Juryless trial

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If the case is open and shut, then a jury should have no problem rendering a verdict.

Refusing to grant the accused a trial by their peers simply because it is 'inconvenient' to do so is absurd. Hell, even trials without a jury are expensive, so why not dispense with them all together? The arresting officer can just throw the accused in jail on prima facie evidence. That will save a lot of time and money.

 

Mordea, the problem isn't cost, but safety. Juror's families can be threatened, influencing their findings no matter what the evidence. If the state want's to protect it's people from such, this is a reasonable measure. As I said, you have to be careful about it, and the media had better have full access to these trials (public uproar is your only defense now if things go wonky), but it can work.

 

Again, reasonable steps must be taken to accord a fair trial -- I'm not arguing an arbitrary system. But the costs must be weighed. If the cost to provide a jury trial becomes prohibitive because career criminals are exploiting loopholes and threatening families of jurors, and the cost to defend against such threats is skyrocketting, then something must be done, and the answer is not to let criminal organizations call all the shots.

As others have mentioned, many democratic countries get by without jury trials, and their trials are fair. Here in Canada, for example, in many cases the defendant can opt to merely have a trial by a judge.

All of your concerns, Mordea, are fair enough -- no one wants to see an innocent citizen railroaded. But we are not talking about such things, or at least I'm not. To address the threat posed by organized crime, there must be some extra measures taken to protect the truly innocent. If we leave loopholes open for them to exploit, then we sell out our citizenry and fail as a society.

 

hmmm, have you ever sat on a jury?

 

A judge's family can be threatened. Should we also do away with judges and just arbitrarily imprison people accused of crimes?

It's a measure which impinges on the accused's right to a fair and impartial trial by their peers. Why can't the government just take measures to ensure the anonymity of the jurors? Do you mean to tell me that the government we pay a ridiculous amount of tax money to *can't* protect it's citizens from a bunch of thugs?

Also, not providing a trial by peers once sets a really bad precedent. In the future, the powers that be will simply need to deem the risk of jury tampering too high in order to deny individuals the right to a trial by peers.

Because the media isn't prone to bias? Hell, the media frenzy over O.J Simpson sure didn't provide the public with a distorted version of events, right?

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Nope. What's your point? If the prosecution can't demonstrate conclusively to 12 laymen that the accused is guilty, then reasonable doubt exists.

 

One judge who does this as a living is much easier to protect than 12 jurors who change every trial.

It impinges on a right to a trial by peers where there is such a right. Remember, that's in the US constitution, but not in everyone's. Specifically, we're talking about the UK here. I don't know how the law stands on this, but this implies they have no such inherrant right.

As for corruption, this is why I said they had to be careful. A trial-by-jury is a safety net, and it's by far the safest net we've developed yet. They're now operating (in these cases at least) without one, which means they had better check up on their next safety net (the media) a lot more carefully. Even then, it's not a particularly good net.

As for the jury point, I think what they meant is that 12 random people aren't necessarily reasonable people. I've heard stories from several people who have sat on juries of old ladies who just pitty the guy ("But he's such a nice, young murderer. I'm sure he won't do it again.") and vindictive a-holes who want to crucify everyone ("I don't care about evidence, the defendant is a f***ing man/woman/n*gg*r/sp*ck/cop/biker/whatever)! Fry'em!"). These people should never be on juries, but sometimes they are.

 

Trouble is, most people out there have some kind of significant defect, be it bias, hatred, irrational thinking, lack of intelligence, or whatever. So the likelihood that you'll ever get a trial with 12 perfectly reasonable jurors seems very remote to me, despite the best (and sometimes possibly incompetent) efforts of the attorneys during the voir dire process.

But ... I'm no constitutional specialist, but I don't think the US constitution guarantees anything more than "peers," as unreasonable or defective as they may be.

I sat on a jury recently where one of the members had virtually no opinion about the case at all during deliberation, other than a yea or nay on different counts when he was asked.

 

Ive sat on a rape trial, thinnest evidence ever. The first day of the trial there was only enough time to swear us in and to hear his plea, we had a jury of 3 men and 8 women (we only had an 11 person jury). After retiring for the day 9 jurors were convinced that he was guilty without even hearing any evidence - thats what jury 'justice' is like.

and reasonable doubt can still lead to conviction by majority.

 

Is that a trick question? Seriously....

Because jury members are humans and they: (1) Can be intimated, (2) Bribed, (3) Extorted, (4) be bigoted, (5) are laymen that are possibly not even skilled in the arts of common sense or logical thinking.

Don't you think it should be a right of the individual to select his own peers or test their 'peerness'/validity. They could be stooges for the government you know!

 

I agree. In fact, most trials do result in a guilty verdict. I have sat on both a regular jury and a grand jury. The grand jury system is in place to show there is reasonable cause for a trial. (I concede that I am unaware if an equivalent system exists outside the US.) During a grand jury hearing, you only hear the prosecutors side of the story. What they do is present to the jury evidence that they have gathered, and the grand jury decides if that is adequate for the case to proceed to a regular trial. So it really makes sense that there are a lot of guilty verdicts, simply because if the prosecutors don't have some pretty good evidence, they're never even going to be able to take the accused to court in the first place...