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The jury system seems completely corrupt to me. I am glad we do not use this method in criminal trials here in Germany where I live.

by pell 7y ago

rootsudo 7y ago
Corrupt? It's a jury of your peers, how is it corrupt? It's random people that decide your fate. In German it's judges. So a judge tries you and says you're guilty or innocent? You have to forego your right of trial by Jury in the USA for that to be the case.
- kevingadd 7y ago
  The corruption is that the lawyers are allowed to take advantage of the jury dismissal system to stack the jury, and in many locations they will do so.
  - leetcrew 7y ago
    have you ever served on a jury? it really does not work this way. the defense and prosecution both get to dismiss as many people with obvious bias (eg, victim of gun violence in a murder trial) as they want. then they both get to dismiss a small number of people without giving a reason. usually there are not enough of the second type to actually "stack" a jury. plus the other side is going to use their strikes to dismiss your favorites anyway, and I believe the defense generally gets more strikes.
- HorstG 7y ago
  In Germany there is the Schoeffengericht aka jury trial for intermediate crime. Schoeffen are also called Laienrichter, layman judges, there just aren't that many of them and procedures are different. The decision of facts (as opposed to legal decisions) is a majority vote of professional and layman judges... edit: major —> intermediate
- wongarsu 7y ago
  I like being judged by a professional with experience. Judges are great. And if one judge or panel of judges is bad you will notice everything they do will be overturned in appeals. The problem is selecting good judges. In Germany this seems to work great, but what I see in recent times in the US terrifies me. Voting for judges leads to populists winning, appointing them leads to very questionable people being appointed for their stance on single issues. Maybe the real problem is that the US is so divided with all sides trying to score points against the other side (whether that's Democrats vs Republicans, Feminists vs everyone else, Black vs White, Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice etc). Everything else just follows from that.
  - lacker 7y ago
    Part of trial by jury is to prevent the government from pushing immoral, dictatorial laws on its citizens. I wouldn’t say that Germany has a great track record of avoiding that.
    - wongarsu 7y ago
      Hitler was a populist with many popular policies and broad support in the population. Trial by jury wouldn't have slowed him down. Apart from Hitler I can't think of any dictatorial laws in the last 150 years or so of (Western) German history. 12/150 seems better than average, so I wouldn't dismiss anything based on that. Trial by jury didn't seem to help African Americans in the first 100 years or so after slavery was abolished, so that's clearly not foolproof either
      - brigandish 7y ago
        Maybe if they'd had their white nationalists cleared out by outside influence it would have. That's what it took with Germany, they should thank the Americans for their part in that. Regardless, the foolproof is the enemy of the good. I doubt whataboutery based on whose deeply immoral and harmful behaviour is worse, of all things, is the way to win that argument.
        7y ago
maxlybbert 7y ago
I used to have a very low opinion of the jury system. I can’t imagine how a system designed to be swayed by emotional or ignorant but opinionated people would look any different from what we already have. After I served on a jury, I had to admit that, whatever its faults, there is some value to occasionally explaining the law to random citizens and asking them to apply it in a given case. It should put a limit on how weird or explicitly unfair the law can be. To be honest, it’s not much of a limit. Several words already have a different legal meaning than their everyday meaning (e.g., in copyright law, “to copy” includes activities that don’t end with an identical copy of the protected work). But there is some limit.
- linuxftw 7y ago
  The whole point of the jury is determining whether or not these laws are even reasonable in the first place.
  - maxlybbert 7y ago
    The courts do their best to discourage jury nullification, but it is important to remember that after Colonial American juries regularly failed to convict people for particular crimes, the British government would instead charge people for those crimes in Britain. That was listed in the Declaration of Independence as one of the king’s abuses: “For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury: For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences.”
    - linuxftw 7y ago
      Indeed. This knowledge has been withheld from the public for generations, hidden in plain site. We have to educate each other.
- Chathamization 7y ago
  > It should put a limit on how weird or explicitly unfair the law can be. The defense isn't allowed to tell jurors about jury nullification and there's an effort to keep out any potential jurors who are aware of it. In general there seems to be a big effort to not have jurors think to much on their own. Once during selection I mentioned how unreliable eye witness testimony can be (they were trying to weed out anyone who had problems with convicting based solely on eye witness testimony), and the prosecutor asked me "What if the judge told you to give eye witness testimony the same weight as physical evidence?" I often see people worry that if we didn't have trial by jury a lot more innocent people would get convicted. Yet if you look at a country like Germany, it doesn't have trial by jury and it has ~1/9 the incarceration rate as the USA.
Tomte 7y ago
We do have remnants of it. In all more severe criminal trials the number of lay judges is calibrated such that they alone without the votes of the professional judges can acquit. Unfortunately, there are many, many problems with it. Lay judges don't get to see the court record (or even the written indictment), they stumble into the trial unprepared, and since oftentimes the oral proceedings are referring to things in the record, they can easily be overwhelmed and confused. Additionally, court secrecy is absolute, and they must not tell anyone how they voted or why, so the professional judge can always sabotage an acquittal by introducing an error in the written judgment, which is written without the lay judges, and the lay judges never even see the written judgment.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  If there are things in the record, how do you prevent these lay judges from reading them? Do you have any insight as to why the court system prevents the lay judges from begin informed -- presumably to prevent the record from being an undue influence.
  - Tomte 7y ago
    > If there are things in the record, how do you prevent these lay judges from reading them? As a lay judge you walk into the court building in the morning of those days you've been appointed for. You meet the professional judges, and they give you a short rundown of the day planned. Then you start the trials. Until then you never even knew that Mr Miller was going to be tried for arson or that Mrs Johnson was going to be tried for shop-lifting. If you walked into the judges office and asked the secretary (well, officer of records) for the indictment, she would tell you to walk away. She, the defender and the prosecutor have the only copies of the record (and in smaller cases the prosecutor does not even have the whole record, just excerpts he photocopied, because the prosecutor in the court room is not the one who worked the case). Yes, the idea is to have totally uninfluenced lay judges.
leetcrew 7y ago
there are a lot of things that are unfair about the us legal system that are unfair, but the jury selection process is not one of them. the prosecutor and defense attorney both get an unlimited number of "strikes for cause". it's a good system for eliminating jurors with potential bias. if you face criminal charges is the US, you can have the verdict decided by the judge if you prefer, but it's usually not a good idea. trial by jury tends to favor the defense more than a bench trial (where the judge decides). imo trial by jury is probably the best part of the US legal system. the real issue is the imbalance in resources between state prosecutors and public defendants. a poor or overburdened attorney can fail to make use of the many advantages you have as the defendant in a jury trial.
brigandish 7y ago
As an aside, this for me has always been the glaring difference between continental Europe which is largely under a civil law system, and Britain, which has a common law system (and hence, the US, Canada, Australia…) The different systems are completely at odds philosophically and require a completely different attitude, which explains so much - Brexit and the antipathy of many Brits towards the EU, and the EU itself are the current exemplar of this - but pick any of the contested parts of the US constitution (like freedom of speech or right to bear arms) and you can gauge support either way by answering the question "do you understand/prefer common law or civil law?" If you don't trust the citizenry to make decisions for themselves then paternalistic authoritarianism is your preference, and we all know where that leads.
- akimball 7y ago
  There isn't a lot of contest about free speech in the US. Some, yes, but not much. The objections to getting shot are much more motivating than the objections to being spoken to or even about.
  - brigandish 7y ago
    You should try Europe, there's plenty of contest about it there, and with plenty of reference to the US.
- user5994461 7y ago
  European countries have a jury system, usually reserved to criminal cases with long sentences, like a murder. Germany is the exception. Abolished jury in 1924. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_trial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_trial
  - brigandish 7y ago
    While technically true, I wouldn't characterise that as "hav[ing] a jury system" but of those systems making use of a jury in exceptional cases or a very limited capacity. Even then I would feel it mischaracterised the system to anyone from the Anglosphere. Greece, for instance, has a jury made up of judges. That's not a jury, that's an equivocation!

The jury system seems completely corrupt to me. I am glad we do not use this method in criminal trials here in Germany where I live.

by pell 7y ago

The jury system seems completely corrupt to me. I am glad we do not use this method in criminal trials here in Germany where I live.

rootsudo 7y ago

Corrupt? It's a jury of your peers, how is it corrupt? It's random people that decide your fate. In German it's judges. So a judge tries you and says you're guilty or innocent? You have to forego your right of trial by Jury in the USA for that to be the case.

kevingadd 7y ago
The corruption is that the lawyers are allowed to take advantage of the jury dismissal system to stack the jury, and in many locations they will do so.
- leetcrew 7y ago
  have you ever served on a jury? it really does not work this way. the defense and prosecution both get to dismiss as many people with obvious bias (eg, victim of gun violence in a murder trial) as they want. then they both get to dismiss a small number of people without giving a reason. usually there are not enough of the second type to actually "stack" a jury. plus the other side is going to use their strikes to dismiss your favorites anyway, and I believe the defense generally gets more strikes.
HorstG 7y ago
In Germany there is the Schoeffengericht aka jury trial for intermediate crime. Schoeffen are also called Laienrichter, layman judges, there just aren't that many of them and procedures are different. The decision of facts (as opposed to legal decisions) is a majority vote of professional and layman judges... edit: major —> intermediate
wongarsu 7y ago
I like being judged by a professional with experience. Judges are great. And if one judge or panel of judges is bad you will notice everything they do will be overturned in appeals. The problem is selecting good judges. In Germany this seems to work great, but what I see in recent times in the US terrifies me. Voting for judges leads to populists winning, appointing them leads to very questionable people being appointed for their stance on single issues. Maybe the real problem is that the US is so divided with all sides trying to score points against the other side (whether that's Democrats vs Republicans, Feminists vs everyone else, Black vs White, Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice etc). Everything else just follows from that.
- lacker 7y ago
  Part of trial by jury is to prevent the government from pushing immoral, dictatorial laws on its citizens. I wouldn’t say that Germany has a great track record of avoiding that.
  - wongarsu 7y ago
    Hitler was a populist with many popular policies and broad support in the population. Trial by jury wouldn't have slowed him down. Apart from Hitler I can't think of any dictatorial laws in the last 150 years or so of (Western) German history. 12/150 seems better than average, so I wouldn't dismiss anything based on that. Trial by jury didn't seem to help African Americans in the first 100 years or so after slavery was abolished, so that's clearly not foolproof either
    - brigandish 7y ago
      Maybe if they'd had their white nationalists cleared out by outside influence it would have. That's what it took with Germany, they should thank the Americans for their part in that. Regardless, the foolproof is the enemy of the good. I doubt whataboutery based on whose deeply immoral and harmful behaviour is worse, of all things, is the way to win that argument.
      - 7y ago

maxlybbert 7y ago

I used to have a very low opinion of the jury system. I can’t imagine how a system designed to be swayed by emotional or ignorant but opinionated people would look any different from what we already have. After I served on a jury, I had to admit that, whatever its faults, there is some value to occasionally explaining the law to random citizens and asking them to apply it in a given case. It should put a limit on how weird or explicitly unfair the law can be. To be honest, it’s not much of a limit. Several words already have a different legal meaning than their everyday meaning (e.g., in copyright law, “to copy” includes activities that don’t end with an identical copy of the protected work). But there is some limit.

linuxftw 7y ago
The whole point of the jury is determining whether or not these laws are even reasonable in the first place.
- maxlybbert 7y ago
  The courts do their best to discourage jury nullification, but it is important to remember that after Colonial American juries regularly failed to convict people for particular crimes, the British government would instead charge people for those crimes in Britain. That was listed in the Declaration of Independence as one of the king’s abuses: “For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury: For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences.”
  - linuxftw 7y ago
    Indeed. This knowledge has been withheld from the public for generations, hidden in plain site. We have to educate each other.
Chathamization 7y ago
> It should put a limit on how weird or explicitly unfair the law can be. The defense isn't allowed to tell jurors about jury nullification and there's an effort to keep out any potential jurors who are aware of it. In general there seems to be a big effort to not have jurors think to much on their own. Once during selection I mentioned how unreliable eye witness testimony can be (they were trying to weed out anyone who had problems with convicting based solely on eye witness testimony), and the prosecutor asked me "What if the judge told you to give eye witness testimony the same weight as physical evidence?" I often see people worry that if we didn't have trial by jury a lot more innocent people would get convicted. Yet if you look at a country like Germany, it doesn't have trial by jury and it has ~1/9 the incarceration rate as the USA.

Tomte 7y ago

We do have remnants of it. In all more severe criminal trials the number of lay judges is calibrated such that they alone without the votes of the professional judges can acquit. Unfortunately, there are many, many problems with it. Lay judges don't get to see the court record (or even the written indictment), they stumble into the trial unprepared, and since oftentimes the oral proceedings are referring to things in the record, they can easily be overwhelmed and confused. Additionally, court secrecy is absolute, and they must not tell anyone how they voted or why, so the professional judge can always sabotage an acquittal by introducing an error in the written judgment, which is written without the lay judges, and the lay judges never even see the written judgment.

pbhjpbhj 7y ago
If there are things in the record, how do you prevent these lay judges from reading them? Do you have any insight as to why the court system prevents the lay judges from begin informed -- presumably to prevent the record from being an undue influence.
- Tomte 7y ago
  > If there are things in the record, how do you prevent these lay judges from reading them? As a lay judge you walk into the court building in the morning of those days you've been appointed for. You meet the professional judges, and they give you a short rundown of the day planned. Then you start the trials. Until then you never even knew that Mr Miller was going to be tried for arson or that Mrs Johnson was going to be tried for shop-lifting. If you walked into the judges office and asked the secretary (well, officer of records) for the indictment, she would tell you to walk away. She, the defender and the prosecutor have the only copies of the record (and in smaller cases the prosecutor does not even have the whole record, just excerpts he photocopied, because the prosecutor in the court room is not the one who worked the case). Yes, the idea is to have totally uninfluenced lay judges.

leetcrew 7y ago

there are a lot of things that are unfair about the us legal system that are unfair, but the jury selection process is not one of them. the prosecutor and defense attorney both get an unlimited number of "strikes for cause". it's a good system for eliminating jurors with potential bias. if you face criminal charges is the US, you can have the verdict decided by the judge if you prefer, but it's usually not a good idea. trial by jury tends to favor the defense more than a bench trial (where the judge decides). imo trial by jury is probably the best part of the US legal system. the real issue is the imbalance in resources between state prosecutors and public defendants. a poor or overburdened attorney can fail to make use of the many advantages you have as the defendant in a jury trial.

brigandish 7y ago

As an aside, this for me has always been the glaring difference between continental Europe which is largely under a civil law system, and Britain, which has a common law system (and hence, the US, Canada, Australia…) The different systems are completely at odds philosophically and require a completely different attitude, which explains so much - Brexit and the antipathy of many Brits towards the EU, and the EU itself are the current exemplar of this - but pick any of the contested parts of the US constitution (like freedom of speech or right to bear arms) and you can gauge support either way by answering the question "do you understand/prefer common law or civil law?" If you don't trust the citizenry to make decisions for themselves then paternalistic authoritarianism is your preference, and we all know where that leads.

akimball 7y ago
There isn't a lot of contest about free speech in the US. Some, yes, but not much. The objections to getting shot are much more motivating than the objections to being spoken to or even about.
- brigandish 7y ago
  You should try Europe, there's plenty of contest about it there, and with plenty of reference to the US.
user5994461 7y ago
European countries have a jury system, usually reserved to criminal cases with long sentences, like a murder. Germany is the exception. Abolished jury in 1924. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_trial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_trial
- brigandish 7y ago
  While technically true, I wouldn't characterise that as "hav[ing] a jury system" but of those systems making use of a jury in exceptional cases or a very limited capacity. Even then I would feel it mischaracterised the system to anyone from the Anglosphere. Greece, for instance, has a jury made up of judges. That's not a jury, that's an equivocation!