With my personal experience serving on a jury, I can comment directly in agreement with the statements you’ve made. I served on a jury in a weeklong trial involving child molestation. Aside for the the horrible details about the case specifically, the whole experience left me with a bad taste in my mouth.
My thoughts exactly. The notion that we can expect people to exercise their minds for a function as crucially important as ascertaining the facts in a trial while under compulsion is perverse. It is not difficult to imagine jurors becoming complacent and losing interest simply because they legitimately want a week long trial containing complicated, possibly technical issues to be over so that they can return to their lives.
I was called for jury duty when I was on summer vacation from college and had just started a new job. They county said they would compensate me $25 for the first day of service and that my employer would pay me $25 for each of the following days. Since I had only been at my job for less than 3 months, I was still on “probation,” consequently they did not provide me compensation for jury service. And I never received the $25 from the county either. So instead of paying me peanuts, they paid me nothing.
For a comment about the complicated, technical issues, the most complicated issues can into play in regard to establishing a particular witness as an “expert”. In the context of my case, the “experts” involved were child psychologists dealing with children that had been abused or molested. They lawyers went through an extraordinary lengthy process of establishing the “expertness” of a witness, asking questions that did not pertain directly to the case. Sometimes this would take 3 hours for a single witness.
When they were done, they would ask the judge if the witness could be submitted to the jury as an actual “expert” and the judge would ok it. After the completion of the case, the judge told us (the jury members) that there was no objective legal standard establishing how someone could be an expert, and that experts would almost never rejected.
Sadly, our society does not take the attainment of justice seriously. If it did, the government would provide much greater compensation to jurors, at least putting them back in the place they would have been in but for their having been called to jury duty, the government would employ more judges to adjudicate a large backlog of civil cases, prosecutors would not be pressured to try to obtain convictions at any cost (my impression of how it works; I could be wrong), and we would invest more in providing effective assistance of counsel (public defenders) to help ensure that innocent people are not convicted (which is a tremendous societal expense). It might also be easier for judges to overturn jury verdicts in cases where it is blatantly obvious that the jury’s decision was arbitrary (jurors admittedly high on cocaine during the trial, etc.). (As I understand it, it is extremely difficult, if not practically impossible to overturn a jury verdict unless jury tampering or the like can be shown.)
In my particular case, we found the defendant guilty of child molestation. The collective decision of the 12 jurors was not arbitrary, but the decision of some of the individual jurors was. When we first entered the room for deliberation, we took a vote on guilty vs. not guilty. The vote was 8-4 for conviction. After seeing that the majority of people voted guilty, 2 jurors immediately changed their vote, simply because they didn’t want to be in the minority! It left me and one other person on the not guilty side.
Most of the people on the guilty side gave horribly subjective arguments to conclude the defendants guilt, things along the lines of “the look in his eye” and “he wouldn’t have been arrested if he didn’t do it”. After about 4-6 hours of debate, I was the last person to finally decide to convict him. I made everyone go over the actual evidence and carefully examine the portions of the case that I took issue with. Out of the 12 people that were on the jury, I would say there were only 3 or 4 that actually thought objectively about the case and were qualified to be on the jury, the rest were sheep.
This is a very interesting issue, and I have not yet settled on a model for an ideal jury system. Every model I have thought of has negative aspects. However, I am unsatisfied with our current system and I am highly skeptical that it produces as high of a percentage of just results as is reasonably possible given the fact that humans are not omniscient.
In my case, the final decision was just, but it was not made in the proper manner by all 12 of the jurors. After seeing the other people who served on the jury with me, it scared the hell out of me that there are the type of people that are carrying out justice on a day to day basis.
I think the system falls apart in the jury selection process. Ideally, the purpose of jury selection is to weed out people that may have a bias on one side or the other. But not only are those people weeded out, but so are people who have obvious shreds of intelligence and independence. They lawyers want juries of clay sheep, that they can mold and into any shape and lead into any direction that they choose. These are the juries that they select.
It’s safe to say that courts in a Objectivist society will be far more objective than they are now, such that juries would likely be unnecessary in most cases. Beyond that, I say: there’s a lot of steps between here and there, and there’s no shortcuts.