Get Rid of Jury Duty

Back on Sunday we published an article about the "second guessing" that's about to go on concerning police shootings. We also included this throw away line:

• Civilians, especially civilians who have anything to do with the reverends, have no business anywhere near a round table discussion. In our opinion, most civilians have no business even being near a jury box, but that's a different argument.

That comment provoked a number of responses:

• Now, you don't really mean that you, a sworn peace officer, don't believe in the jury system, do you? Do you?
  
  
• No jury of your peers? WTF. Sounds like SCC wants to be the judge and jury now?
  
  
• SCC, I know you are a right wing nut. But do you REALLY BELIEVE that most citizens "have no business in a jury box". What, only people like you should serve on a jury? What makes you qualified to decide who should sit on a jury or not?

To address these comments in order:

• We think the jury system is broken. Badly broken. And to fix such a system, radical measures ought to be considered and debated.
• If you read the 6th and 7th Amendments to the US Constitution, you'll find guarantees to a "speedy" trial, a "public" trial, a trial by an "impartial" jury, and the right to trial by jury. You will find NO reference whatsoever to a "jury of your peers." We'd love to be judge and jury, but that doesn't seem legal. Yet.
• After seeing hundreds or more out of control jury awards in civil trials for the most insanely stupid reasons or murderers go free because certain ethnic groups wanted to "send a message" to the world, do you really think most citizens have any business near a court room? The fact that we've participated in the legal system in hundreds of instances as plaintiff, defendant, witness and observer makes us uniquely qualified to have an opinion as to who should sit on juries. Oh, and the fact that we're American citizens with a right to an opinion, too.

Its been said here and other places, "Better to be judged by 12 than carried by 6." We've also seen it here that people ought to be worried when they place their fates in the 12 people too stupid to get out of jury duty. Let's look at the whole thing though.

Jury duty is onerous at times. Locked in a room with strangers, listening to heated arguments on points of law and procedure that don't interest most people, bombarded with minutiae over and over. It's boring. And then you have the lawyers and their consultants who have potential jurors fill out surveys about all sorts of trivia that will enable them to bump off jurors they don't like. Who gets bumped more often than not? People with the ability to reason, follow logic, people with experience in a given field (ever see a cop on a criminal jury? a doctor on a medical malpractice suit? almost never).

The people who end up on juries are more often than not big television watchers who expect some big "CSI" moment where someone spontaneously confesses on the stand or some fingerprint miraculously appears to exonerate a suddenly innocent accused. You get people who will award a dope dealer millions based on zero DNA evidence and zero attributable damage to a claim of sodomy with a screwdriver. Or who will ignore expert testimony that in less than 2% of all firearms is there a recoverable fingerprint and give millions to a dead felon's family claiming a lack of prints means police planted a weapon.

Professional jurors, made up of learned citizens with a basic understanding of law, science and statistical analysis would make trial lawyers (pardon our language) shit bricks. Even if it never came to be, it would provoke such a wave of reform in the system that we'd get closer to what the Founding Fathers envisioned as trial by jury. At the very least, it deserves debate.