I'm afraid you're mistaken. Quoting with emphasis mine. > judge can instruct the jury to exclusively consider the statutes in question as read and interpreted

I'm afraid you're mistaken. Quoting with emphasis mine. > judge can instruct the jury to exclusively consider the statutes in question as read and interpreted by the court, facts deemed relevant as determined by the court, and decide only if the facts presented appear to have violated the statutes presented. > This isn't a way that law should work and there's absolutely no reason to have a jury in the first place if it is going to be so mechanistic. > A jury is there to judge the actions of one of their peers. Lawyers are there to present the facts and the arguments for why a person should be considered guilty or innocent. This isn't how it's supposed to work. Juries are not supposed to "decide if the facts appear to have violated the law". Lawyers are not supposed to "present the facts". The textbook explanation of how the system is supposed to work is: juries are supposed to decide the facts after considering the evidence presented (either written or live testimony by witnesses), and then, given the facts they have determined, apply the law as instructed by judge (and argued by lawyers), decide the result of the case. In short, facts are supposed to be decided by juries, and law is interpreted by the judge after hearing legal arguments from the lawyers. I think you kind of got it backwards. Perhaps what actually happens in courts deviate from the textbook norm (since I don't know where you got your information from), but it's not supposed to happen that way.