Good. Said it along, the jury system doesn’t work because you’re asking the sort of halfwits who get confused by Love Island to have the attention span to understand a criminal trial.
Jury’s need asisstence to understand the contexts and how to evaluate information and how it can be misleadingly presented. Logic. I feel that a lot of things wrong are a result of the controls placed restricting information that it is claimed can mislead juries, and techniques used to misrepresent the relevance of information, and how to effectively summarise it and the issues with it at the end.
For example, the degree of doubt would be influenced with better preparation regarding how offenders escape justice in general, lie, manipulate, minimise incriminating evidence, as well as how that may happen with the accuser in some situations, and knowing more about prior history would often be of use, but may be omitted until the end to prevent prejudicing. Perhaps that is causing more problems than it solves.
An offender will paint reasonable doubt by making it seem unreasonable to claim they behaved that way and to take an alternative explanation they present as more plausible.
If they are moral folk they would have difficulty doing that, however more psychopathic offenders know how to limit the evidence that could be presented following a crime, so knowing up-front about prior patterns of behavior could be a valid thing.
Juries can also be hobbled by removing members assessed to be somehow biased because they have experience of these manipulative behaviors as victims of the same. I don’t see a scientific basis for determining that such experience makes someone less fit as a juror, and that actually, some of them at some fraction should be mandated to be past victims.
As much as I think a jury is capable of bias and incompetence, the point of jury is to a reflect the decision of the greater population.
We would all give out different verdicts but a jury is the voice of the people and not of the state. Maybe everyone should have some more training and jury like experiences in education to improve our approach but removing them is not the answer
Rape trials are hard enough to _get_ to trial, much less operate as they do without making them “juryless”.
These are quite complicated cases to read into, process and accordingly decide on which is completely negated if those involved have the collective intellect of a room-temperature pickled onion.
Courts and the legal system need funding to an appropriate level, not finding new and interesting ways to cut costs and make Joe Public somehow responsible for deciding on the outcome of what is invariably a personal, traumatic and life-changing crime.
It’s bad enough in the UK only a Man can be found guilty of Rape, despite us living in bloody 2024, the last thing we need is yet another service some crisp-brained mental muffin is finding ways to keep it limping along without actually putting money into it.
Having done jury service twice, jury less is the way. The general public are fucking stupid, the naive and dumb shit I’ve heard in deliberation rooms still makes me angry. The more complex cases need an educated jury or no jury at all.
Juryless trials can too easily be used by the state/the authorities to protect their own from justice or to silence dissent in the population.
While juries are made up of people who are not legal experts, most want to do the right thing, both for victims and the accused.
We can’t compromise justice to get higher conviction rates. There needs to be a way to find proof without making it even easier for accusations alone to ruin people’s lives.
The problem is
1. Judges who take on the case will be a particular ilk. Any balanced judge would not want to decide guilt or innocence and then decide the sentence. My view is the judges taking the cases would all be hard left feminist types with their own agenda and views of men as oppressors. So prejudiced in other words.
2. If a member of the state (police, NHS,judge,barrister etc.) Is on trial it opens up a can of worms of state corruption and cover-ups, especially if the alleged victim is not a high ranking person.
Anyone supporting this feminist/communist style madness would need their head examined. The public must be involved in these processes to stop the state controlling the courts.
I say this while know their are many prejudiced against victims of sexual assault.
Alot people in this thread don’t seem to understand the main reason for a jury.
It’s to be judged by your peers. Being factually correct is secondary. It is a moral judgement from the people you live with and whom will have to live with you about your actions warranting a punishment or not.
It is to prevent the state from being able to use legislation to silence groups or individuals as the final barrier is your peers.
It is a reflection of the morality of our society at the time which is a fairer judgement then a law which in some cases made be decades or even centuries out of date from when it was written (not rape specifically)
Imo we need to come up with a manslaughter equivalent of rape if we really want to solve this problem and keep due process
Trial by jury is a fundamental bedrock of our legal system.
To all those that say that rape perpetrated by women, and thus only considered sexual assault, is treated just the same as male perpetrated rape, where’s the call for juryless sexual assault trials?
Oh yeah, no one cares about this because no one gives a fuck about female rapists or male rape victims.
I’m sorry but this is terrifying. I fully support this boycott.
Isn’t it literally our oldest written right? I thought it was in the Magna Carta.
Deeply, deeply troubling that there are forces in this country who want to take away rights with that much significance.
I don’t really see how this is going to solve the problem they’re trying to solve.
I completely get the issue here. Juries are potentially biased and incompetent, and their pre-conceived notions can hinder prosecutions in rape cases (“she was being a tease”, “she was dressed like a whore” etc). So I completely understand, and agree with, the desire for reform.
However. The strength of a jury is that there are enough people in there that one or two people with shitty opinions can’t have a dramatic influence of the outcome on a trial. If there are 12 people, selected at random, you’d hope to see a relatively broad representation of different ideas and opinions. Sure, a couple of the jurors might have problematic views but it’s less likely that they *all* will.
Surely getting rid of juries and replacing that with a smaller number of people, even well trained legal professionals, just makes the odds of getting somebody with shit opinions more likely?
We all know judges and magistrates can be biased and corrupt. What’s more likely, that you’ll end up with one biased judge or 12 biased jurors? Surely the solution here is to make juries larger and more diverse, not smaller and more concentrated?
This is leaving out the ethical issues of making the state the sole arbiter of someone’s guilt.
What am I missing?
Trials are not necessarily a test of guilt, they’re a test of facts about the case. Unfortunately, unless a victim has semen and evidence of violent or forceful insertion or video evidence, it devolves into a case of he-said she-said. Evidence that is too circumstancial or anecdotal. Then juries look for body language, signs of guilt on the accused or signs of trauma on the victim, not to count that a defence lawyer will call into question their character as well by invasive questioning.
The reasons rape convictions are low is because of the evidence struggles to reach the legal bars. That’s not counting all the traumatic stuff victims have to go through during an investigation to even get to trial.
Unfortunately, I’m not sure juryless trials are a solution either. You still have to convince a judge, and you still have to go through character assassination. Judges are taught to judge each case dispassionately and look at the facts as they are presented. They could still look at it and say it’s too circumstantial and not enough to prove beyond reasonable doubt an accused is guilty.
16 comments
Good. Said it along, the jury system doesn’t work because you’re asking the sort of halfwits who get confused by Love Island to have the attention span to understand a criminal trial.
Jury’s need asisstence to understand the contexts and how to evaluate information and how it can be misleadingly presented. Logic. I feel that a lot of things wrong are a result of the controls placed restricting information that it is claimed can mislead juries, and techniques used to misrepresent the relevance of information, and how to effectively summarise it and the issues with it at the end.
For example, the degree of doubt would be influenced with better preparation regarding how offenders escape justice in general, lie, manipulate, minimise incriminating evidence, as well as how that may happen with the accuser in some situations, and knowing more about prior history would often be of use, but may be omitted until the end to prevent prejudicing. Perhaps that is causing more problems than it solves.
An offender will paint reasonable doubt by making it seem unreasonable to claim they behaved that way and to take an alternative explanation they present as more plausible.
If they are moral folk they would have difficulty doing that, however more psychopathic offenders know how to limit the evidence that could be presented following a crime, so knowing up-front about prior patterns of behavior could be a valid thing.
Juries can also be hobbled by removing members assessed to be somehow biased because they have experience of these manipulative behaviors as victims of the same. I don’t see a scientific basis for determining that such experience makes someone less fit as a juror, and that actually, some of them at some fraction should be mandated to be past victims.
As much as I think a jury is capable of bias and incompetence, the point of jury is to a reflect the decision of the greater population.
We would all give out different verdicts but a jury is the voice of the people and not of the state. Maybe everyone should have some more training and jury like experiences in education to improve our approach but removing them is not the answer
Rape trials are hard enough to _get_ to trial, much less operate as they do without making them “juryless”.
These are quite complicated cases to read into, process and accordingly decide on which is completely negated if those involved have the collective intellect of a room-temperature pickled onion.
Courts and the legal system need funding to an appropriate level, not finding new and interesting ways to cut costs and make Joe Public somehow responsible for deciding on the outcome of what is invariably a personal, traumatic and life-changing crime.
It’s bad enough in the UK only a Man can be found guilty of Rape, despite us living in bloody 2024, the last thing we need is yet another service some crisp-brained mental muffin is finding ways to keep it limping along without actually putting money into it.
Having done jury service twice, jury less is the way. The general public are fucking stupid, the naive and dumb shit I’ve heard in deliberation rooms still makes me angry. The more complex cases need an educated jury or no jury at all.
Juryless trials can too easily be used by the state/the authorities to protect their own from justice or to silence dissent in the population.
While juries are made up of people who are not legal experts, most want to do the right thing, both for victims and the accused.
We can’t compromise justice to get higher conviction rates. There needs to be a way to find proof without making it even easier for accusations alone to ruin people’s lives.
The problem is
1. Judges who take on the case will be a particular ilk. Any balanced judge would not want to decide guilt or innocence and then decide the sentence. My view is the judges taking the cases would all be hard left feminist types with their own agenda and views of men as oppressors. So prejudiced in other words.
2. If a member of the state (police, NHS,judge,barrister etc.) Is on trial it opens up a can of worms of state corruption and cover-ups, especially if the alleged victim is not a high ranking person.
Anyone supporting this feminist/communist style madness would need their head examined. The public must be involved in these processes to stop the state controlling the courts.
I say this while know their are many prejudiced against victims of sexual assault.
Alot people in this thread don’t seem to understand the main reason for a jury.
It’s to be judged by your peers. Being factually correct is secondary. It is a moral judgement from the people you live with and whom will have to live with you about your actions warranting a punishment or not.
It is to prevent the state from being able to use legislation to silence groups or individuals as the final barrier is your peers.
It is a reflection of the morality of our society at the time which is a fairer judgement then a law which in some cases made be decades or even centuries out of date from when it was written (not rape specifically)
Imo we need to come up with a manslaughter equivalent of rape if we really want to solve this problem and keep due process
Trial by jury is a fundamental bedrock of our legal system.
To all those that say that rape perpetrated by women, and thus only considered sexual assault, is treated just the same as male perpetrated rape, where’s the call for juryless sexual assault trials?
Oh yeah, no one cares about this because no one gives a fuck about female rapists or male rape victims.
I’m sorry but this is terrifying. I fully support this boycott.
Isn’t it literally our oldest written right? I thought it was in the Magna Carta.
Deeply, deeply troubling that there are forces in this country who want to take away rights with that much significance.
I don’t really see how this is going to solve the problem they’re trying to solve.
I completely get the issue here. Juries are potentially biased and incompetent, and their pre-conceived notions can hinder prosecutions in rape cases (“she was being a tease”, “she was dressed like a whore” etc). So I completely understand, and agree with, the desire for reform.
However. The strength of a jury is that there are enough people in there that one or two people with shitty opinions can’t have a dramatic influence of the outcome on a trial. If there are 12 people, selected at random, you’d hope to see a relatively broad representation of different ideas and opinions. Sure, a couple of the jurors might have problematic views but it’s less likely that they *all* will.
Surely getting rid of juries and replacing that with a smaller number of people, even well trained legal professionals, just makes the odds of getting somebody with shit opinions more likely?
We all know judges and magistrates can be biased and corrupt. What’s more likely, that you’ll end up with one biased judge or 12 biased jurors? Surely the solution here is to make juries larger and more diverse, not smaller and more concentrated?
This is leaving out the ethical issues of making the state the sole arbiter of someone’s guilt.
What am I missing?
Trials are not necessarily a test of guilt, they’re a test of facts about the case. Unfortunately, unless a victim has semen and evidence of violent or forceful insertion or video evidence, it devolves into a case of he-said she-said. Evidence that is too circumstancial or anecdotal. Then juries look for body language, signs of guilt on the accused or signs of trauma on the victim, not to count that a defence lawyer will call into question their character as well by invasive questioning.
The reasons rape convictions are low is because of the evidence struggles to reach the legal bars. That’s not counting all the traumatic stuff victims have to go through during an investigation to even get to trial.
Unfortunately, I’m not sure juryless trials are a solution either. You still have to convince a judge, and you still have to go through character assassination. Judges are taught to judge each case dispassionately and look at the facts as they are presented. They could still look at it and say it’s too circumstantial and not enough to prove beyond reasonable doubt an accused is guilty.
Wait until you hear about the [Single justice procedure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_justice_procedure), where one random guy with no legal qualifications whatsoever is allowed to sentence offenders.