jmmcd comments on Rationality & Criminal Law: Some Questions - Less Wrong

14 Post author: simplicio 20 June 2010 07:42AM

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Comment author: WrongBot 22 June 2010 03:22:53AM 5 points [-]

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.

Comment author: jmmcd 24 June 2010 06:25:59PM *  2 points [-]

it's much, much harder to buy off or otherwise influence a jury

But jurors are subject to intimidation. I'm not sure of the situation in the rest of the world, but in Ireland this is currently a significant problem for some (mostly gang- and drug-related) trials.

</minor factual nitpick>

EDIT: in designing an ideal system maybe we can assume that good legislation and procedures make this problem go away.