Any Country That Has Mandatory Jury Duty is Despotic

[bobevenson]

No ifs, ands or buts!

[Philosophy Explorer]

No ifs, ands or buts!

Fool, this is laughable. In the US you can get excused from jury duty. I can't speak for the UK, but in the US, nah.

PhilX

[bobevenson]

Every court jurisdiction has its own rules. Yes, you can get off jury duty with a good excuse, but why should you have to offer any excuse? Furthermore, legal decisions should not be made by people off the street, but by professional jurors paid by the government.

[Philosophy Explorer]

Every court jurisdiction has its own rules. Yes, you can get off jury duty with a good excuse, but why should you have to offer any excuse? Furthermore, legal decisions should not be made by people off the street, but by professional jurors paid by the government.

Some jurors do get paid. But jury duty is looked upon as a civic duty. Do you think that some day, AI will perform the task of jurors?

PhilX

[bobevenson]

I don't know about the future, but juries should be composed of well-paid professionals, not amateurs, and "civic duty" is just a government ploy to get free labor.

[Philosophy Explorer]

I don't know about the future, but juries should be composed of well-paid professionals, not amateurs.

Please, I fail to see how paying a juror would help them render a proper decision.

PhilX

[bobevenson]

I don't know about the future, but juries should be composed of well-paid professionals, not amateurs.

Please, I fail to see how paying a juror would help them render a proper decision.

PhilX

Please, you can't get professionals for free, duh!

[Arising_uk]

Please, you can't get professionals for free, duh!

Of course you can, professionals often donate their time and services out of moral and civic duty. At least over here they do.

[Philosophy Explorer]

I don't know about the future, but juries should be composed of well-paid professionals, not amateurs.

Please, I fail to see how paying a juror would help them render a proper decision.

PhilX

Please, you can't get professionals for free, duh!

Well DUH, you've missed my point entirely.

PhilX

[FlashDangerpants]

I don't know about the future, but juries should be composed of well-paid professionals, not amateurs.

Please, I fail to see how paying a juror would help them render a proper decision.

PhilX

Please, you can't get professionals for free, duh!

How would you go about monitoring the job performance of professional jurors?
What qualification do they need? Will there be a college course for jury professionals?
Is there to be a separate set of jury-accountants who can decide fraud cases that no longer have to be explained to the courts in layman's terms?

[Terrapin Station]

How would you go about monitoring the job performance of professional jurors?
What qualification do they need? Will there be a college course for jury professionals?
Is there to be a separate set of jury-accountants who can decide fraud cases that no longer have to be explained to the courts in layman's terms?

Why not just model it after professional referee/umpire/etc. crews in sports?

[Philosophy Explorer]

Is there a need to be professional about it (aside from the money?) Lawyers in challenging potential jurors sometimes seek to exclude knowledgeable jurors, for their own particular reasons.

PhilX

[FlashDangerpants]

How would you go about monitoring the job performance of professional jurors?
What qualification do they need? Will there be a college course for jury professionals?
Is there to be a separate set of jury-accountants who can decide fraud cases that no longer have to be explained to the courts in layman's terms?

Why not just model it after professional referee/umpire/etc. crews in sports?

Absolutely. There should be a professional directory too which allows us to inspect who is on our jury and what their credentials are, where they studied, who their friends are and what they get up to on social media (so we can estimate their biases ofc).

[Terrapin Station]

How would you go about monitoring the job performance of professional jurors?
What qualification do they need? Will there be a college course for jury professionals?
Is there to be a separate set of jury-accountants who can decide fraud cases that no longer have to be explained to the courts in layman's terms?

Why not just model it after professional referee/umpire/etc. crews in sports?

Absolutely. There should be a professional directory too which allows us to inspect who is on our jury and what their credentials are, where they studied, who their friends are and what they get up to on social media (so we can estimate their biases ofc).

Well, you wouldn't want it to be a closed-door affair, sure. It's just like we don't have a closed-door policy with judges, sheriffs, etc.

[FlashDangerpants]

Juries are a fundamentally dissimilar role to both of those though. Judges are trained at great expense to provide their judgments free of influence and prejudice. Even so they routinely fail in this task, and their failings are grounds for appeal. Crucially, they are limited in their work to describing what the law says about a procedure, not deciding who is guilty or otherwise in most cases.

With juries we select a bunch of people at random and factor in the assumption that this delivers the average level of stupidity, prejudice and incompetence. Our system is tuned to deliver largely acceptable results on the whole if this bears true. If we remove the randomness of the collection, we have lost the point of having juries at all.