The point of a jury is to get people who are unbiassed to determine guilt or innocence to help make the trial fair and not a kangaroo court. The jury determining that they absolutely did it, but the law is bullshit so they shouldn’t be punished and submitting a not guilty verdict anyway is basically a glitch or an exploit. They’re not there to determine the validity of the law, just whether or not the law was broken.
🤔 I made a thread a while back asking people here what they would do if they were founding a country, and one guy had the best solution I ever heard anyone come up with:
It was this tiered, hierarchial council lottery system where people were randomly elected to serve on councils that managed every aspect of day to day life. Eligibility for each council depended on your education, age, background, etc. and it was set up such that you had to take leave from your old job, but your spot would be held, you’d be paid the same rate you were before, etc. to disincentivize people from not participating.
He went into a lot of detail about it, and had a long writeup for it because it was a project for his pol sci degree, and it was based on the assumption that no human involved was scrupulous or trustworthy, and if some aspect of the system could be abused, it would be.
To this day I have not seen anyone come up with a better governance idea, past or present.
Following is a generally devil’s advocate point here, because in principle I’m wholly supportive of jury nullification:
The idea of the jury being able to cast verdicts on conscience rather than just evidence does also, however, risk personal bias influencing trials regressively. It is not unknown for systems to acquit or convict someone based on racial prejudice or media coverage of a case, which is why even a sniff of conscience voting of any kind is heavily policed.
There’s a whole host of selection processes that try and limit bias in trials while keeping the state from totally controlling the process, but jury duty is one of the only examples of direct democracy under most neoliberal capitalist systems; that comes with all the risks and caveats that it would when applied to any other aspect of our social and political existences
I might be confused, isn’t this the whole point of a jury in the first place?
The point of a jury is to get people who are unbiassed to determine guilt or innocence to help make the trial fair and not a kangaroo court. The jury determining that they absolutely did it, but the law is bullshit so they shouldn’t be punished and submitting a not guilty verdict anyway is basically a glitch or an exploit. They’re not there to determine the validity of the law, just whether or not the law was broken.
The real joke is that the founding fathers genuinely expected people to be fair, impartial and unbiased.
I mean, nobody in any country has found a better option yet and it’s been a couple centuries.
🤔 I made a thread a while back asking people here what they would do if they were founding a country, and one guy had the best solution I ever heard anyone come up with:
It was this tiered, hierarchial council lottery system where people were randomly elected to serve on councils that managed every aspect of day to day life. Eligibility for each council depended on your education, age, background, etc. and it was set up such that you had to take leave from your old job, but your spot would be held, you’d be paid the same rate you were before, etc. to disincentivize people from not participating.
He went into a lot of detail about it, and had a long writeup for it because it was a project for his pol sci degree, and it was based on the assumption that no human involved was scrupulous or trustworthy, and if some aspect of the system could be abused, it would be.
To this day I have not seen anyone come up with a better governance idea, past or present.
I specifically meant the jury thing.
Following is a generally devil’s advocate point here, because in principle I’m wholly supportive of jury nullification:
The idea of the jury being able to cast verdicts on conscience rather than just evidence does also, however, risk personal bias influencing trials regressively. It is not unknown for systems to acquit or convict someone based on racial prejudice or media coverage of a case, which is why even a sniff of conscience voting of any kind is heavily policed.
There’s a whole host of selection processes that try and limit bias in trials while keeping the state from totally controlling the process, but jury duty is one of the only examples of direct democracy under most neoliberal capitalist systems; that comes with all the risks and caveats that it would when applied to any other aspect of our social and political existences