Yeah, I have no opinion on the verdict itself. Didn't read the evidence and am not going to because I don't care enough.
There are two levels to this:
The general idea that law is something every Joe understands and is capable of delivering justice is just stupid. You don't grab random people on the streets to form a medical consilium to decide what to do about your cancer and you should not do the same with law. Sure, some cases can be "easy", such as murders, admittedly. The subject matter is something a layman is familiar with (dude is dead, has a bullet in the head), there isn't much legal work to do and it's all about evidence which usually comes from the forensics people anyway and a professional judge is not required and not likely anyway to have any advantage in these fields over a lay person. But that is not an argument for lay judges. They just don't lose on this one. Then there is for example white collar crime where you actually need to know the fairly complicated law - corporate, obligations, trusts etc and the judge has to hand-walk the jury to the decision anyway explaining to them what means what and what constitutes what. Then there are civil cases where having a jury is just completely ****ed up and totally unnecessary.
Second, a professional judge is less likely to be impressed by, well, emotions, sympathies and antipathies towards the parties.
Regarding corruption, it's not true that bribing six, twelve or however much people than bribing one. Well, sure it is, but a) you don't need to bribe (or again, even **** with their head with your parlor rhetorics tricks and appeals to emotions) all of them, you just need one or sometimes two to get a hung jury, which obviously is not as good as acquittal, but it can be worked with. And b) no one says the only alternative is a single professional judge. It is not that novel an idea to have a panel of three or five professional judges. Or at least a combination of professional judges and lay persons.
Combine with the equally as outdated US tort law and cue in the ridiculous decisions where a guy falls into a clearly visible pit or microwaves his kid or whatever and is awarded a bazzilion dollars in damages because the sign/manual wasn't specific about it and the general lawsuit culture you have over there when even clearly bizzare cases get settled out of court for absurd money because it's better than risking a random emotional decision from the jury.
There would be no other reason to bring that up.
The reason to bring it up was there would be less (grounds for) drama and accusations of racism or reverse racism etc if the decision was made by professionals and not by random Missouri rednecks. The system as it is now is just asking for it. Then I sort of drifted away, hehe.
Banned
