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[Steven Champeon <schampeo AT hesketh.com>]

on Thu, Jul 01, 2004 at 11:40:38PM -0400, Tanner Lovelace wrote:
> Alan,
> 
> You've missed the entire point of juries. Juries are not supposed to
> decide what the law is. That's what the judge is there for. As we
> were told when I sat on a jury, the jury is the "judge of the facts"
> and the judge is the "judge of the law". The jury hears what the
> facts are, then the judge tells them what the law says and then they
> decide whether the facts rise to the level of whatever the law says.
> You can't have one without the other without unbalancing everything.

I just served, myself. And I'm gonna have to agree with Tanner here.

Bear in mind, too - and this is where the years of Law and Order reruns
are coming in handy ;) - it's a deeply interdependent process. The judge
decides matters of law, the jury decides matters of fact, and the
prosecutor(s) and the police decide how to try to apply the law, by
determining what to charge criminals /with/. 

If you steal my car, and the prosecutor charges you with manslaughter,
guess what - you'll likely get away with theft, because the jury isn't
there to decide whether you're a bad guy, or whether you're being well
treated in custody, or whether you deserve a medal. They're there, like
it or not, to decide whether, given the facts in the case, you are
guilty _of the crime with which you are charged_.

And if you don't think that it's possible to introduce enough reasonable
doubt into the minds of any sane person to sway their judgement away
from "guilty", you've never been on a jury with a good defense lawyer.
The case I just sat for had a really bad defense lawyer, I thought, and
he still managed to keep us in deliberations for half an hour, as we
went through and dealt with all of the possibilities.

Maybe the case you were talking about just had a really good defense
team and a really bad prosecutor. Don't blame the jury for that.

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