Trial by jury

"It is not an extremely loose definition. It is guaranteed by the sixth amendment with quite literal wording. Several other countries have the same thing. " I agree that the 6th amendment gives specific definition, But the only thing that you said jurors represent the people, So your definition was loose. The 6th amendment say "an impartial jury of your peers" and then goes on to give further details. Big difference. Let me ask you, How can a jury be impartial when they're chosen by lawyers? You talk about not wanting a system controlled by the government, But lawyers work with the government. So if lawyers are selecting juries, They're not necessarily impartial are they? Nope. You make repeated comments about judges having a potential bias. This is not germane to my position because I'm not arguing for judges handling verdicts. This is a misrepresentation of my position. Judges only job is sentencing. If a judge is biased and the jury finds a person guilty, Then the judge is free to use their bias during sentencing, Juries do not prevent this in anyway. I just want to make it clear that my position is NOT giving judges the powers of a juror. "Juries are also selected, They aren't 100% random. Good lawyers can select for likely good jurors" Yeah, That's the problem, If the system was actually random, I may not have the same critiques of it that I have now. Lawyers can be biased and if any potentially biased person has a hand in jury selection, That means they can select biased juries, Which flies in the face of the 6th amendment by the way. I don't think it's possible to have a courtroom full of truly impartial people, So we need to take away as much discretion as possible. The less choices that the lawyers, Judges, And juries get the better. If we applied Occam's razor to the amount of necessary discretion involved in the jury selection process, My system would be better because it requires less pieces of discretion. Trained jurors do not have to be pro government. They would be just as effective as a trained judge or a trained lawyer. If you truly want to eliminate bias, Then why not just do random judge and prosecutor selection as well? The answer that I assume most people would give is that they would be bad at their jobs right? This is the same claim I make for randomly selected juries. "If there is a shadow of doubt in cases, They should not prosecute. " They shouldn't, But they do, Because they're not trained. A trained jury would be better suited to realize when there is insufficient evidence in cases. In the future, Please do not compare juries to judges, As I mentioned before, Judges have a different job than juries, Only compare trained juries to random juries, Because that's the topic. Unless you're saying that the judge should have power, But that's your prerogative. "You can argue that a different system may improve on certain problems, But you have to be a bit more specific than "fixes all or some of the problems that we currently have"" Did I say that it fixes ALL problems? If I did, Then I misspoke. It's impossible to create a "Perfect" jury obviously. I think we can both agree on that. I reject that I'm committing a nirvana fallacy, However. My system is more or less the same as the current system, With the exception that I'm removing lawyer bias by taking them out of the selection process. So unless you can show evidence that lawyer bias is a good thing, My system would be necessarily better since it's comparable to the original system in almost every other way. ". You seem to be living in a world where you can wave your hand and a 100% impartial agency could be created" I never said this. This is a strawman of my position. " If they were elected or around for any length of time to make "juror" a career" That's a vacuous statement. Anyone could be bribed. So by your logic, We should just get rid of every judge, Lawyer, And politician. If you're not going to apply this to the entire justice system, Then you're not allowed to apply it to juries as well. So what's it gonna be? Are we going to get rid of the whole government? So while it's true that random or professional juries could both be influenced, The difference in my system is that the lawyers will not have the ability to hand pick the juror, Which is worse than bribery because lawyers can influence the decision without having to bribe anybody. At least in the case of a bribe, Some people would say no. If a juror is selected "randomly" they could be in on the bias without even having the chance to say no because they're unaware. "This happens already in a system where there is far less access to these people and they aren't around in semi-permanent slots" Far less access huh? In your system, The judge and the lawyers both have prior access to the juries beforehand. In my system, The only person that has access to them is whoever hires the jurors, Which would be a person that has no personal interest in a particular court case. So let's compare. You have 3 people with access the jury who all have agendas and I have 1 person with access who has no agenda other than hiring jurors. I think it's clear who's system REALLY allows the least access. "my previous point would still stand in this case. Government would have full control and be judge, Jury, And executioner. " well, The government doesn't have "full" control in either system. The government is not some mind controlling alien that gets into the heads of all their workers. Judges, Lawyers, And jurors all have their own minds an biases. The problem isn't government control, It's too much discretion. In my system, I've taken out more discretion and therefore, Mathematically decreased the amount of potential bias that could enter the system. Once again, If you're argument is government control, Then you're being vacuous and that would apply to the entire justice system. So are we back to getting rid of the whole government again? "So the problems stand. You have to tell us what data you have on the efficacy of current jurors, Judges, And professional jurors" This data would be unnecessary because my type of jury wouldn't function identical to a random jury after the fact. The focus of my argument is on the jury selection process. I only have to prove that my system removes bias. There is no perfect system that will stop bad verdicts. That would be a problem for a different topic. So from what I gathered in your critiques, You seem to have the conspiracy theory going in your head that all the government agencies are just one jury selection process away from being taken over. This is a slippery slope fallacy because you can't predict that one small change would lead to a huge outcome. The fact is that if some huge entity was going to bribe and take over our whole government, Then it would happen regardless of our policies. So it's either never going to happen or it already has happened and this debate is moot. I would suggest that we avoid the slippery slope and try to talk about effects that would be within the scope of the argument, Because I think we can agree that neither one of us can see the future with our magic powers, Lol. I'm at the floor of thoht.