Why are common people selected for jury duty? Why are common people selected to be the jury in the USA? Shouldn't people that know the law to decide criminal's fate? Why pick just some twelve random people to be the jury and decide the outcome of a trial instead of people who have extensive knowledge of the law?
Because it's explicitly a jury of your peers That is, every person is entitled to have their guilt or innocence decided by people &quot;like them&quot; - not kings, lords or, heaven forbid, lawyers. The jury doesn't need to know the law and indeed, in many jurisdictions, lawyers are explicitly disqualified from jury service (hint: if you want to avoid jury service, get a law degree). The role of the jury is to decide the facts - what happened and whether that meets the prosecution's burden of proof. The jury is told what the law is by the judge - that's their job. Most law shows on TV skip over the very important role of the judge's instructions to the jury. These usually go along the lines of (greatly abridged and paraphrased) &quot;If you decide that X, Y &amp; Z are true then you must return a guilty verdict but if any of them are not true you must return not guilty.&quot; A very brief potted history of the jury system is contained in this answer: Why 12 Jurors, why not 11, 10, 9, 1? Now, this is, according to those from common law traditions, the great truth and beauty of the jury system. To those from civil, sharia and other legal traditions: it's just stupid.
The title question is overly-ambitious: it is not guaranteed, and nobody thinks that it is. The law does what is practical to achieve the desired result. Actual failure one way or the other is mostly irrelevant until a clear pattern to the failure is found, then there might be a legal resolution, but it might also require a political resolution. One consideration is whether it is possible for a defendant to receive a fair trial in a certain jurisdiction. Generally, you are tried in the jurisdiction where the offense occurred, sometimes (rarely) the venue can be changed to a more neutral location. This consideration is significant in high-profile cases. For example, the trials of Lee Boyd Malvo and John Allen Muhammad took place relatively far away from the scene of the crime. The trial judge must weigh the arguments for an inconvenient trial location, and in this trial the judge refused a petition for a change of venue. The judge stated that &quot;As far as change of venue, I do not think that that would give the defendant any kind of a fair trial beyond what we are doing here today. I don’t think there’s any place in the state of Minnesota that has not been subjected to extreme amounts of publicity on this case&quot; A second layer of protection is that prospective jurors may be excused. If a juror declares in advance (during voir dire or elsewhere) that the defendant is guilty, they will be excused for cause. The defense (or prosecution) also has some number of peremptory challenges – in this case, the defense has 5 and the prosecution has 3. In this category, a seated juror can be excused for cause (this happened), when a juror admits that some news e.g. about the city's settlement had prejudiced the juror. Also related to juror selection is that juror must swear to follow the law in reaching a decision. The third layer of protection is limiting testimony, for instance if the prosecution were to ask a witness something like &quot;Won't there be major riots if Chauvin isn't convicted?&quot;, the defense would presumably object and prevent such testimony from getting uttered in the first place, or getting officially stricken if it somehow gets out. The fourth layer of protection is that jurors are meticulously instructed as to the logic of decision-making. If you can find a copy, there are here (MN does not make the instructions freely publicly available). Here are the California instructions. Additionally, a judge might attempt to limit what can be said by the media, or might sequester the jury so that they cannot hear any such publicity during the trial (but that's impossible for pre-trial publicity). Another layer is that a mistrial can be declared. However, what goes on in the jury room is in a black box that the legal system cannot generally touch. If a juror was paid off, that could be touched by the legal system, but there is nothing that can be done if it turns out that a juror has a bias in favor of the prosecution, despite the premise of neutrality. Finally, if the facts are so clear, a judge might overturn a conviction on the grounds that a reasonable jury could not reach that conclusion, based on the facts and the law. By &quot;final&quot; I ignore the possibility of an appeal.
First, while Law and Order should not be taken as an accurate depiction of a New York trial, it especially should not be taken as an accurate depiction of an Australian trial. Australian law, while it has some major similarities with US law (both ultimately derive from the law of England), is not US law. With procedural matters (such as "may jurors ask questions of witnesses"), it can potentially differ from court to court. In general, jurors may not simply ask a witness a question. The jury's job is not to investigate and figure out if the defendant was guilty or not; it's to evaluate the cases presented by each side. US (and Australian, as far as I know) courts use what's known as the adversarial model, where the prosecution and the defense both present the best cases they can and a neutral third party decides which case was stronger. In a US criminal trial, the state is expected to justify why someone should be in jail; the jury shouldn't be helping them justify it. This isn't how all jurisdictions around the world work, but it's how the US does. One concern with juror questions is that it has the risk that the juror will not be impartial. Jurors are not supposed to get into arguments with witnesses, or to go after them to try to prove a point. In your case, the juror might be introducing an entirely different line of reasoning from the one either side is presenting, and that's simply not their job. People have raised the concern that a juror thinking up questions might be deciding the case before they hear all the evidence, and might give too much weight to the answers to their own questions (or read a lot into it if a question is denied). There are also rules on what questions may be legally asked; lawyers know these and jurors generally don't, which is why jurors may almost never directly ask a question to a witness. Where they can ask questions, it's virtually always written questions, which the judge reviews, gives to both sides to see if anyone objects, and then reads to the witness in a neutral tone.
No, but... Common law does not apply in countries that follow the legal school of Code Civil, aka civil law legal system, such as Germany or France. Some basic principles are common between them and common law: While there's generally no right to a jury, the innocence part actually stems in both cases from ROMAN law: in dubio pro reo - in the case of doubt, (you have to decide) for the accused. The similar Ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat - Proof lies on him who asserts, not on him who denies - is the source: It was butchered into &quot;innocent until proven guilty&quot;, but the sentiment is the same. Other countries that have no relation to common law are based on Sharia and Fiqh. There is absolutely no relation to Roman law either. However, there is a presumption of innocence, or as one of the largest Scholars of Islamic law Caliph Ali ibn Abi Talib said in the mid-600s: &quot;Avert the prescribed punishment by rejecting doubtful evidence.&quot; However, what is considered doubtful is quite different. On the other hand, presumption of guilt was the foundational principle in other legal systems!
Such an order, like all other orders and decisions, is voted on at a conference of justices. Normally all 9 are present and vote, unless one or more is recused. But if one or more happens to be absent, those present vote. A majority of those present an voting is enough for such an order. Dissents from such orders are quite unusual, but any justice may file one if s/he so elects. Reasons for such orders are not normally provided. The usual standard is that such relief is only granted if A) one party will be irreparably harmed by delay, and B) that party has a reasonable likelihood of prevailing on the merits when the matter is finally decided. Presumably a majority of the Justices did not feel that this standard was met. Beyond that, no one can say.
This is still common practice in most, if not all, of the mountain west states in the United States in rural areas, although, obviously, nobody rides horses from court house to court house these days. I don't know if it is done in rural areas in other states. Typically, general jurisdiction trial court judges in these areas are assigned to a multi-county district, but there are court houses in each county. Judges in the district rotate between county court houses to preside over court cases on a schedule worked out with court administrators.
No - there is no general requirement to be fair to all applicants when selecting someone for a job. It's not even clear how this would work - you would need to define what "fair" means in this context, and there would be many competing definitions. Is it fair to prefer an applicant who has more experience because they received help from their parents with landing their first job? Is it fair to prefer someone with a certain look for an acting job? Is it fair to prefer someone who happens to have a similar personality to the person hiring? So if the employer finds it more convenient to use the same test every year, and if they do not mind that this gives some applicants an advantage, they are free to do that. The only exception is that discrimination based on certain, specific factors (often called "protected characteristics") is usually outlawed. The list depends on jurisdictions, but usually includes things like gender, race and age. However, even in that case discrimination is allowed if the business can demonstrate a genuine need - for example, when looking for an actor, it is allowed to hire based on gender.
The most innocent of your scenarios is "against the rules", so less innocent acts fair worse. The idea behind researching legal theory and precedent (presumably not presidents) is that surely it is good for a juror to know what the law is. But that thinking is wrong. The judge will instruct you as to what the law is, and will also instruct you that "the law" is limited to what he says it is. I will draw on the instructions for an antitrust case, Best Buy v. Toshiba, HannStar. The core instruction is: It is your duty to find the facts from all the evidence in the case. To those facts you will apply the law as I give it to you. The preliminary instructions (the pattern instructions for California civil trials) say the same basic thing: At the end of the trial, I will explain the law that you must follow to reach your verdict. You must follow the law as I explain it to you, even if you do not agree with the law. The judge instructs the jury that: When a party has the burden of proof on any claim or affirmative defense by a preponderance of the evidence, it means you must be persuaded by the evidence that the claim or affirmative defense is more probably true than not true. Your research might find alternative statements of the law out there, which seem entirely plausible. That doesn't matter: you have to set aside whatever ideas (about the law) that you've gotten from anybody besides the judge. In fact, if the judge makes a (serious) mistake and rules against a party in a manner that is contrary to established law, and you know this (it doesn't matter how), you are supposed to apply the law (including rulings during trial as to admissibility) as given to you by the judge. As for a case of a juror knowing that the judge was mistaken (specifically, knowing based on his pre-existing knowledge of statutes and case law – not based on forbidden research during a trial), we can get the "should" from the absolute instruction to follow the judges instructions. Additionally, if you read transcripts of voir dire (not a trivial task), you can observe judges probing attorneys who happen to be in the prospective pool, asking questions to determine whether that person can just do as they are told. But it would be difficult to establish a "hard rule". There never will be an instruction that says "You must follow my orders even if you know for a fact that my orders are wrong" – jury instructions never admit the possibility of judicial error.