Oh come on DEMOS, you see things in far too much of a black and white manner.

My tolerance for nuclear power is extremely limited, and I mean extremely. I think you are misrepresenting me. Likewise with my tolerance for John Howard and lawyers.

I’ll debate sedition laws all you want. How about we start with a response from you to this http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/user.asp?id=22800&show=history, on the appropriate thread.

“and a penalty if they get it wrong? why not use electric shock, and make sure they get it right the first time?”

My goodness! How silly is this? I thought your previous post was purely tongue-in-cheek. Surely you don’t seriously think like this!

You can’t just take things to the totally ridiculous end of the spectrum and expect to be taken seriously. All of the subjects that we discuss on this forum are complex, with shades of grey everywhere. Advocating a little bit of something doesn’t mean you have to support a full-on concept.

You haven’t addressed the main point I made in my last post – that jurors needs to be held accountable for making valued judgements, and to be seen to be doing so.

continued

The type of penalty I envision is a small fine, and only for those jurors who really can’t demonstrate that they have followed the case. Surely you can see that accountability is all-important. So it makes no sense at all for there to be no come-back whatsoever on those that demonstrate a completely lack of accountability.

Crikey, this is just the same sort of concept as with our whole legal system, within our jobs and within our families. We need mechanisms to make people live up to the responsibility of the roles that they take on.

“more seriously, the point of jury trials is to keep the result in tune with community expectations”

Yes of course. And the community should be demanding a better standard of accountability to this end.

The concept of jurors making important decisions and then not being open to any scrutiny of why they reached such a decision is fundamentally flawed. Openness and accountability need to prevail.

Your implication that this would somehow bias the outcome away from a properly assessed decision seems completely unfounded. Surely it is the other way round, with a lack of accountability more likely to lead to a bias.

On having sat on a jury, I found it interesting that after listening to both the prosecutor and defense lawyers for 4 days, my fellow jurors were of the opinion that if the police say they are guilty then we should agree. Luckily for one of the two men charged my self and another juror could not agree with the others and argued only one should be found guilty and the other not guilty (in the wrong place at the wrong time). We eventually persuaded the others to agree with our line of thinking, It is a concern of mine that if jurors cant have an open mind or just want to get it over with, then how many have been unfairly convicted because no one in the jury is willing to stand up and fight for their rights to a fair hearing and the prospect of a fair and just verdict.

Although I would say to have your hearing in front of a jury is still our best option to date. As to whether jurors have to give a reason for their verdict I must say that would certainly make them accountable for handing down their decision.

I think they should have to give reasons. I feel the romantic notion of being tried 'by a jury of your peers' to be very old fashioned and out of touch with the rest of the legal system.

By that I mean we have a set of very strict codified laws, and very strict codified system of getting to the 'truth' and then we throw it out to a random group of people who come from god knows where, with who knows what beliefs and a somewhat dubious track history of doing stupid things (like ignoring the judge, doing online or crime scene investigations, falling asleep, or just being dumb as crap).

Of course we also have judges like that too so...

But at least if they have to explain their decisions, it can be later analysed to ensure conformity and fairness is applied in the face of such randomly selected 'legal brains'. Afterall these people are sending innocent people to jail and destroying reputations and families with incorrect decisions and there should be checks in place to prevent this as much as possible imo.