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Trial by jury, as practiced in the U.S., is fundamentally flawed in at least four major ways:
When I reported for jury duty, we were told that we were not allowed to:
Now, in any other area of life, when you have to make an important decision, and all the information you have has been given to you by extremely biased parties, you would think it would be foolish not to either try to look up background information yourself, nor to look for a third party who can fill you in on the basics. If you don't do either of these things, it's difficult to identify when you are in a situation where one of the biased parties is telling something which is not obviously (to you) false but which 99% of the experts on the issue disagree with; all you'll see is that each side has an expert witness. Furthermore, it will be easy for you to misinterpret anything that you are told which is technically correct but phrased in a purposefully misleading way.
I am especially conscious of this because of my job as a science researcher (I am currently a graduate student). I would think that another scientist would be basically derelict in their duty if they took a position on an issue that they are supposed to understand well without doing any of (1), (2), or (3) above, after only being exposed to pre-selected one-sided arguments from biased sources (yes, journal papers are usually one-sided arguments from biased sources, and yes, I often only read journal articles for subjects in my field but not at the heart of my own work; but for subjects that I specialize in, I also look up background information myself, talk to other experts, and even collect my new data. Even if the background information that i find is only other journal articles, I feel there is less bias because I have sampled the space of available journal articles myself rather than being fed a pre-decided selection of articles).
So, in this respect, the U.S. jury system is so bad that it is as if it was designed to render wrong (random) decisions.
Another problem with evidence rules is that they circumscribe the function of jurors. I used to believe that the purpose of jurors included serving as a check against the government, and a check of "common sense" against the otherwise mechanistic legal process. However, evidence rules can prevent jurors from knowing enough information to serve either of these functions. Example:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9906E5D61E38F936A35751C0A9659C8B63
One argument in favor of the evidence rules is that the lawyers on each side want to be aware of all of the information that you hear, so they can present counterarguments to anything they disagree with. However, this could be dealt with by "supervised" information gathering; i.e., you could look stuff on in books or on the internet, but a log of which book pages and websites you accessed would be given to the court; you could call people and ask about the case, but the conversations would be recorded and given to the court.
(aside: given the current evidence rules, what should you do if you are a juror? If you believe in "innocent until proven guilty", then if you think someone is otherwise guilty, you must consider the hypothesis that perhaps evidence is being witheld that would change your mind, and possibly declare them innocent on that basis alone. However, if everyone did that, almost no one would ever be convicted; in addition, doing this would be a receipe for deadlocked juries. So I'm not sure what to do.).
The U.S. jury selection process excludes anyone who has expertise in the issues relevant to the case. For example, if the case involves a particular type of business, anyone with knowledge about that type of business is excluded. Clearly, this means that the people least qualified to juror the case are the people who are specifically selected. This can lead to situations where jurors misunderstand basic facts about the issues being discussed, causing gross miscarriges of justice.
When I was called for jury duty, there were more than (approximately) 50 people called into court the first day. These people had to arrive at 7:45am and stay at least past lunch. Most of them would not be selected and would go home, but apparently, in addition to the 12 jurors, there were going to be a number of backup jurors. All of the backup jurors were required to attend the court every day just like the real jurors, just in case.
So, a jury trial costs a lot of person-hours; much more than just 12 x the length of the trial.
This cost must be weighed against the benefit.
As detailed in the section "evidence rules", I used to believe that the purpose of jurors included serving as a check against the government, and a check of "common sense" against the otherwise mechanistic legal process. However, I was incorrect.
A friend explained to me that the real purpose of jurors is to serve as a check against corruption of the judge handling the case. Apparently the idea is that anything which is clearly an objective question that has a clear right or wrong answer is called a "question of law" and left up the the judge. Anything else is called a "question of fact" and left up to the jury. So, the judge is supposed to basically be an automaton -- any decision made by the judge is a decision that no reasonable third party could disagree with (in theory). In this case, the judge (in theory) has no opportunity for corrupt decision-making because if they decide a question of law the wrong way, it is obvious to everyone that they made a mistake (and hence that decision can be reversed and the judge can be punished). The function of the jury is to act like a subroutine that the judge can invoke to tell her the answers to "questions of fact" (i.e. subjective questions).
So, the benefit of the jury system is the reduced amount of judicial corruption in this country, as compared to similar countries which have panels of judges rather than juries (including most of Europe, I believe, excepting common law countries such as Britain and Ireland). I don't know if America has less judicial corruption than these countries but if so, I bet that the difference is small -- not worth the time cost of jury duty.
I have a number of complaints with compulsory jury service in the United States.
First, in general, I don't believe it is necessary. If jury duty were voluntary, then it is true that when you go to court, you would lose the ability to be tried by a representative sample of the citizenry. However, you would get a representative sample of those who care enough about trials to be on juries. Think about it -- should it really be your right to find out what a random sample of voters think about your situation? Or should it only be your right to find out what people who choose to tell you think? People who care more would probably make better jurors anyhow.
Second, if jury service were voluntary, this would force courts to actually make jury service convenient to jurors. As far as I can tell, currently the system is set up to optimize the convenience of the court. For example, in my recent federal jury service, there were a number of things that were annoying to the jurors which could be fixed if the system thought that it was important to serve the needs of the jurors:
Note: if jury service is made voluntary, it is important that it be made so very openly, and be made "opt-in" rather than "opt-out". If it were "secretly" possible to opt-out of the process but this was not publicized or obvious, you would have a selection bias in which more intelligent people or people who enjoy their normal job more would realize that it is possible to opt-out, and others would more often end up being on juries.
Another note: because currently jurors are generally drawn from voter registration rolls, compulsory jury service could serve a function as a poll tax; i.e. it could serve to deter people who don't care about the issues very much from voting. However, I am of the opinion that it does not function that way, because people are in general not aware of how much their chance of being selected for a jury is related to whether or not they register to vote.
Another note: there was a survey posted in the jury waiting room that claimed that about 40% of people in the U.S. actually liked being jurors. So, there would still be enough jurors if it were voluntary -- assuming of course that the pay rate was raised to reasonable levels, which it should be in any case.
http://www.dcd.uscourts.gov/juryhandbook.html
In summary, the evidence rules and the jury selection process greatly reduce the chance that the jury will make the right decision. Due to the evidence rules, juries do not and cannot, as sometimes thought, serve as an effective check on the government, or as a provider of "common sense" to the legal process. The positive impact of jury trials seems to be only an insignificant reduction in corruption, whereas the negative impact is a large amount of time wasted.
In addition, the compulsory nature of jury service is unnecessary and the "low price" of jurors encourages our legal system to use procedures that unnecessarily waste large amounts of the jurors' time.
