Honestly never understood the rationale behind jury-based trials. You're having a group of people who aren't trained in law, forcing them to rely only on the bits of evidence presented in the court, and asking them to make an unbiased decision, when they clearly have not been given any training of the sort?
I mean, vesting all the power in the jury is just as bad as vesting all power in a single person/group of persons (judges). Perhaps a rational middle ground would be to give jury duty to only members of the bar?
The point of juries is to decide whether or not disputed facts are true. They don't need to know anything about the law because the jury instructions given to them by the court will deal with that.
The jury instructions essentially break the law down to essentially a flowchart, with the decision points being questions of whether or not some specific fact is true or not.
Both the prosecution and the defense will have geared the arguments and evidence they offered toward convincing the jury as to whether or not those specific facts or true.
The point is that, regardless of how logical you want the jury to act, they will still act inherently with some bias because they are not trained in the law. While lawyers and members of the bar are also inherently prone to bias, they at least have some degree of knowledge on what evidence is admissible and what evidence should not be taken under consideration.
FWIW, in France, a few years ago, there was an academic study on the impact of TV on jury decisions [1]. This study concluded that the content of yesterday's TV news had a measurable impact on the duration of sentences inflicted by a jury.
I seem to remember that this led to a reform which removed the popular jury (and replaced it with a jury of law professionals) for some cases. I don't know if the effect of that reform has been studied.
> Honestly never understood the rationale behind jury-based trials. You're having a group of people who aren't trained in law, forcing them to rely only on the bits of evidence presented in the court, and asking them to make an unbiased decision, when they clearly have not been given any training of the sort?
this is a democracy, and the power of a democracy is ultimately on people; these people can vote, and they get to vote on your guilt.
I mean, vesting all the power in the jury is just as bad as vesting all power in a single person/group of persons (judges). Perhaps a rational middle ground would be to give jury duty to only members of the bar?