The only people who think judges would do a better job of it are either currently judges or would like to set themselves up as judges.

Moreover, those who think that juries do not unusally render the correct verdict attributable to the facts and law presented to them have not seen many jury trials.

As to the Simpson case, there appear to have been significant prosecution blunders, in particular the failure to prepare Furman, and, if memory serves, a concession as to either venire- or venue-shopping, which were, to say the least, suspicious. There is more than one way to fix a case.

Now ponder the effects on the bonds of civil society when jurors disregard their oath out of racial animosity. Who would suffer such persons as neighbors, given the choice? Just asking.

At least a couple of the Simpson jurors later said that they had made a mistake :

The forewoman and another juror who voted to acquit O.J. Simpson of murder said they likely would decide against him if they were on a civil jury, where the burden of proof is lighter.

"Given that standard and based on the amount of evidence that was presented, ... then yes, you would have to say that yes, he is guilty," Armanda Cooley told Dateline NBC. [...]

Cooley was forewoman of the long-sequestered Simpson jury. Jurors deliberated less than four hours before clearing Simpson of two counts of murder.

Cooley and other jurors said they were impressed by defense efforts to raise reasonable doubts that Simpson committed the killings, with Detective Mark Fuhrman's role proving critical. [...]

Although she didn't like Fuhrman from the start, Cooley wrote in a new book, "Madame Foreman," the former detective's initial testimony "did not look good for O.J."

But as Fuhrman underwent cross-examination by defense attorney F. Lee Bailey, his demeanor changed, said Cooley, the juror who sat closest to the witness box.

"His breathing patterns shifted and, from where I was sitting, you could see him squirming," she wrote. "Fuhrman kept pushing his feet up against the back board of the stand. You could tell there was just a little anger building up in him. I'm thinking, 'This man is lying."' [...]

The book plays down the importance of the now-infamous glove demonstration, however, in which prosecutor Christopher Darden had Simpson try on the evidence gloves found at his estate and at the crime scene. The gloves appeared not to fit, but the jurors said they weren't convinced.

"Those gloves fit," [said one juror] "He wasn't putting them on right."

"Sure," added [another juror] "you know they fit. ... I must have had an expression on my face because as he stood there, it was like he was talking to me, and he went, 'They don't fit.' They would have fit anybody."

During the trial, they said, Fuhrman made the biggest impression on the jurors.

But juries aren't just scapegoats and lightning rods, although those are valuable functions.

Juries can also be mine canaries and guinea pigs. They serve as a test-bed for new defenses predicated on societal changes that haven't yet been reflected and formalized in the law, and by looking at the types of cases where juries convict or refuse to convict, one can get a sense of how well served society is by current laws.

Finally, and most importantly, juries are more likely to come to the "right" conclusion than is any one given individual, due to group intelligence :

The theoretical physicist Norman L. Johnson has demonstrated this using computer simulations of individual "agents" making their way through a maze. Johnson, who does his work at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, was interested in understanding how groups might be able to solve problems that individuals on their own found difficult. So he built a maze—one that could be navigated via many different paths, some shorter, and some longer—and sent a group of agents into the maze one by one. The first time through, they just wandered around, the way you would if you were looking for a particular café in a city where you'd never been before. Whenever they came to a turning point—what Johnson called a "node"—they would randomly choose to go right or left. Therefore some people found their way, by chance, to the exit quickly, others more slowly. Then Johnson sent the agents back into the maze, but this time he allowed them to use the information they'd learned on their first trip, as if they'd dropped bread crumbs behind them the first time around. Johnson wanted to know how well his agents would use their new information. Predictably enough, they used it well, and were much smarter the second time through. The average agent took 34.3 steps to find the exit the first time, and just 12.8 steps to find it the second.

The key to the experiment, though, was this: Johnson took the results of all the trips through the maze and used them to calculate what he called the group's "collective solution." He figured out what a majority of the group did at each node of the maze, and then plotted a path through the maze based on the majority's decisions. (If more people turned left than right at a given node, that was the direction he assumed the group took. Tie votes were broken randomly.) The group's path was just nine steps long, which was not only shorter than the path of the average individual (12.8 steps), but as short as the path that even the smartest individual had been able to come up with. It was also as good an answer as you could find. There was no way to get through the maze in fewer than nine steps, so the group had discovered the optimal solution. [Emph. add.]

- Excerpted from The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki

Posted by: Michael Herdegen at October 2, 2005 7:26 PM

Juries are necessary, if for no other reason than that half the laws involve the word "reasonable," and you need a large sample size to decide what that word means.
Of course, the problem the way the system is set up, you "are guaranteed a trial by a jury of your peers too stupid to get out of jury duty."

Noel

The other function of a jury, besides deciding on matters of fact, is deciding on the "law" itself, and in doing so, nullifying unjust laws and preventing selective application. This power goes back to Magna Carta, if not earlier, when all laws were made by the king, and the jury of peers (literally) could prevent the enforcement of unjust laws.

Posted by: jd watson at October 2, 2005 9:52 PM

JD: I don't think so.

jd:

Not a recognized legal power, but understood as practical safety valve. They aren't supposed to do that, but they do and we tolerate it in extreme circumstances, especially in cases of undue severity or political motivation.

In Victorian England, when there were over two hundred capital offences, stealing anything worth over forty shillings was a capital offence. It was the job of the jury to decide the value of the stolen article. Gradually, juries began to decide that jewels, gold. etc. didn't make it. Finally, one jury decide a five pound note (100 shillings) didn't either. This was also the period when the law developed all the protections for the accused that characterize the common law in the Anglosphere. It wasn't so much love of liberty or fear of the state as a reaction against the severity of the law.

OTOH, jury nullification is pretty much what killed Canada's abortion laws.

People who think that Judges would do a better job than juries haven't met enough Judges.

No kidding.