wedrifid comments on Rationality & Criminal Law: Some Questions - Less Wrong
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Ceteris paribus, I would think that the lower gullibility of judges would be entirely overwhelmed by the effects of increased corruption. Take the corrupt judges in Pennsylvania that were all over the news last year, for example. The difference in accuracy between a jury and a judge pales in comparison to this sort of thing; that's fine if corruption is proportionally more rare than that accuracy gap, which is probably true if most cases of corruption are uncovered.
But if you look at the story of those Pennsylvanian judges, they did a miserably bad job of covering their own tracks, and it still took four years for anyone to notice. If we're only catching the incompetent corrupt judges, then either only incompetent judges are corrupt, or we don't have an accurate picture of how much corruption there actually is.
It's oft-repeated but nevertheless true: power corrupts. Because jurors serve infrequently, for one case at a time, and have little individual power, it's much, much harder to buy off or otherwise influence a jury. I think that if we want to improve our justice system, we'd be best served by applying closer scrutiny to positions that act as bottlenecks of authority - judges, prosecutors, and anyone involved in jury selection.
Granted, that's all predicated on maintaining a justice system that looks approximately like our current one.
Totally true, and it's also unfortunate that this is just the kind of scrutiny that is hard to get in place. Apparently those with authority don't like to implement systems that scrutinize authority. Even those without authority don't like to scrutinize those with authority. Because those with authority don't like people that scrutinize them!
Also note that the power of juries has become more and more limited, by way of discouraging knowledge of jury nullification, and by not letting the jury know what punishment a guilty verdict will lead to.