Ceteris paribus, I would think that the lower gullibility of judges would be entirely overwhelmed by the effects of increased corruption. Take the corrupt judges in Pennsylvania that were all over the news last year, for example. The difference in accuracy between a jury and a judge pales in comparison to this sort of thing; that’s fine if corruption is proportionally more rare than that accuracy gap, which is probably true if most cases of corruption are uncovered.
But if you look at the story of those Pennsylvanian judges, they did a miserably bad job of covering their own tracks, and it still took four years for anyone to notice. If we’re only catching the incompetent corrupt judges, then either only incompetent judges are corrupt, or we don’t have an accurate picture of how much corruption there actually is.
It’s oft-repeated but nevertheless true: power corrupts. Because jurors serve infrequently, for one case at a time, and have little individual power, it’s much, much harder to buy off or otherwise influence a jury. I think that if we want to improve our justice system, we’d be best served by applying closer scrutiny to positions that act as bottlenecks of authority—judges, prosecutors, and anyone involved in jury selection.
Granted, that’s all predicated on maintaining a justice system that looks approximately like our current one.
It’s oft-repeated but nevertheless true: power corrupts. Because jurors serve infrequently, for one case at a time, and have little individual power, it’s much, much harder to buy off or otherwise influence a jury. I think that if we want to improve our justice system, we’d be best served by applying closer scrutiny to positions that act as bottlenecks of authority—judges, prosecutors, and anyone involved in jury selection.
Totally true, and it’s also unfortunate that this is just the kind of scrutiny that is hard to get in place. Apparently those with authority don’t like to implement systems that scrutinize authority. Even those without authority don’t like to scrutinize those with authority. Because those with authority don’t like people that scrutinize them!
Also note that the power of juries has become more and more limited, by way of discouraging knowledge of jury nullification, and by not letting the jury know what punishment a guilty verdict will lead to.
it’s much, much harder to buy off or otherwise influence a jury
But jurors are subject to intimidation. I’m not sure of the situation in the rest of the world, but in Ireland this is currently a significant problem for some (mostly gang- and drug-related) trials.
EDIT: in designing an ideal system maybe we can assume that good legislation and procedures make this problem go away.
If jurys are not taken from a preselected pool of specially trained people, they are highly susceptible to common forms of rationality failure. This can in no way be conciliated with “innocent untill proven guilty”. Therfore, the jury system as implemented today in the US can not be called “just” in any common meaning of the word.
A single judge who can sentence someone to any punishment without accountability is too powerful. That too could not be called “just”.
One possible solution would be to separate the trial from the sentence. One judge would then preside over the trial and regulate the interaction of prosecution and defense with the witnesses. From this trial an anonymized record is then passed to a different judge or group of judges who evaluate the evidence and formulate the sentence.
I don’t think this opposition is so absolute, though, between on the one hand wanting there to be a large pool of unpredictably assigned judges, and on the other hand wanting them to be familiar with the relevant law. For instance, given that there exists such a thing as a license to practice law, perhaps juries could consist of randomly selected lawyers, instead of randomly selected people-in-general. If I were more awake right now I could probably start poking holes in that idea, but I do think it at least serves as a counterexample to that dichotomy.
Ceteris paribus, I would think that the lower gullibility of judges would be entirely overwhelmed by the effects of increased corruption. Take the corrupt judges in Pennsylvania that were all over the news last year, for example. The difference in accuracy between a jury and a judge pales in comparison to this sort of thing; that’s fine if corruption is proportionally more rare than that accuracy gap, which is probably true if most cases of corruption are uncovered.
But if you look at the story of those Pennsylvanian judges, they did a miserably bad job of covering their own tracks, and it still took four years for anyone to notice. If we’re only catching the incompetent corrupt judges, then either only incompetent judges are corrupt, or we don’t have an accurate picture of how much corruption there actually is.
It’s oft-repeated but nevertheless true: power corrupts. Because jurors serve infrequently, for one case at a time, and have little individual power, it’s much, much harder to buy off or otherwise influence a jury. I think that if we want to improve our justice system, we’d be best served by applying closer scrutiny to positions that act as bottlenecks of authority—judges, prosecutors, and anyone involved in jury selection.
Granted, that’s all predicated on maintaining a justice system that looks approximately like our current one.
Totally true, and it’s also unfortunate that this is just the kind of scrutiny that is hard to get in place. Apparently those with authority don’t like to implement systems that scrutinize authority. Even those without authority don’t like to scrutinize those with authority. Because those with authority don’t like people that scrutinize them!
Also note that the power of juries has become more and more limited, by way of discouraging knowledge of jury nullification, and by not letting the jury know what punishment a guilty verdict will lead to.
But jurors are subject to intimidation. I’m not sure of the situation in the rest of the world, but in Ireland this is currently a significant problem for some (mostly gang- and drug-related) trials.
EDIT: in designing an ideal system maybe we can assume that good legislation and procedures make this problem go away.
If jurys are not taken from a preselected pool of specially trained people, they are highly susceptible to common forms of rationality failure. This can in no way be conciliated with “innocent untill proven guilty”. Therfore, the jury system as implemented today in the US can not be called “just” in any common meaning of the word.
A single judge who can sentence someone to any punishment without accountability is too powerful. That too could not be called “just”.
One possible solution would be to separate the trial from the sentence. One judge would then preside over the trial and regulate the interaction of prosecution and defense with the witnesses. From this trial an anonymized record is then passed to a different judge or group of judges who evaluate the evidence and formulate the sentence.
I don’t think this opposition is so absolute, though, between on the one hand wanting there to be a large pool of unpredictably assigned judges, and on the other hand wanting them to be familiar with the relevant law. For instance, given that there exists such a thing as a license to practice law, perhaps juries could consist of randomly selected lawyers, instead of randomly selected people-in-general. If I were more awake right now I could probably start poking holes in that idea, but I do think it at least serves as a counterexample to that dichotomy.