On Fri, Jun 01, 2007 at 05:12:57PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote: > Randomly selected juries avoid the "cabal" problem -- it's transparent > who gets involved, it's not limited to some people, it's not > the same people all the time, and it's a bit easier to deal with > (perceived/claimed/whatever) conflicts of interest. The big problem with juries is that the jurors are *always* newbies to judging. In real life, I was clueless about the first dozen times I sat as a lay judge in the district court. Without having the opportunity to do it again and again and again, nobody can learn to do the thing properly. Of course, we hope that this sort of dispute resolution is needed so rarely that anybody, even if appointed as a regular judge, would have a hard time learning the job :) (As an aside, the other thing I find really abhorrent about the US-style juries is that they are not allowed (nor required) to write up a reasoning. If I have understood it correctly, there is a legal doctrine in the US that entitles the jury to rule contrary to law. This is ... bizarre, but also not relevant to Debian. Sorry about the rant:) -- Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho, Jyväskylä http://antti-juhani.kaijanaho.fi/newblog/
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