Living in the Real World
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.
jury, jurors, magistrates, lay magistrates, lay jury
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