The Challenge
Currently less than 5% of criminal trials have juries.
From a Court’s perspective non-jury, ‘justice’ saves time and costs. Plea bargaining and or Summary Judgements by a Judge is more effective at doling out justice. Through the court’s lens, citizens are ill-prepared to deal with the intricacies of the law and the complexity of a trial.
While the random selection process to seat jurors introduces a variable, the writers of the Constitution wanted to balance the bureaucratic authority of the justice institution with citizens reflecting current norms of society for determining the truth—not the facts. When jurors observe the trial, they are, naturally unfamiliar with the setting and the other seated jurors. They will experience an inherent argument based on biases in the trial, and likely adversarial biases in the deliberation room.
Are all the jurors engaged during the trial?
What’s their motivation to wrestle with the specifics of the case?
Jurors should be engaged during the trial. Stereotypical in the eyes of the courts, some jurors will tire from the stress and others will be distracted by thoughts of the job and family they’re missing.
No protocol exists for getting to the truth. No means exist to help other jurors get to the objective without distraction and argument. The emerging threat to the Seventh Amendment to the Constitution is the rapid decline of a trial that involves the judgement of a jury.
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