12 Angry Men

Checked the index thread and saw that there wasn't a topic for this, so here goes.

In criminology today we were discussing whether or not the Jury was a relevant aspect to today's criminal justice system. At first, having done jury duty and enjoyed it, I thought yes, of course it is. But as the arguments flew back and forth I began to realise that there are many flaws in the system that may make it inadequate in today's societies. It is no longer (with communities being multicultural) representative of the community as a whole (if it ever was), cases are becoming more complex, with DNA evidence and technological crime being more prevalent, juries increase the time taken to run trials because everything has to be explained and so on. Is the Inquisitorial system where it is designed to discover the truth and conducts trials by judge alone a better way to run a legal system, than the adversary model, designed to produce a fair trial, currently used in countries such as the USA, Australia and Britain?

So, is the jury an archaic system which needs to be abolished, or is it something that should be maintained, at least in some form?

 

I believe FID made a thread about this when he was forced into jury duty a few weeks ago.