UK Politics VI - Will Britain Steir to Karmer Waters?

Evie said:
Not what history of law says. That might have been a later justification, but the original principle is just a continuation of the "if you can find twelve people to say you didn't, then you didn't"
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It might or might not have been the origin of the system in the UK, but such juries also exists elsewhere and certainly have a different reasons to exist, and these reasons might have becomea actually more important than said supposed origins.
 
Evie said:
Jury trial is an antiquated custom (literally descended from the medieval notion that if you could find twelve people, any people, to say you didn't do it then clearly you hadn't done it, because nobody has twelve friends) that put far too much emphasis on a person's ability to look sympathetic to jurors and a lawyer's ability to wow them and far too little on the actual law and evidence. It results in people being found guilty or innocent as much because of theatrics and appearances as because of, you know, actual evidence that they actually did do the thing. To say nothing of the potential (read solid certainty) for sizeable bias and the perpetuation of various class, racial and other prejudices.

The reasons to abolish them given here look pretty questionable, but the idea that juries are a guarantee protecting fair trial is a misbegotten medieval tradition that we would be well rid off.
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Evie said:
Not what history of law says. That might have been a later justification, but the original principle is just a continuation of the "if you can find twelve people to say you didn't, then you didn't"É

Seeing as this was the medieval era (not known for egalitarian views of justice between elites and commoners or for caring much whether peasants think the system is fixed against them) and that the justice system (and magna carta) were originally about enshrining the right of those selfsame elites against the king, not of the commoners against the elites...yeah, I somehow don't think the right to jury trial originate in any great care to making "regular people" trust justice.

As to current situation, a system that create the appearance of legitimacy in the eyes of the uninformed while actively undermining equality before the law is not a system we should be fighting to preserve.
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In the American context the emphasis on jury trials is rooted in an aversion to having cases decided by aristocratic judges who were appointees of the King and accountable to no one in the colonies.

It is not clear to me that a system putting outcomes in the hands of magistrates is clearly superior to a jury trial system.

I actually did a paper in graduate school on outcomes in the immigration court system, which in the US is unusual in that it subjects people to criminal penalties but there is no right whatever to a jury trial. And not having jury trials led (predictably) to outcomes that varied wildly based on the officer assigned to adjudicate each case. There were for example immigration officers who approved virtually every asylum case and those who denied virtually every asylum case, with the course of people's entire lives depending on which immigration officer they were assigned to.

Given that this same system is now the tumor metastasizing into full-on fascism (or, alternately, the foundation on which fascism is being built) I certainly don't agree that jury trials are not worth defending.

As to this specific issue of using austerity as an excuse to limit jury trials, it is complete and utter nonsense. The British government issues the pound and can 'afford' to fund the court system to whatever extent it desires. It is preposterous that the people running the British government do not understand how the British government works. If there is a large backlog of cases the solution is to expand the resources available to the courts so they can process cases faster.
 
It's worth pointing out that, as far as I can tell (it's definitely the case up here, and I gather from a cursory look it is on your side of the border too), immigration courts, though they may be called courts, are part of the executive apparatus. There is a whole push and pull surrounding that entire system in determining how much they are courts (and subject to most of the fundamental principles of justice), and how much they are simply an administrative body under the Executive (and not at all subject to the expectations we'd have of court) - on paper, the case law here says they should be the former, but in practice, the executive can seldom resist treating them at the later. There are whole realms of questions regarding how much of a judicial system they really are, and whether they have all the tools required to do so.

Though, having done my articling in our equivalent of immigration courts, and having consequently read at length what the real judiciary had to say of their decisions as often as not...I cannot disagree with your assessment of them. But I don't think piling more untrained random people would make the system more fair.

(Of course, in the case of the US, the utterly complete political takeover of judicial nominations does throw a further wrench in the discussion. But then again, given the utterly complete tribalization of politics, I'm not sure what else can be done).
 
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Evie said:
Jury trial is an antiquated custom (literally descended from the medieval notion that if you could find twelve people, any people, to say you didn't do it then clearly you hadn't done it,
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Evie said:
Not what history of law says. That might have been a later justification, but the original principle is just a continuation of the "if you can find twelve people to say you didn't, then you didn't"É
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In England the accused does not select the jurors, and has not done so since time immemorial.

So your repeated point is irrelevant now.
 
Whether or not the system has changed (of course it has), that's still where the idea originate from. Yes, in England. Amazingly, being Canadian, and our jury and criminal system being inherited from yours, that does happen to be the system whose history I studied.
 
I live in the 21st century and I am not really interested in the archaic uses of
words, and in the context of the debate that seems very much a red herring.

In any case the word juror appears to be derived from Latin, and I dare
say that the Romans did things quite differently when they ruled Britain.

There is a very material difference in finding 12 so called friends who can be bribed,
persuaded or threatened into denying one committed a crime, and having a neutral
jury appointed by a process that is independent of defendant and prosecutor.

Voting is at the heart of democracy, and doing away with citizen juries erodes that.
 
It's not "archaic use of words", it's "the actual origin of the system", as in "where people originally got the idea that any twelve people could determine innocence or guilt."

And no, it's not a roman invention. Purely English. Nor is it a latin word. It's Anglo-Norman (where it originally meant "A person who swears an oath", ie, someone who swears you didn't do it), which is why it resembles latin.
 
Evie said:
And no, it's not a roman invention. Purely English. The name is latin because latin was the scholarly language of the middle ages.
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The Romans had jury trials albeit not quite the same.
 
"Not quite" is I would say a bit of an understatement, but in any event, there's no historical link from the Roman practice to the English one - that one arise purely from a formalization of pre-existing (germanic) customs in England that grew naturally. The term, likewise, arise with the English institution, not in Rome, and does not actually reflect any latin use.

IN any event, the history aside, the idea that guilt and innocence should be governed by democracy, as expressed in Edward's last post, is one that's flabergasting to me. Determinations of truth should not be

Anyway, I'm going to leave it at this point. I stand by what I said ; but the jury system is too much of a quasi-sacred institution in Anglo-American perceptions of law, supported by the weight of a millenial custom, and my outlook too far removed from that world - we have the institution, but, at least on the French side, we don't have the Millenia of tradition).
 
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It substantiates my previous point that the word juror is derived from the Latin.

The Anglo-Saxons, derived from the Germans, were strong on trial by ordeal or by combat.

But the roman catholic with its church law moved away from those preferring to
use lay juries and inquisitorial judges, albeit it backslided during the inquisition.

The former solution was preferred in England, the latter solution on the continent.

When it comes to flying placards with support Palestine Action or Stop the Boats,
these are not purely legal matters of innocent or guilty to be decided by lawyers but
political matters and in a democracy that is best decided by votes as by a jury.
 
Evie said:
IN any event, the history aside, the idea that guilt and innocence should be governed by democracy, as expressed in Edward's last post, is one that's flabergasting to me. Determinations of truth should not be
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In the absence of omniscience it has to come down to an opinion. Is the opinion of 12 randomly-selected peers less valid than the opinion of one judge? Do we have complete and utter faith in the infalibility and lack of bias of the criminal justice system now? I'm sure it's not a perfect system, but I can't believe just getting rid of juries is the way to improve it.
 
EnglishEdward said:
It substantiates my previous point that the word juror is derived from the Latin.

The Anglo-Saxons, derived from the Germans, were strong on trial by ordeal or by combat.

But the roman catholic with its church law moved away from those preferring to
use lay juries and inquisitorial judges, albeit it backslided during the inquisition.

The former solution was preferred in England, the latter solution on the continent.

When it comes to flying placards with support Palestine Action or Stop the Boats,
these are not purely legal matters of innocent or guilty to be decided by lawyers but
political matters and in a democracy that is best decided by votes as by a jury.
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Ugh, you're just so precise in your vagueness, and absolutely pigheaded in never retreating. The derivation may be correct, and you're hinting at meaning by vaguely gesturing at roman-ness, RC church, latin, contrast of nordic+germanic vs. roman, etc

But you're stopping short of ever actually saying anything.
 
I'm less interested in the institution than in there being another front in which the strategy of starvation followed by destructive "reform" is being applied. Was it a direct target? Or is it just worse at negotiating with the treasury over successive governments and deprioritised.

As it is, its almost "too late" now. If we cared about having a functional judicial system, we should have been kicking up a fuss about it 10 years ago. (As with so many things).
 
I doubt that the government is coherent enough to have a strategy.

I rather think that the Criminal Justice Service is primarily an unintended victim of the practice of the DWP
paying ever more of the UK GDP in landlord's benefit and of pursuing fantasies such as HSII etc etc.

Having said that juries had a habit of acquitting the sit down in the road and block the traffic climate protesters.

And the authoritarian approach to obstacles is to abolish the obstacles.

By the way, I do wonder if our retired elderly judge was promised political support in obtaining treasury
funding if his report included abolishing jurors. If he was, he was very foolish as government might
just cut jury trials, and renege on any unwritten promises of more money.

I also think that the Treasury does not like many parts of the Criminal Justice Service because it perceives that
it is just paying the inflated salaries of lawyers. There is I suspect a money people via legal people cultural clash.
 
To be pointedly specific: english juror (a member of a jury) comes from anglo-norman/old french juror or jureor( one who takes an oath), the latin equivalent of which would be jurator/iurator (one who takes an oath).

A quick look (trial by combat is not much considered in law school) suggests that trial by combat is entirely absent from old english texts, and there is no trace of even one actual trial by combat in England until several years after the conquest. This is in stark contrast to continental Europe, where trial by combat appears 100 to 200 years earlier. The conclusion appear fairly clear.

It's certainly true that the Church (among many others) would have favored jury trial (because people not killing each other over who is right is surprisingly seen as a good thing by a lot of people), but it certainly appears they were formalizing anglo-saxon traditions at the expanse of continental ones, not the other way around.
 
Been reading

hls.harvard.edu

The veiled history of the English jury trial - Harvard Law School

English medieval law expert Elizabeth Papp Kamali explores the roots of modern criminal procedure through papal precedent and the story of Saint Veronica.
hls.harvard.edu hls.harvard.edu

but it is the 21st century I am concerned about rather than a digression to the distant past.

And no real justification was provided by the judge for further restricting jury trials.
 
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