Juries were originally taken to know something about the relevant events. The modern form of jury trials is a weird hybrid of inherited practices and contemporary political ideals. Like most legal phenomena :-)
That modern juries are inexperienced in criminal matters could be a positive feature. Judges may be jaded by constant exposure to narratives of crime. In wealthy countries, serious crimes are exceptional events. Jurors have reason to pay attention to narratives of such events.
Further, legal experts worry about naive juries being swayed by irrational considerations. This might draw expert attention to cognitive biases, and result in institutional steps to avoid them. Legal experts may be less willing to concede that they themselves are biased. Eliminating juries might mean less expert consideration of hazards to good reasoning in criminal trials.
I think it might be useful to focus on how juries decide cases. For example, juries could be told to hold off on proposing solutions. The jury’s group dynamics could be tweaked to promote rational discussion, perhaps by allocating jurors specific roles in the discussion (eg “your job is to tell the group if they’re assuming something that might not be true”, “your job is to look up information in the transcript and see if we’re remembering it correctly”).
That modern juries are inexperienced in criminal matters could be a positive feature. Judges may be jaded by constant exposure to narratives of crime.
I disagree that it’s a positive feature: when juries see each case with inexperienced eyes, they become wildly inconsistent in terms of how informative they regard the various pieces of evidence, and can much more easily be bullsh**ed by charismatic lawyers.
Professional juries (so long as they kept a distant relationship from the judge and are composed of a different group of jurors each time) would gravitate towards a consistent—and probably more rational, evidence-law-adhering—standard for guilt, and for the relevance of the different types of evidence. This would make the results less capricious and more entangled with the defendants’ actual guilt.
I very much like the idea of giving jurors specific roles.
I think telling people to hold off on proposing solutions would be very difficult to get to from current systems, for example the Knox case seemed to center entirely on the prosecution proposing a solution. If you stopped that, it would have a powerful but also partisan effect on cases where unlikely things did actually happen.
ETA: another good juror role might be someone to make sure they only consider legitimate evidence. (i.e. that was presented but not dismissed)
Juries were originally taken to know something about the relevant events. The modern form of jury trials is a weird hybrid of inherited practices and contemporary political ideals. Like most legal phenomena :-)
That modern juries are inexperienced in criminal matters could be a positive feature. Judges may be jaded by constant exposure to narratives of crime. In wealthy countries, serious crimes are exceptional events. Jurors have reason to pay attention to narratives of such events.
Further, legal experts worry about naive juries being swayed by irrational considerations. This might draw expert attention to cognitive biases, and result in institutional steps to avoid them. Legal experts may be less willing to concede that they themselves are biased. Eliminating juries might mean less expert consideration of hazards to good reasoning in criminal trials.
I think it might be useful to focus on how juries decide cases. For example, juries could be told to hold off on proposing solutions. The jury’s group dynamics could be tweaked to promote rational discussion, perhaps by allocating jurors specific roles in the discussion (eg “your job is to tell the group if they’re assuming something that might not be true”, “your job is to look up information in the transcript and see if we’re remembering it correctly”).
I disagree that it’s a positive feature: when juries see each case with inexperienced eyes, they become wildly inconsistent in terms of how informative they regard the various pieces of evidence, and can much more easily be bullsh**ed by charismatic lawyers.
Professional juries (so long as they kept a distant relationship from the judge and are composed of a different group of jurors each time) would gravitate towards a consistent—and probably more rational, evidence-law-adhering—standard for guilt, and for the relevance of the different types of evidence. This would make the results less capricious and more entangled with the defendants’ actual guilt.
I very much like the idea of giving jurors specific roles.
I think telling people to hold off on proposing solutions would be very difficult to get to from current systems, for example the Knox case seemed to center entirely on the prosecution proposing a solution. If you stopped that, it would have a powerful but also partisan effect on cases where unlikely things did actually happen.
ETA: another good juror role might be someone to make sure they only consider legitimate evidence. (i.e. that was presented but not dismissed)