I’ve always been confused by this.
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Why would you want a bunch of randoms to decide your fate, and not the actual judge with a law degree and years of experience?
Why do those people have more power than the judge? They can decide anything they want and the judge is basically just the guy who signs and does the paperwork.
In: 2634
Trial attorney here. I would rather have my client’s case in front of a jury 99.9% of the time than any judge.
Plenty of comments about this already, in this thread. I’ll add the following which I’m not seeing:
– Judges worry about their reputation, and this creates bias. In cases where ruling in my client’s favor would expose them to public scrutiny, public attack, career harm, campaign or fundraising difficulties, you’d have to be living in lalaland to think bias isn’t an issue. Juries don’t go into a trial worrying or even thinking about any of these issues, and certainly even if one juror does, you won’t have the entire jury pool being that way. With a judge, you have this bias 100% of the time. It’s human nature. We’re biased people, our decisions get influenced by our personal and local concerns. In the U.S., we have put judges at an automatic position of extreme power that is largely unchecked at all levels. No one tells them they’re wrong, except other judges in the rare cases where a higher court overturns a lower court.
– Judges don’t declare a mistrial due to the inability to decide on the facts. I am talking about the so-called “hung jury.” Sometimes there’s not enough evidence for everyone to make a decision on a claim/case. People simply are different, and have different internal standards of what it takes for them to believe that a claim or case has been proven to the standard required. Has the burden of proof been met? That’s a big question , and often very personal to an individual. If something that is claimed/alleged results in a split jury, in my opinion, that’s a good outcome for the legal system whether it’s for me or against me, because the result should be to try again. Declare a mistrial, try again. Plug the holes. Do more research. Get more evidence. Provide enough that you win outright. I’m 100% sure I’ve hung cases in front of a jury where a judge would have simply made a decision while likely KNOWING the case would have been on a razor’s edge one way or the other with a juror. Why is that ok? Especially in a criminal case context. If the decision is so close that a coin toss would be just as likely to predict the outcome, how can that possibly be fair to a person fighting for their life? Fighting for keeping their kids? Keeping their house?
– Judges shouldn’t be doing everything, especially both deciding the case and then also deciding sentencing/consequences. At least maybe not the same judge. This is because in presenting a case, there’s always a lot of things that get decided outside the presence of the jury. Things that are unfair, that create bias, things that the rule of law has decided are so damaging to a fair trial that a jury cannot even be exposed them. And with a court trial, we’re ignoring that premise entirely by first exposing the judge to these very things, asking the judge to decide whether they should be allowed for consideration in the case, and then pretending the judge is some magical being unlike all other humans such that they will not be affected or biased by these things that would end a case immediately if even one juror heard/saw them. Then you get to the end of a case, and the judge also decides the consequences and/or sentence? I, the judge, have used my superhuman powers to successfully ignore all the things the law says would have irreparably prevented a just/fair trial in this matter if even a whiff of them landed in front of any juror. I the judge am magical and perfectly able to ignore all inadmissible evidence, despite having full knowledge of all of it. And now I have ruled that X party loses, and now I will cast a decision to punish them fairly without any bias whatsoever related to everything a juror would not have been allowed to experience. I rule as follows…. yeah no, give me a jury any day.
– Final note – in the U.S., juries decide the facts, make decisions of guilt or fault, but then a judge still handles the sentencing/consequences (sometimes a jury helps with some of this, like deciding the amount of damages, though a judge can modify that amount, or deciding to kill a person in a death penalty case, there’s always nuances). So the “fate” of a person in a case with a jury isn’t entirely decided by the jury top bottom. In a bench trial (case where the judge is the jury), basically you have a situation of Judge Dredd – judge, jury, executioner.
(On mobile, apologies for not formatting or any typos).
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