131–140 of 229 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There were two men of color, one black and one latino. All the other people of color were women.
There were no black men: "Every black man had a story: police harassment, spurious arrests, intimidation. They were all eliminated".
The author himself is a black man.
> two men of color make it to the jury, and I am one of them. The other is Latino.
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these same people are voting for your president or prime minister or MP. If anything, the (unfortunately, long term..) solution is to educate these people, not to abolish jury duty.
Good luck with that. We'd have to start with totally remaking news media, or even getting rid of them altogether - it's them who present a new outrage every day with a handy judgement to cache and retrieve the next time you see a similar looking situation. But "free speech!", "free media - the cornerstone of democracy!", something something.
We need something that is to current journalism as the Senate is to the House: unable to be blown around by society's ephemeral tastes.
The simplest method is probably to pay for journalism through taxes. The BBC is a decent model. Ideally we'd want to retain a multiplicity of viewpoints, though. Maybe a BBC-alike as a grant-funding organization, where small independent journalist groups get grants to go out and investigate, in exchange for an agreement to publish their stories onto the BBC-alike's news wire service (which would then be freely licensed to distributors—basically putting those stories into the public domain.)
Rather than the BBC-alike deciding who to hire, let a Journalist's Guild decide who's good enough to publish; anyone allowed into the profession will be trusted to have done something valuable whenever they submit a story, and will be automatically paid out. It's the Guild's responsibility (i.e. that of the other Guild members) to catch their peers submitting nonsense and report them, and have those people's journalistic credentials suspended or disbar them entirely.
That'd neatly realign the concept of "journalistic integrity" or "journalistic ethics" to stand at the same strength-of-force on journalists as the equivalent concepts in medicine and law do for their professionals.
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Trained professional judges who understand these matters. This is called 'Bench Trials'.
Nothing can be as biased and conservative as "trained professional judges". Not to mention they tend to reflect the interests and prejudices of their kind and class -- not the society at large, who is supposed to be the one whose moral system and will is to be enforced in the legal/justice system.
As a non American, the USA justice system honestly sounds like the worst possible system for justice imaginable. I don't think I could design a worse system if I tried. Do you all just keep the system because it keeps so many people employed following the pointless bureaucracy of it all? The people making the decisions have no training in law at all, yet they have to decide if the law was broken. They get a brief spo…
In both instances the lawyers who practice, especially in more serious cases, need "a right of audience" - that is they are either an English barrister/Scottish advocate or a solicitor who has undergone additional training. For a case like a murder trial both sides will have solicitors who appoint experienced counsel to actually make the argument in court. This is the key that the American system doesn't have - those counsel almost always act for both defence and prosecution - they are not professional prosecutors or defenders. Some specialise in one direction or the other, but they avoid the tribalism and chasing of conviction rates. There is the equivalent of the DA, that is the senior state lawyers who rarely actually appear in court, but they come up through the tradition of the independent bar.
What that leads to is a prosecution and defence that both tend towards the interest of justice. Given that you end up with the professionals all striving to test the burden of proof, not grandstanding - which leads to a more harmonious jury experience. Many of my friends from university became lawyers, some of the brightest minds in the country practice at the criminal bar and conduct "legal aid" defences - i.e. act as public defenders. It is the equivalent of the defence attorney in the article's case being a Harvard Law graduate.
No legal system is perfect, many are starved of funds, every one has had prominent scandals over the years. I would submit that the jury system is still a valuable check and balance and works remarkable well when combined with an independent, professional, bar which avoids perverse incentives.
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Haha. And did she vote to convict or aquit?
Of course she voted to acquit. So did the old guy who shouted "Nothing is obscene!" the moment he entered the jury deliberation room, despite the fact that Jello was not charged with obscenity. And the girl who said "The defense attorney is pretty cute."
Despite the other negative comments, I actually find this a vicarious account of the judicial system - a poignant reminder that behind any democratic system lies humans.
In a lot of the world, justice decisions are made by professional judges who have a lot of literature (laws, other decisions, and interpretation by higher courts) to guide their decisions. Which has the upside of more informed decisions (in France, it's interesting to see that professional judges seem more harsh than public jury tho.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good luck with that. We'd have to start with totally remaking news media, or even getting rid of them altogether - it's them who present a new outrage every day with a handy judgement to cache and retrieve the next time you see a similar looking situation. But "free speech!", "free media - the cornerstone of democracy!", something something.
Remove economic incentives from news media, perhaps. You'd think news-organizations-as-charities would work, but even being donation-driven still incentivizes populist pandering at the expense of real journalism. We need something that is to current journalism as the Senate is to the House: unable to be blown around by society's ephemeral tastes. The simplest method is probably to pay for journalism through taxes. Th…
Yeah, BBC may be a step in the right direction. The grant-funding organization idea is interesting. Or maybe the reverse? Let's make news just like a public agency - collecting data (stories) and releasing it as a public service, just like NOAA does with weather? But then again, we'd need a way to incentivize the reporters to dig into government/whoever-funds-this problems and make sure that such reports get published as well.
It's a hard problem, and alternative solutions won't be perfect either, but the current situation of constant outrage-fueled brainwashing is taking a heavy toll on the ability of our society to reason, so IMO it's worth considering a change.
BTW. I think that a regular change of such systems may not be a bad idea. The problem with media, or with justice, or democracy, or even with markets start when they're getting too optimized, and thus start to deviate from the original purpose. So i.e. if you look at the arguments about why democracy is awesome and all, they all seem to make sense... if applied to the system from 100 years ago, back when it wasn't so thoroughly gamed. We want our systems efficient, but not too efficient, because they're not perfectly aligned with our shared values.
"I imagine what an inverse 12 Angry Men would be like, starting with 11 jurors ready to acquit and Henry Fonda as the only one willing to convict. " There's a Japanese film, 12 Tender Japaneses, which is exactly that---at the beginning everybody casually votes to acquit except one who insists more discussion. It's of course an homage to Reginald Rose, but it also depicts very well how typical Japanese people behave w…
> 12 Tender Japaneses The only thing I can find googling this is a worldwar 2 aircraft carrier. Can I have the original title in romanji I want to see if it has been dubbed or subtitled.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There were no black men: "Every black man had a story: police harassment, spurious arrests, intimidation. They were all eliminated".
I think he meant all the others were eliminated. The author himself is a black man. > two men of color make it to the jury, and I am one of them. The other is Latino.