In this article, and apparently this happens a lot, jurors are not allowed to research the laws they are supposed to reach a verdict on. Also, the jurors cannot get the court transcript or ask the prosecution to repeat the charges.
How is this the best alternative? Why can't jurors learn what they are incarcerating for?
> In this article, and apparently this happens a lot, jurors are not allowed to research the laws they are supposed to reach a verdict on
The judge includes the law the defendant is charged with violating and an explanation of what must be proved and what legal defenses that are (with advice from both the prosecution and defense on what to include and on the wording) in the jury instruction material given to the jury before deliberation. Unless the judge and the defense attorney seriously screw up, that should give the jury everything they need to know about the relevant laws.
Part one, with jury #1, just considers the facts. It does not attempt to apply the law to the facts to render a guilty/not-guilty verdict.
Part two presents the facts as determined in part one to jury #2 (which was not present during part one), and jury #2 applies that law to those facts to render a verdict. The facts as presented to jury #2 are cleaned up to replace names with pseudonyms, and race, gender, etc., are removed (unless they are relevant to the applicable law).
Nothing can be as biased and conservative as "trained professional judges".
Not to mention they tend to reflect the interests and prejudices of their kind and class -- not the society at large, who is supposed to be the one whose moral system and will is to be enforced in the legal/justice system.
Is it really worse than delegating it to general population, whose interests and prejudices are shaped by bullshit media narratives, and whose primary interest in the case is to get out of it as fast as possible?
In Japan lay judges (citizens) were re-introduced into trials in order to offer defendants a possibly more sympathetic audience.
In Japan, due to quite a few idiosyncrasies[1], prosecutors achieve upwards of 95% conviction rates.
An imperfect jury system is likely better, in criminal cases, than having cozy professionals decide cases.
[1] often no attorneys during interrogation, forced confessions, detentions without charges, taking up only choice cases, declaring "accidents" rather than pursuing murder, etc...
My apologies, but I find your comment somewhat confusing.
> In Japan lay judges (citizens) were re-introduced into trials in order to offer defendants a possibly more sympathetic audience. In Japan, due to quite a few idiosyncrasies[1], prosecutors achieve upwards of 95% conviction rates.
> often no attorneys during interrogation, forced confessions, detentions without charges, taking up only choice cases, declaring "accidents" rather than pursuing murder, etc...
How are any of these problems solved by introducing lay judges ? Aren't they attacking the wrong part of the problem ?
> An imperfect jury system is likely better, in criminal cases, than having cozy professionals decide cases.
I find it hard to believe that professionals would be more incapable of sympathy.
Unfortunately I was talking about two things simultaneously without making the connection.
One, with professional juries (judges) a high conviction rate is achieved in Japan, possibly contributed to by the cozy relationship between attorneys and judges as well as some deficiencies in how its determined when to take a case in addition to laws and in addition to police misconduct.
One of the reasons (there were others, such as decreasing backlog) for the introduction of lay judges ("peer" jurors) was because it's thought they could prove more sympathetic to defendants.
> How are any of these problems solved by introducing lay judges ?
Haven't studied this, but I would expect that it's in order to break the cozy (word used above) inner-circle relationship of professional lawyers who work in courts, switching roles between judge and prosecutor. The problem being isolation of the legal profession from "lay people".
Impartiality and expertise are not necessarily correlated. In fact in my experience, experts tend to hold much stronger personal opinions about their area of expertise, than do members of the random general public.
How is this the best alternative? Why can't jurors learn what they are incarcerating for?