Guest post: Does Jury Duty still make sense in the 21st Century?

Last updated on: August 2, 2017 at 9:36 pm by Jane the Actuary

Guest post: Does Jury Duty still make sense in the 21st Century? 2017-08-02T21:36:54-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Continuing the series of guest posts, even though I’m back from vacation. Here’s Jane Stoneface’s contribution.

I had plans to write something Catholic for Jane’s blog. I even had an outline. But then, in the middle of a busy afternoon, I got a jury summons, which derailed my trains of thought and sent me into a fit of complaining and griping. In the 5 years we’ve been living in my small town, I’ve been summoned for jury duty twice. Some life-long residents I know have never received a summons at all. (Probably because everyone born here is related to at least one cop or judge or criminal.)

The thing is, quick Googling has revealed that, if chosen, I’ll be serving on a murder trial. Which means a week or more of my life thrown into chaos, money lost (I’m a contractor), and appointments and trips with friends ruined, all for a murder which, based on the newspapers, was just stupid. (I’m of the opinion that most crimes reek of stupidity. There’s never any real hope of gain, anyone with Kindergarten-levels of self-control could avoid committing them, and you’re just left shaking your head and shouting “Why? Why did you do this, when it would be more lucrative and less dangerous to get a perfectly adequate job at Subway?”)

Anyway, I don’t want to serve on the jury, but as I think about it, the whole institution of randomly selected jurors seems outdated and rather silly. Here’s why:

Lawyers are allowed to lie and misdirect in court. We have a person trained in rhetoric and logic who is doing his best to win, not get at the truth. Meanwhile, we have a jury full of people who have probably never had any training in logic and rhetoric, who easily fall sway to the wiles of politicians like Sanders and Trump. They’re supposed to decide the merits of the case? They can’t even pick a non-crazy, non-lying president. They elect liars to the Senate all the time. Why does anyone think a jury of random citizens will have anything to contribute to the trial?

Google is not allowed in court. One of the jobs the jurors are supposed to do is judge the testimony of competing experts like psychologists, pathologists, and ballistics scientists. But they can only go on what the experts say in court. They’re not allowed to double check facts with Google searches or creep the experts’ LinkedIn accounts for weird random holes in their resumes and dubious connections. As a juror, I’ll actually have less ability to judge the testimony of experts than I do to judge the testimony of some random guy mouthing off in the comments of my favorite blogs.

The Sort of People who are Objective are Probably Less Intelligent than Average

My town doesn’t get murders very often. That means this case was all over the local paper, splattered across the regional news, and linked throughout local social media. If you’re literate and have friends, you already know about the crime, the perpetrator, the witness, and the police case. Yet they somehow have to find 12 jurors in a county with 17,000 people who have not yet formed an opinion on the case and the killer. And they have to be the sort of people who don’t hang around with criminals and get convicted of felonies. Where the heck are they going to find those 12 people? If you are truly ignorant of these big cases, you’re probably not someone with the capacity to act as a juror.

The American jury system is based in the idea that it’s possible to find a ‘jury of your peers’ who will seek to get at the truth, carefully weigh opposing arguments, and ultimately try to find the facts and protect innocents from crusading prosecutors and judges. But the whole idea is based in the idea that the citizens can actually make good decisions in these cases, and that the jury is a better alternative to the mob.

While trial-by-jury is still better than mob justice, we need better juries. We’re not going to have that until we replace ‘random jury of peers’ with juries of professionals, who have the ability to judge the lawyer’s cases using reason, science, and a knowledge of law. Professional jurors would be expensive. You’d probably have to pay them $100 an hour. But you get what you pay for. Right now, our trials are decided by people getting paid less than half of the going rate at McDonalds, who are there because the alternative is jail time. (I suppose this is an effective way to make us as close to the peers of the criminals as possible.) People who are denied the basic tools of research, and locked in a closed room with lawyers for days at a time. We’re not judging evidence. We’re judging the ability to read reviews on Yelp and pick a decent lawyer.

If we had professional jurors, the hourly cost of trials would go up, but overall costs might go down as lawyers focused on presenting clear, factual cases and deliberating points of law, rather than maudlin appeals to try to introduce ‘reasonable doubt,’ in the absence of reason.

On the other hand, my husband claims that my arguments undermining the whole basis of the American legal system and that the point of a jury trial is not to get at the truth, but to protect the rights of the accused. That may have been the case at the founding. But now? The jury system is broken. It’s time to try something new.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AThe_Jury_by_John_Morgan.jpg; John Morgan [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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