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360 points namlem | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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like_any_other ◴[] No.44571164[source]
> Juries, widely trusted to impartially deliver justice, are the most familiar instance.

Trusted by those that have not looked into whether this is actually the case. The first prime minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, was famously against trial by jury, because of how easily lawyers can abuse biases in multiracial societies, based on his first-hand experience [1].

A UK study found his experience is the norm, not the exception - Black and minority ethnic (BME) jurors vote guilty 73% of the time against White defendants, but only 24% of the time against BME defendants [2]. (White jurors vote 39% and 32% for convicting White and BME defendants, respectively. You read that correctly - Whites are also biased against other Whites, but to a much lesser degree)

Edit: To answer what is the alternative to juries: Not all countries use juries, in some the decision is up to the judge, and in some, like France, they use a mixed system of judges and jurors on a panel [3]. The French system would be my personal preference, with the classic jury system coming in second, despite my jury-critical post. Like democracy, it's perhaps the least bad system that we have, but we shouldn't be under any illusions about how impartial and perceptive a group of 12 people selected at random is.

[1] https://postcolonialweb.org/singapore/government/leekuanyew/...

[2] https://www.ucl.ac.uk/judicial-institute/sites/judicial-inst... - page 165 (182 by pdf reader numbering), figure 6.4

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury

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mlinhares ◴[] No.44571214[source]
And what is the other option? Just led the judge alone decide?
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1. tzs ◴[] No.44571907[source]
One possibility would be to use juries to just decide facts, then a panel of judges applies the law to those facts.

If there are many factual disputes in a case maybe use multiple juries with each jury only deciding on a subset of the facts, chosen so that no jury sees the entire case. They are less likely to be biased if they don't see the entire case.