"Alexis De Tocqueville got it right when he noted 150 years ago that America is a country where virtually every issue--the intimate, mundane, significant, complicated, and terrible--eventually makes its way into court. Once there, it is a strange system we have for resolving these problems. A collection of ordinary citizens, who appear to share very little in common, evaluate conflicting versions of historical events as presented by professionally trained, partisan adversaries in the stylized and artificial manner that is the jury trial. Described this way, it is not difficult to see why so many people have come to question the effectiveness of the way we try cases". This is the first paragraph from the website. I think that it really sums up why some people think the jury system doesn't work.
I found a website that lists the seven reasons why the jury system works. The article on the website was posed by G. Christopher Ritter. Ritter is a member of the case manager at the Focal Point. The Focal Point is a company that develops trial strategies and courtroom presentations for the purpose of making cases easier for judges and jurors to understand. Ritter states that the jury system works for seven reasons and lawyers who understand this will do better in court than those who don't. Ritter's seven reasons are:
1) The nature of all disputes
2) We have more in common with the jurors than we think
3) Attorney's use stories to educate jurors
4) At trail those stories are repeated three times
5) It requires the essential characters (people who witnessed the crime)
6) Layers can talk directly to the jurors
7) Jurors bring "collective intuition" to the jury process
This article is only one man's reasons for why the jury system work. It gives you some good reasons why the jury system does work and from there you can make your own decision about it. I found that this article gave me a new way to look at the jury system and made me think of other reasons why the jury system works and why it doens't work. To read more on the seven reasons you will need to go to the website, which is:
http://www.articlesbase.com/law-articles/why-the-jury-system-works-642932.html
When reading through this post and the artilce I find it very interesting. Personally when thinking about why the jury systems works I dont automatically go to the resons that Ritter outlines. A while back in my ethics and business class I did a presentation on complience and authority. Within this presentation I looked at Milgrams study of obediance, The stanford Prison study, and a couple of other smaller studies relating to the topic. One of those studies talked about compliences in a group. When people were asked to discuss an issue and one of the guidelines was that in the end everyone had to agree on the outcome researchers found that if one person seemed to be the odd man out they would give in and "conform" to the decision others made. I am not using this study as a way to defend the arugement that jury systems do not work but rather to evoke a thought to the process of thinking through the reasoning of why they work. Without having a lot of background in how the jury system works, and never haveing been on a jury I assume there is a well structured way in which the outcome of these trials is anaylized. If the complience study I previously discusses is well document by other research I am sure the process the jury undergoes does not fall under the complience characteristics outlined in that study. this simply makes me curious on the details of how the process is carried out and the psychological reasearch (which im sure there is) on the effectiveness of the jury.