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Using Laypeople Compared To Legal Personnel In The Criminal Justice Trial Process

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Report Evaluating the Impact of Using Laypeople as opposed to Legal Personnel in the Criminal Justice Trial Process. Lay people There are many positive impacts of using lay people in criminal trials. One of which being that it reflects the community's standards and values. By including the public’s opinion, the public can have more confidence in the legal system because the decisions made represent societal norms. Whereas with judges, they are where they are needed and not necessarily part of the community. Lay people such as magistrates or jurors know the issues being faced by the community and can therefore have a better judgement on the case. Jurors can provide a different viewpoint, one a judge might not have initially thought of, which …show more content…

Due to their extensive training, they understand legal precedents which leads to more accurate and consistent outcomes in trials. Being consistent with the application of legal principles makes the outcomes of a case more predictable. This is important for maintaining the rule of law and ensures similar cases are treated the same. Lay people such as jurors are likely to not have any experience and therefore may result in making decisions based on their emotions and not legal precedents or legal factors. Legal personnel, especially judges, are trained to remain impartial and not base their decisions on personal beliefs or emotions, but rather on legal facts. It is important to make sure a trial remains fair. Lay people may struggle to do this due to lack of training. A downside to using legal personnel is that they can forget about public perspectives and values. This could lead to a decision that doesn't reflect social norms, which can knock the public's confidence in the legal system. This is why lay people like jurors are important - it encourages public involvement and ensures the legal system stays

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These people become the changing point of the stories. In Twelve Angry Men Juror #8 suggested that they talk about it before just saying that the kid was guilty, when all the other jurors voted guilty without even thinking about their decisions. Even when some of the other jurors got mad and started yelling at him, but he stayed calm and tried to work things out. Also, he convinced Juror #9 to change his vote to not guilty, which then changed slowly everybody else's vote. In Monster, Kathy O'Brien, Steve's lawyer tries her best to defend him even though she didn't even really know if he was innocence.

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Jurors should not know anything about a specific case and not follow public affairs and read the news (Doc F). When a person is selected to be part of a jury, they have to say an oath stating that they will not use their emotions to determine the verdict of a trial. If a juror is caught using their emotions, they will be fined for a crime called perjury. Since there are twelve people in a jury, there is a variation of opinions when the jury decides a verdict. But, a judge is more professional and knows how to only use the evidence provided and be less biased.

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There are many criticisms surrounding, the jury system currently in use in our Australian legal system, these criticisms have recently been brought into the light over the past few years with many cases, such as the Casey Anthony case where a mother was acquitted of murdering her daughter as the jury stated, after less than 11 hours of deliberation, ‘there was not enough evidence’ when the forensic evidence was clearly stacked against her. This lack of competence by the jurors is a criticism that Lord Denning argued about in What Next in the Law? (1982) he debates that the selection of jurors is far too wide, resulting in jurors that are not competent to perform their task. Lord Denning suggested that the jury party should be selected in much the same process as magistrates are, with interviews and references required, although this initiative has several obvious problems, a more complicated selection process would be much more time-consuming and costly to the Australian tax payer; finding sufficient people willing to take part would prove incredibly difficult and a jury that is intelligent and educated can still be biased, and may be more likely to be so if drawn from a narrow social group. For a trial by jury case to be effective, no bias should exist in the jurors judgments, the jurors should understand clearly their role and key legal terms, and the jury system should represent the community as a whole and its standards and views whilst upholding the rights of the accused and society and remain cost and time effective.

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A jury is not trained to decide someone’s fate, which is why a judge, as a trained lawyer, should choose the

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A majority of citizens see jury duty as some sort of punishment, which is made clear by popular television shows and other forms of media, which greatly diminishes the value of the jury system. In cases where the media plays a major role, such as the Casey Anthony case, jurors can be endangered after a verdict is made (Document D, 295). A woman was told that Anthony was found not guilty, and she said that Anthony would not be accepted back into the community and would have to move away. Jurors of the case who came to the verdict would also be in danger of being ostracized by the community for their unfavorable decision; if these citizens had known about the outcry that would follow the verdict, they most likely wouldn’t have served on the jury at all. A total of 5,082 trials were jury trials in one year, which was a small fraction of all cases tried in the same year (Document A, 289).

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But I must mention that the jury are civilians from our community and they don’t have idea about criminal law or just how the law

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In her article, Bit of an Edge, Cleek discusses a variety of angles concerning jury selection, explaining the pros and cons of selecting a jury and hiring a consultant and the implications of jury selection on the American justice system. Cleek is able to provide insight into some key questions that revolve around the use of jury selection by both lawyers and professional jury consultants. The first of these key questions being answered is what traits are desirable in a potential juror. While Cleek doesn’t outright answer this question with a list of characteristics, she does name one key attribute almost every lawyer or consultant looks for in a juror: leadership. Leadership seemed to be the key trait that was always sought out, and from there lawyers or consultants would then look at ways of

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In the cartoon “Jury” by Keith Robinson, many of the jurors aren’t paying attention, which is human nature. “I wonder if the defense attorney is single” (Doc E). In this example, the juror was more focused on getting a date then the actual case. Many people drift off, even the best, most educated people in the world, drift off at times. Although people are saying that a judge would be better at reaching a decision on the case, a judge is also human.

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Of course, it is true that judges are seen as more professional than a jury; there have undoubtedly been times when even a judge may be blinded by his or her own prejudices. As stated by Joe Anderson in Document D, jurors often do not “buy into science fiction” when faced with an obvious case. In the case of the death of Caylee Anthony, the jurors were not bemused by any ungrounded evidence that could have caused Casey Anthony to be found guilty. Certainly in a case of such popularity it is expected that jurors will often have their own preconceived notions about the verdict, but in the end of this case, these jurors were able to put aside their own opinions and only take the hard facts into consideration. Of course, this is the job of a judge as well, but with just one person judging a trial, it is more likely that he or she will give in to his or her own conception of the case.

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The jury may not be experienced enough and can make fatal mistakes. Not only are the jurors biased, they are inexperienced. As shown in cartoon 1, 2, and 3 (Document E), many of the jurors have no experiences with court and base their verdicts on factors other than what the lawyers are giving them. Examples such as the jurors being dogs, verdict based on appearance, and being distracted with other issues during the court trial. The juror is inexperienced and biased, while the judge is experienced with what is going around during a trial, and they have been trained to be able to see both sides of a story and decide on evidence and

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572 Words | 3 Pages

In Twelve Angry Men, Juror 1(Foreman) says, “Anyway this friend of my uncle’s was on a jury once, about ten years ago- a case just like this one..... They let him off. Reasonable doubt. And do y’know, about eight years later they found out that he’d actually done it, anyway.” By allowing different people onto the jury, they have the ability to give assumptions and information about other cases which can sway and harm the verdict.

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Another reason citizens question juries is that they have bias from personal experience or the media. The defendant and the prosecution criticize the jury system because the actual jurors may not understand the situation from any point of view because they come from different lifestyles (Doc E). The American jury system is not a good idea anymore because juries are not experts in law, they have bias, and are not “a jury of peers”. Because jurors are not experts in law, they are subject to be

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Unit 23 D1 – Law The Advantages and Disadvantages of using Lay Magistrates and Juries in the English Courts Lay Magistrates and Juries are found in the Crown and Magistrates Court throughout England and Wales. A Jury is made up of random members of the general public, and is always made up of 12 people. These 12 people sit and listen to the facts and evidence given to them by the barristers.

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But in majority of the cases jurors are older. When the juror is younger they were more likely to find a defendant not guilty compared to the older juror. The evidence that would be compelling to me as a juror is when a small child is involved. There are so many cases now that shows how people are abusing the children and even killing them. While they are in a fit of rage.

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They have to decide important matters, verdicts, without giving reasons about their decision (Hostettler, 2004); they can nullify a verdict even if the evidence is overwhelming (Joyce, 2013). Furthermore, juries are too expensive, prolong the length of the trial (Davies, 2015) and the guilty can walk free, while the innocent is convicted (Joyce, 2013). In addition, jurors should be representative of society, but it is not

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