In the US, juries decide facts, judges interpret the law

Posted May 8, 2012 8:17 UTC (Tue) by job (guest, #670)
In reply to: In the US, juries decide facts, judges interpret the law by JoeBuck
Parent article: Google guilty of infringement in Oracle trial; future legal headaches loom (ars technica)

I must say the jury system is very strange to an outsider. Lots of blatantly apparent problems: your chances vary wildly depending on whether you are famous, from a racial minority etc. If the idea is to protect against dysfunctional judges, I'm pretty sure there are better ways.

Anyways, I've learned not to put to much weight in these kind of rulings. I'm sure the gaping holes in the ruling is reasonable for someone who understands the legal system, and that it will all be explained in time. There is little alternative to Google winning this in the wider economical perspective.

In the US, juries decide facts, judges interpret the law

Posted May 8, 2012 9:06 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

If the idea is to protect against dysfunctional judges, I'm pretty sure there are better ways.

That's one of the purposes. Another purpose is to ensure that legislators and judges cannot drift too far away from the average man -- and if anything the US habit of throwing off juries anyone who has detectable skills helps here, odious though it is. It's as if they're de-eliting the jury pool. (Not that the US system of jury selection doesn't have other huge problems -- jurisdiction shopping, groundless but nonetheless useful appeals to local pride...)

I also note that people have been looking for a better system than juries (in an ad-hoc intermittent fashion) for most of a millennium, and nothing obviously better has emerged. Everything else anyone has tried is prone to capture by one or another interest group or power bloc.

In the US, juries decide facts, judges interpret the law

Posted May 8, 2012 12:14 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Note that the original idea of "a jury of your peers" has already been captured ...

The US habit of throwing people off pretty much *ensures* it is NOT a jury of your peers, as originally constituted.

Cheers,
Wol

In the US, juries decide facts, judges interpret the law

Posted May 8, 2012 14:53 UTC (Tue) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (2 responses)

> I must say the jury system is very strange to an outsider. Lots of blatantly apparent problems: your chances vary wildly depending on whether you are famous, from a racial minority etc. If the idea is to protect against dysfunctional judges, I'm pretty sure there are better ways.

The only major advantage of the Jury system in the USA is that the Jury has the legal ability to nullify laws. If a Jury decides that a law or a ruling is unjust they could declare the defendant not guilty, even if he is clearly guilty of breaking the law.

In the US, juries decide facts, judges interpret the law

Posted May 8, 2012 17:30 UTC (Tue) by job (guest, #670) [Link] (1 responses)

I had no idea! (I seem to remember vaguely from school that the US system used Montesquieu's principles but this seems to run counter to those.) The possibilities sounds endless, but I guess it isn't practiced much?

In the US, juries decide facts, judges interpret the law

Posted May 8, 2012 18:43 UTC (Tue) by wahern (subscriber, #37304) [Link]

A good book which analyses the contemporary and historical use of juries in the context of an overall critique of the contemporary criminal justice system is The Collapse of American Criminal Justice by the late William Stuntz.

There are undoubtedly better books describing the history of the jury system, but according to the thesis of the book various changes in the the criminal system in the United States has turned juries into rubber stamps. Jury conviction rates are significantly higher (double or more) today than a hundred years ago. Juries used to have far more discretion than they do today. Now the laws are so detailed, and their definitions so all-encompassing, that juries are given very little leeway to show leniency or to provide the defendant with any true benefit of a doubt.

In the US, juries decide facts, judges interpret the law

Posted May 8, 2012 16:24 UTC (Tue) by clugstj (subscriber, #4020) [Link]

If all you know about the jury system is what you've read in the news, then I'm not surprised that you find it strange. All news outlets are biased - at least toward what they think you will be interested in hearing about. The news is certainly not how you should learn about how some process normally works.