WANT PEOPLE to question your morality, mock your intelligence, and revile you generally? Get on a jury. Certainly, you could go on 'Temptation Island' and receive those perks while in a more pleasant atmosphere than that of the average courtroom. Unlike the FOX network, however, the government doesn't care about your appearance or consensual sexual proclivities (except in Texas). So you have a much better shot at successfully joining a jury than hanging out with Tom and Mandy. Moreover, through the University's exalted system of student self-governance, you can be a jury member without even having to skip a class. Maintaining a system of justice that is in touch with the average member of the community necessitates the ease with which one can join a jury.
Of course, most people don't enjoy being objects of popular scorn. They don't like having newspapers call them misguided, comedians call them stupid, and people on the street call them unprintable names. Yet that is exactly what happens to jurors who decide cases differently than the general public thinks they should have. The amount of ridicule jurors from O.J. Simpson's criminal trial have endured would be enough to send a person into therapy.
Alongside this emotional abuse is a growing trend of disregard for juries by administrators in the legal system itself. Lawyers ask for jury trials less often than they formerly did. Even when a case does go to a jury, judges are increasingly likely to overturn the verdict, especially in civil trials when the jury gives a large award to the plaintiff. Forty-one states limit the types of cases juries can hear ("Juries Find Their Central Role in Courts Fading," New York Times, March 2).
One can see a parallel tendency at the University in the Honor Committee's proposal to eliminate the option of a jury panel consisting entirely of randomly-selected students. Had the referendum passed, all juries would be composed either partially or exclusively of Committee members.
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Genuine reasons underlie these changes. They do not arise from power-hungry judges and Committee members. The problems these people have with juries seem essentially to boil down to a single issue: Jurors don't trust "The Man," consisting of powerful institutions and the representatives thereof.
In criminal trials such as Simpson's, jurors look at incontrovertible evidence and deem it tainted by a racist police force, setting apparently guilty defendants free. In civil trials, jurors' lack of sympathy for "big business" leads them to hold corporations responsible for injuries to the little people and to penalize excessively with millions of dollars in punitive damages. Here on Grounds, Committee members and The Cavalier Daily charge random student jurors with returning verdicts inconsistent with the facts because of sympathy for defendants and dislike of the single sanction. These leaders of the University community say juries thereby alienate student and faculty initiators.
Certainly in most fields, the average person does not have the kind of control that he does in law. The physicists at NASA determine how to send up the shuttle without asking the people who wash the spacesuits. CEOs of companies seldom survey their secretaries on whether to split stock. Doctors choose the best course of treatment regardless of the janitor's opinion. In jury trials, however, the accumulated experience and education of lawyers and judges must bow to the decision of twelve people, most of whom know very little about the law. As in the honor system, experts administer, but do not run, the United States' justice system.
With all their prejudices and ignorance, Americans are nonetheless generally fair-minded and unwilling to allow injustice to occur. They bring to the decisions of whether a peer is guilty or a consumer wronged a perspective that the experts have lost - that of the average person.
The solution to poor jury verdicts is education, not elitism. If American citizens are indeed doing a poor job of being just, then they have not been sufficiently educated.
Use of the random jury is a gesture of faith in one's community. By refusing to eliminate the option of a jury composed entirely of random peers, University students decided to maintain the importance of the average student's opinion. So go read up on the Committee Bylaws - there could be a pop quiz.
(Pallavi Guniganti's column appears Thursdays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at pguniganti@cavalierdaily.com.)
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