The advantage of judges over juries is that we could teach judges to be rationalists as part of their job.
I still think you are missing a primary reason for having a jury system. The role of the judge in a jury system is to be an expert on the law and to explain to juries how it applies to the current case, to ensure the trial is conducted under the rules of the system and to pass sentencing.
The decision of guilt or innocence is delegated to the jury in an attempt to avoid conflicts of interest. Because of the requirement for the judge to be an expert on the law it must be a long term position and so the judge would be an obvious target for bribery or intimidation and will be prone to conflicts of interest when deciding verdicts where the state's interests are opposed to a private citizen's. Historically jury nullification was seen as an important check on unreasonable or unpopular laws.
Adversarial systems have similar advantages in terms of reducing the potential for conflicts of interest to unduly influence the outcome of a trial. The alternative of an inquisitorial system again runs the risk of biasing the court in favour of the state or establishment and against the private citizen.
The history of common law systems reveals an ongoing process attempting to balance the rights and interests of the state, private citizens, the defendant and the prosecution in a world where bias and conflict of interest are recognized to exist. The results are not perfect but understanding why such systems developed as they did is an essential prerequisite to any consideration of possible improvements.
I'm quite familiar with these arguments. I'm not sure why you'd suppose I wasn't.
The decision of guilt or innocence is delegated to the jury in an attempt to avoid conflicts of interest. Because of the requirement for the judge to be an expert on the law it must be a long term position and so the judge would be an obvious target for bribery or intimidation and will be prone to conflicts of interest when deciding verdicts where the state's interests are opposed to a private citizen's.
First, my claim is that determining matters of fact also requires a ki...
In 2004, The United States government executed Cameron Todd Willingham via lethal injection for the crime of murdering his young children by setting fire to his house.
In 2009, David Grann wrote an extended examination of the evidence in the Willingham case for The New Yorker, which has called into question Willingham's guilt. One of the prosecutors in the Willingham case, John Jackson, wrote a response summarizing the evidence from his current perspective. I am not summarizing the evidence here so as to not give the impression of selectively choosing the evidence.
A prior probability estimate for Willingham's guilt (certainly not a close to optimal prior probability) is the probability that a fire resulting in the fatalities of children was intentionally set. The US Fire Administration puts this probability at 13%. The prior probability could be made more accurate by breaking down that 13% of intentionally set fires into different demographic sets, or looking at correlations with other things such as life insurance data.
My question for Less Wrong: Just how innocent is Cameron Todd Willingham? Intuitively, it seems to me that the evidence for Willingham's innocence is of higher magnitude than the evidence for Amanda Knox's innocence. But the prior probability of Willingham being guilty given his children died in a fire in his home is higher than the probability that Amanda Knox committed murder given that a murder occurred in Knox's house.
Challenge question: What does an idealized form of Bayesian Justice look like? I suspect as a start that it would result in a smaller percentage of defendants being found guilty at trial. This article has some examples of the failures to apply Bayesian statistics in existing justice systems.