which no one may know, and that way no judge holds the power of deciding over the defendant's life alone, even though he still determines the sentence; because there can be no sentencing of someone found not guilty of the charges.

That sounds fair enough. But sooner or later, some questions will arise. First of all the famous Platonic questioning of the power of the ignorant: why allow someone who has no knowledge of the intricacies and nuances of law and the legal system decide such an important thing as the guilt of a man in a courtroom? What's more, the jury not only lacks all such knowledge, but it is in fact chosen because it lacks such knowledge. Common sense tells us that it is pretty impractical, not to mention morally wrong, to allow people ignorant about a situation to judge it. The same should apply here, especially because the matter at hand is so important: everyone pretends to have knowledge about football matches and such opinions are usually not a matter of extensive intelligent debate, but in a potential case of life and death, such as a trial sometimes is, most people would prefer to have someone who is capable of that extensive intelligent debating of the case at hand, instead of a rudimentarily random selection of citizens.

Now there is the matter of protection from undue influence and power abuse. The jury system was, as mentioned, designed to combat such problems as one single judge having judicial power in a case would invite them. In the United States (and everywhere else where juries exist, this applies equally if not more so) juries are not quite the independent, impartial observers of the case they are expected to be. While a judge is trained to be impartial and to apply the law equally and fairly to everyone, juries have no such training. The fact that the death penalty is almost always the jury recommendation in cases where a black person kills a white person, but rarely in the opposite case, is an indication that juries are not any more capable of avoiding prejudice and corruption than anyone else.

The rules of procedure in jury systems also allow for much more undue influence than the system can bear. Although the rules of evidence and statement admission are just as strict as in the French legal system (which knows only judges), there is with juries always the opportunity for shrewd lawyers to abuse it by wilfully making invalid, but highly suggestive comments in their speeches and questions. Judges can rule that those are not admissible and that juries should disregard them, but for a group of untrained regular men and women such is not really humanly possible. So in addition to the possible prejudice of even fairly balanced people (as the blatant bigots are usually filtered out), we have the suggestions, implications and insinuations of wily lawyers which can severely infringe upon the right to a fair trial that every defendant has.

The question is now, of course, is it not a lesser of two evils then? That is not the case, though. On the one hand we have judges, who have been trained to be impartial and fair to all parties involved, who know the law and know what parts of evidence, statements and speeches are legally valid and which are not (allowing them to much more easily 'filter out' the parts not admissible), who hav experience in weighing the merits of each case individually and with regard to jurisprudence, and who are controllable by higher courts and by the legislative and executive powers in extreme cases; and on the other hand we have juries, who have no real legal knowledge, who are not trained to be impartial, who will make an honest attempt at a fair trial for all involved usually but who cannot humanly be expected to suddenly suppress all their personal feelings about the parties, who are not bound by any rules nor reviewable in their decisions, and who, ultimately, are completely unfit to rule on often difficult cases of innocence and guilt.

The right and wrong here are, despite all good intentions of the jury system design, pretty much obvious.
Posted by Matthijs Krul @ 19:09