Amendment 29
Jury trials shall be decided by lay magistrates. Lay magistrates shall be hired by the chief executive officer in the jurisdiction where the lay magistrate serves. Lay magistrates shall serve ten year terms. Lay magistrates shall receive training in the evaluation of evidence and the application of legal precedence.
Most people called to jury duty don’t actually serve. They just sit around all day at the courthouse waiting for a trial to begin. We hire jury commissioners and administrators to process thousands of potential jurors every day. It disrupts work schedules and forces employers to account for lost productivity. The extra traffic every morning clogs the roads and fills up downtown parking lots.
Inconsistent evidence, dishonest witnesses and silent defendants all make resolving criminal cases difficult. For most people, jury service is a once in a lifetime experience. High priced attorneys on the other hand spend 365 days a year finding clever ways to mislead novice juries. Professionals could do a better job.
People wonder how top notch defense attorneys can overcome overwhelming evidence to keep their clients out of prison. Picking gullible jurors helps. When all the evidence points to your client’s guilt, you don’t want Cum Laude types on the panel. So lawyers use voir dire to dismiss unsuitable potential jurors without giving a reason.
Attorneys may also seek a change of venue in order to draw from a different jury pool. This shifts the trial to another county, where residents may have a more lax attitude about certain offenses.
Our juries are composed of carefully selected individuals with little to no training in evaluating evidence, applying legal precedence or even working with others in a courtroom setting. These groups then determine the fate of the most dangerous people in our society.
Before trials even begin, attorneys hire jury consultants to help them find just the right candidates, the ones that will tip the balance in their favor. It can take only one juror holding out to force a mistrial. Then the prosecutor has to bring charges all over again. Very wealthy defendants will spare no expense to obtain a favorable verdict. In America, that includes picking the right jurors.
juries, voir dire, jury consultants, change of venue, mistrial
When the neighbor’s house catches on fire, you call 911. The emergency operator answering the phone works for the government. So do the firefighters controlling the blaze, the paramedics treating the injured and the highway patrol officers managing traffic at the scene. We rely on civil servants to keep our streets clean, our food uncontaminated and our job sites safe. We brush up against them every day. The days of menacing rulers lording over us from faraway castles have long since passed.
Our courthouses are full of public officials. The judges, the prosecutors, the bailiffs and the clerks all work for American taxpayers. It’s a quaint notion that we’ve carried forward into our modern system of justice. We entrust every aspect of our criminal trials to civil servants, except actually deciding cases.
No other country in the world relies so heavily on untrained juries. England uses lay magistrates to decide criminal cases. Comparable to American justices of the peace, these magistrates learn to set aside their personal biases as part of the job. It makes them more impartial than inexperienced lay jurors, not less. We should use lay magistrates in this country and bring a higher level of expertise to this critically important process.
The laws of the United States are derived from British jurisprudence. In 1215, Barons from north England forced King John to place his royal seal on the Magna Carta, which includes this guarantee: “No free man shall be seized or imprisoned… except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land.” Of course back in the day, courts used thumbscrews and the rack to dispense justice. 21st century defendants usually live through the trial. So the need to place every judgment in the hands of untrained locals has greatly diminished. We now have a much greater level of trust in government employees.
According to the Innocence Project there have been 200 post-conviction DNA exonerations in the United States, including fourteen from death row. If some juries found innocent defendants guilty, it’s likely other juries blew it on not guilty verdicts, thereby setting bad characters loose on the streets. But in our system we never reassemble juries and hold them accountable for erroneous decisions.
Full time professional juries would keep attorneys on their toes. Overworked public defenders represent indigent citizens in our country. These lawyers haven’t the time or resources to fully investigate difficult cases. An experienced jury could spot inadequate representation on either side and ask the judge to order an independent investigation. A thorough evaluation of all evidence in criminal cases will get the truth out, and that’s the key to just verdicts.
jury trial, Magna Carta, Innocence Project, DNA, death row, exonerate
Judging by the popularity of celebrity justice on TV, one would think that Americans must cherish jury service as an honored civic responsibility. Instead we try anything to avoid it. And why shouldn’t we? Jurors must work with complete strangers to evaluate sketchy, conflicting evidence. And bad decisions have tragic consequences. For this we earn $12 a day, plus free parking downtown.
According to thinking handed down from the 13th century, a jury of commoners can set aside their biases more easily than a jury of public servants. No wonder so many of us have misgivings about the government. We’ve codified a basic distrust of public officials into our Constitution.
Deciding criminal cases correctly requires a certain level of expertise. We could use public employees with special training in evaluating criminal evidence for this task. Instead we use amateurs. Professionals working for our government sit next to us on the bus, in church and even on the juries we have otherwise been keeping them from.
Our highest priority when it comes to criminal trials should be to make certain the guilty are convicted and the innocent exonerated. It’s time to transfer this critical responsibility to properly equipped personnel.
Radical Avenue is about promoting objective standards in government. Taxpayers deserve proactive public policy solutions developed through rigorous scientific analysis, not empty promises based on convenient theories.
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