trial by jury [Matthew's Journal]

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The first object of any tyrant in Whitehall would be to make Parliament utterly subservient to his will; and the next to overthrow or diminish trial by jury...

Lord Devlin, Trial by Jury, 1966

Somehow, it seems relevant in light of this.
ETA: I have a .sig-file with the quote in from early 2000.

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There are 11 comments on this entry. (Reply.)

Given most of the judges I've met or heard of, I don't think they'd be any more expert in complicated fraud trials (to quote the given example) than J Random Juryman!

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Parliament's looking a bit less subservient lately. (And while abolishing juries doesn't seem like the right answer, I agree with the principle that you shouldn't be able to get away with crime just becuase you can make the details of it so complicated that only a few experts can understand it; something ought to be done, I just don't have my own idea as to what.)

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Could one have a jury composed of experts? Would that count as a jury?

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To my mind one of the advantages of a jury selected largely uniformly from society is that it provides a sampling of all society's attitudes to right and wrong.

If we reduce the jury to experts in the field of the crime then may skew the notion of right and wrong embodied by the jury - perhaps the crime was only committed because people "in the know" tend not to see anything wrong with it, when the man in the street would disapprove more strongly, for instance.

Educating an otherwise randomly-picked jury might indeed carry the same risks, but much less so than people who've been immersed in the relevant culture for years. But, it might not help much either...

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In a case where a regular jury is considered incapable of dealing with the facts, that doesn't solve the problem.

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I supose you could, but I think cost might be a major factor, here. Long-running fraud trials are already mind-bendingly expensive. And you'd have to pay empaneled experts their going rate, as you'd be selecting them as experts. And the difference between the more-or-less minimum wage you get as a juror, and a financial fraud expert's hourly rate is huge (a factor of 30-50+, I'd reckon), and multiplied by 12 over six or nine months...

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I was thinking more keeping a note of who the experts in the population are, and calling them for their normal jury service for cases touching their area of expertise.

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But then you would be explicitly depriving them of income for the duration of a trial, while making use of their expertise.

It's hard enouhg to get people to do jury service (although it has been tightened up recently), but targetting like this would just make people even more hostile towards it.

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As opposed to normal jurors, whom you explicitly deprive of their incomes whilst making use of their judgement?

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But there you're making use of (pretty much) their native wit, rather than skills they've spent years acquiring.

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We pay jurors for their lost income.

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Matthew's Journal

trial by jury

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October