| > law, like facts, is subject to question and answering those questions is out of scope of the jury, which is the trier of fact alone. Like I said, I was presuming an ideal jury. (Picture a land where everyone has the legal experience and character of a Supreme Court justice—a land that makes Plato's Republic look populist.) A real jury is, of course, Not Good at the law. > Your model would necessarily transfer the executives authority largely to the jury (though prosecutors could withhold inculpatory evidence to avoid undesired charges being triggered.) Not necessarily. The jury could return a list of crimes that have been proven (in Scottish justice-system terminology), and then the aggrieved could decide which crimes they want the defendant to be sentenced for. Basically, extend the judge's ability to issue a "judgement notwithstanding" verdict, to be something done in cooperation with the aggrieved party. Or, to put that another way... take a jury trial, and split it into two pieces: • a jury-empanelled inquest—a truth-finding procedure—where the jury is there to be a truth-finding oracle, consuming 1. a criminal code and 2. a ream of testimony, and then outputting 3. a set of "proven" / "not proven" decisions for every crime in the criminal code, as they apply to the testimony. • then, a bench trial, where the judge also has access to the testimony from the inquest, but where the law directs the judge to make their decision the same way they do in a jury trial: by—unless their reading of the transcript reveals that something has gone terribly wrong in the execution of justice—treating "the decision reached by the jury" as the only valid testimony. The judge then assigns a "guilty" / "not guilty" verdict for particular crimes that were being pursued, based on that testimony, and does sentencing. I think this approach addresses most of your other points. Please poke holes in it :) > By the court system, I might add, so obviously they like it enough to keep protecting it. Jury nullification isn't really upheld by the court system (it's been repeatedly found that jurors have no right to it); its existence just comes down to the fact that criminalizing a juror's voting in one direction or the other would kind of break the justice system. In a justice system that separated the "we declare that you screwed up" and the "so we will punish you" parts, I believe that jurors found to have "voted their conscience" would likely be found to have done something wrong in the eyes of the justice system—just something that cannot, necessarily, be criminalized. |