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
> in the USA
Many legal systems around the world use juries to some extent. Many also have some cases decided by full-time officials with little or no formal legal training, with titles like “magistrate” or “lay judge”.
> Why would you want a bunch of randoms
There is often some scope to choose whether you want a jury or not.
> and not the actual judge with a law degree and years of experience
The problem is, most legal processes combine questions about what the law says, which are best answered by people with legal training, with questions about all manner of factual matters. Knowing a lot about how the law works does not necessarily help you decide which of two witnesses is lying, or whether some DNA evidence could be faulty, or whether a business falsified its accounts on purpose or by accident. I think it’s fair to say that nobody has developed a very effective system to answer such questions. Sometimes judges are put in charge of this stuff too, sometimes jurors, and sometimes a mixture of the two. In a jury trial, the judge will typically rule on matters of law (e.g. whether X evidence is allowed, what needs to be proven to show that someone is guilty of Y offence) and then instruct the jury on what factual questions they need to answer.
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