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| Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, August 26 2012 @ 08:52 PM EDT |
"As far as I can tell, the jury system was created in order to protect
against
feudal overlords handing out random punishment through the court system."
You are correct historically, and *this is still a problem* -- look at
tGuantanamo Bay, or the torture of Jose Padilla until he went insane. Following
which they convicted him in a kangaroo court.
The jury system isn't working because it's been deliberately broken. There were
three elements of protection:
(1) Grand jury hearings. The prosecutor was EXCLUDED from these and not allowed
to witness ANY of the testimony. This allowed people to honestly say to the
grand jury "Look, the prosecutor is lying, he's on a vendetta, but he'd go
after me if he knew I'd say this". Grand juries have been wrecked.
(2) Jury "of your peers". This meant that the jury would be
inherently sympathetic to the defendant. I guess if "corporations are
people", the peers of Samsung would be Motorola, etc. There's no way a
jury of laymen counts as "peers" in this trial. This has also been
utterly wrecked, due to the American delusion that "everyone is your
peer", which we all know is not really true.
(3) Randomly chosen jury which must be unanimous. The prosecution and defense
attorneys' ability to strike people from the jury ruined this.
So juries no longer serve their function.
"More systems are in place for making sure judgement is fair and the law
is
applied equally to everyone."
I wish. Judgment in the US is not fair and the law is not applied equally to
everyone, and the evidence is massive and undeniable.
"Hailing from a civil law country, I am horrified by
juries, plea bargaining and an adversarial system.
Even so, I think what information has surfaced about how the jury came to its
conclusion convinced me this was a mistrial, even by common law's own
standards."
Oh yeah. Plea bargaining used to be considered a crime against the Crown, too
-- corruption of the justice system. Our system is super-corrupt and almost
totally broken.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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