[Closed] Jury service

Yeah, they're a little bit further up the food chain - so actual judges could bias the process a little (smaller recruitment pool) and cost more, no?

Jury's need to be replaced with a pool of professional jurors.

The right to have guilt judged by your peers is pretty important across most of the world.

Start paying jurors and you lose that trial by peers which is pretty much a bad thing. People who are paid are people who have been or can be bought.

As difficult as it was at times, the importance of the public giving up their time to serve was made clear and was thanked several times by judges and legal staff while I attended.

I can't say I found the experience wonderful, not every juror quite got it but it's a duty just as important as voting.

Elections are never really understood by most but no-one suggests a paid electorate is a good thing.

The right to have guilt judged by your peers is pretty important across most of the world.

Start paying jurors and you lose that trial by peers which is pretty much a bad thing. People who are paid are people who have been or can be bought.

As difficult as it was at times, the importance of the public giving up their time to serve was made clear and was thanked several times by judges and legal staff while I attended.

I can't say I found the experience wonderful, not every juror quite got it but it's a duty just as important as voting.

Elections are never really understood by most but no-one suggests a paid electorate is a good thing.

Lets have a volounteer CPS, intelligence services, police and political class then - if you can't counter corruption with anything other than not paying people for a service.

[quote=allan23 ]Elections are never really understood by most but no-one suggests a paid electorate is a good thing.

I think you may have come up with an improvement nobody thought of after the Brexit vote there.

The jury brings together people with a wide variety of experiences in life, work and sometimes technology, this will be lost if you rely on a pool of pain legal experts more so as tuition fees and student debt close off the legal profession to those from a poorer background. It's trial by peers the vast majority of the legal profession I have dealt with have been far removed from the man in the street by both education and income , I have seen juries up close from both the inside and the outside I haven't seen any grossly perverse verdicts so far

The right to have guilt judged by your peers is pretty important across most of the world.

Jury trials are not ubiquitous across the world, and even in England and Wales not all offences have the option for Jury trial, and in Scotland the crown decide the form of trial. In France and countries with related legal systems the Jury deliberate with the Judge.

How? It would be trial by lawyer, a number of them, randomly selected so as to reduce the chance of corruption, from a pool large enough so as to be reasonably representative.

No need for them to be lawyers. They could just be trained lay people.

Someone recently suggested a couple of interesting ideas along this line:

1. Make it compulsory like "national service" to do 3 months (paid, but not well) Jury Service at some point before your 25th birthday. Whilst the jurors would be on average younger than the current system they could be put through some training.
2. Use people who are signing on (who we are paying to "sit at home surfing the internet looking for work")

Make it compulsory like "national service" to do 3 months (paid, but not well) Jury Service at some point before your 25th birthday.

Wouldn't be a very representative demographic.....

Wouldn't be a very representative demographic.....

Does it need to be? Is the current system actually any better [it has a wider age dispersion, but given the efforts some people go to to get out of it, the exemptions that apply, is it actually representative anyway?] Are criminal populations representative of the wider populous (and if not what does the concept of judged by your peers mean?). Are young people any fairer or less fair in deciding guilt than older ones?

The jury brings together people with a wide variety of experiences in life, work and sometimes technology, this will be lost if you rely on a pool of pain legal experts more so as tuition fees and student debt close off the legal profession to those from a poorer background. It's trial by peers the vast majority of the legal profession I have dealt with have been far removed from the man in the street by both education and income , I have seen juries up close from both the inside and the outside I haven't seen any grossly perverse verdicts so far

You think that it's a positive thing to have the "man in the street" making decisions in regards to law and guilt? These are the same people that voted for Brexit. I've read about so many misscarriages of justice due to moronic juries, that it beggars belief.

2. Use people who are signing on (who we are paying to "sit at home surfing the internet looking for work")

isnt that what jeremy kyle is for?

Is the current system actually any better [it has a wider age dispersion, but given the efforts some people go to to get out of it, the exemptions that apply, is it actually representative anyway?]

To paraphrase some chap...

Do you want your case to be decided by 12 people who were not clever enough to get out of doing jury duty?

No need for them to be lawyers. They could just be trained lay people.

This system already exists, they're called "magistrates".

i was on jury duty this time last year.
first day - after the introduction bit, told that there was a case that was entering it's third week (and the jurors had been selected from those that hadnt minded if it went on for an extra week) and there was 2 other ongoing cases from the previous week... the building only contained 4 courts - there was a case due to start that day, but there was some work going on in court 4 - so we could relax til the afternoon. They let us go at 3pm when it became obv that nothing was gonna happen that day.

Tuesday - defendant didnt turn up - sent home at lunchtime
Wednesday - defendant pleaded guilty - sent home at lunch
Thursday - wasnt selected out of the pool of available jurors for the case starting that day. Told to come back on monday.
Monday - wasnt selected from the available jurors for the 2 cases that started that day - remaining 2nd weekers told they wouldnt be needed for the planned cases that week...

So never ended up on a jury - but did nearly complete the jigsaw of sorrento that was for our amusment while waiting in the jury holding room.

So never ended up on a jury - but did nearly complete the jigsaw of sorrento that was for our amusment while waiting in the jury holding room.

Sorry - what? You had a room and furniture and some sort of ackowledgement that you were going to have to spend a lot of time waiting about?

I wonder if the variation in how attentive or enthusiastic people have found the juries they've served on my be influenced by the culture in individual courts.

My jury service was typified by spending almost all the first day with 60 odd other people waiting for an indefinite amount of time, with no information and little attendance from staff (who seemed to communicate in shrugging and skilfully avoiding eye contact) in a room with no heating, no refreshments, and no furniture bar a few cold marble planters some of us could perch ourselves on.

There was an atmosphere of resentment from the outset.

yeah, luxury i guess 😆 Had some furnished chairs (sofas in the room for second weekers!) dunno about heating, but no air con (or opening windows)

The Jury Co-ordinator would arrive for 10am, take a register... then disappear. they'd pop their head round the door again later to say if we could go home or just go for lunch.

I did it a few years ago.
Boring case..he said she said.no evidence.

However, I was thoroughly impressed at the judge's keenness to have lunch at EXACTLY half one every day.
He'd simply stop someone mid sentence, stand up, and walk out!
I compared my profession to his, and chuckled at how different the approaches to the work/lunch importance was!
(But that I think medics who skip lunch do themselves any favors!)

DrP