Murthy's Innovative Paradigms for the Jury Systems in USA and the World
KRS Murthy
Historical Anthropological Introduction
We are all familiar with the jury system of US legal system, at least at a conceptual level. Other countries of the world also still practice the jury system, even though the jury system and its basic paradigm is probably as old as the human history.
Even in the animal world, in the most basic form, if any one member is deviant from the norms of the herd or flock which is the community, other adult animals intervene to discourage the deviant animal member, and sometimes deter the deviant behavior as a group effort, sometimes even punishing if the deviant animal does not conform or heed to the benefit of the community, after initial discouragement and warning. This is an attestation to a harmonious community which is called a herd or a flock in the animal kingdom. In the case of an intruder to the herd from outside the herd, the whole herd participates in defending the herd against the intruder and to regain the peace of the herd.
The Humans and History of Jury System
Early humans, aborigines, and modern humans have steadily reformed this innate group effort to thwart any disturbance from a deviant member of the group and also the intruders from another group. In the last few millennia and especially the last few centuries, gradual development of leadership echelon of the human tribes or community have been developed, the senior males, and even the senior males forming a close alliance making up of the echelon, with a structured approach to dealing with deviant behaviors and activities in a group effort. More formalized communications developed in this leadership echelon in the administration and ensuring of constructive communications in formalized procedures, which over time given rise to the jury system. From vagabond human groups slowly into settled and civilized societies mostly close to natural resources, especially water and food resources, the humans have developed improved formalized jury systems, even though the membership limited to males, resources and assets rich and physically dominant males, rarely the females, The privilege of being a member of the jury was also based on seniority in age, as some cultures and civilized communities with respect to the wisdom of life experience of the older males, still not the privilege of the older females in the male dominant societies.
Even in USA, and most western countries considered as advanced, the jury system was reserved for the privileged males even in the recent centuries, excluding the working class, excluding all women of all classes, with the definition of ownership of assets and wealth as the selection criteria. Only these privileged wealthy men has the right to vote anyway, with all others left to be in the work class. This was unfortunately true in other countries and continents, of all races and cultures also. In countries like China, Japan, Korea, India and others in Asia, the practice of class and caste has existed, dividing the members of the societies into ruling and the “noble” class with privileges, other working class with only work all their life. Africa was no different, before and after the colonization by the European countries. While privileged part of the different tribes in Africa maintained all administrative control including the legal and policing aspects. After colonization by the Europeans, and even the Arabs, all privileges were striped for the native Africans, with only the whites and Arabs with all privileges.
Is it a right, privilege and a mandatory duty to be in the jury process?
Coming to the recent times, which took various agitations and struggles, all citizens in USA are bestowed with the privilege and rights of being on the jury in the court proceedings, which is called the “jury of the peers”. It is ironical that the other side of the privilege or right to be in jury of peers is the “duty” more than right. This that the “duty” is mandated, by the act of summons, which in practice means “you shall attend and participate in the jury system” on specified dates, with limited options for excuses. The citizen could be busy at work with deadlines, running a business requiring the that the business can run smoothly only when the citizen in running it, or any other reason of financial or work forbidding upkeep by loosing days sitting in various stages of selection, and through the full trial as need by the court. It is mandate from the court. It is strange transition of societal status of either privileged or not privileged to duty and mandate, with mandated dates not in control of the citizen, but arbitrarily decided by a lottery, random, but once selected in that random process turns into a summons and a mandate, exclusive of any genuine reasons of the citizen.
The Jury Selection Process: You are Summoned to be a Jury
The crux of this summons and mandate is that, given a chance, no citizen is interested to be summoned and mandated, and also participating in the jury process, with no limit to the number days required to be away from professional, business or family responsibilities and obligations, practically for pennies per hour, far less than the minimum wage. The jury selection process is ridden with numerous loopholes, that most of the citizens, who get from simply waiting in the courtroom or the court building waiting in crowded waiting rooms, to the jury selection bench, use various tactics to be “excused” by the presiding judge, which excuse only means that the defending and the prosecuting attorneys or the judge have come to a conclusion that the “excused citizen” is not suitable with a special context of “bias” of the citizen that is not in the best interest of either attorney or the judge. It would be very interesting for anyone to see the drama of the citizens on the jury selection bench only to make statements and responses to a series of questions from the judge and also the attorneys on both sides of the case to “happily” get branded as “biased” and not suitable to be jury, only to be excused. Once excused, the citizen gets to leave the court and let off the hook.
Are you really a “Peer” in the “Jury of the Peers”?
If you are summoned, you are considered a “peer” in the community, only by the trivial nature and qualifications that you are a citizen, and one among many citizens in the city or county. The peer concept and its definition might have been meaningful during the times people lived in villages or small close knit communities, when you practically knew the names and family of each other for many years, the number of peers were only in hundreds or thousands, surely not in hundreds of thousands and millions.
We live in cities, big and small, not even knowing our next door neighbors, or others in the same apartment complex. We are all strangers and not peers. We are not peers in the sense of individual and family backgrounds, education, language, culture, race, religion, work and especially intellectually. In small and big cities, townships and counties, intellectually, financially, emotionally and in all aspects of the personality, we statistically are far apart from each other than to be considered peers. The current jury system to be renamed as “Jury of Total Strangers”. The jury selection may take many court sessions and days, and sometimes more than a week.
After Selection as a Jury
Once the jury selection is over, the selected jury listen to the court proceedings to include the legal statements and arguments, the statements and directions of the presiding judge, and all aspects of the case. This may take many court sessions, days, weeks and months depending on the case.
After hearing the whole proceedings, the jury deliberations will start that may take many sessions or days, and sometimes a week or more, depending on the complexity of the case. During the jury deliberations and in the process of jury verdict, all members of the jury are considered equal and equally logical. The actuality would be far from such equality in any one or more of the dimensions of intellectual caliber, educational backgrounds and accomplishments, logical prowess, various implicit or explicit biases, composure and tolerance for arguments and difference of opinions, emotional profile and tolerances, and most of the times oral and written competences, and in a multicultural and multilingual society with immigrants from many countries of the world not able to speak, write and comprehend English ably.
All Chinese immigrants, Koreans, Japanese and other Asian immigrants, with the clear exception of few English educated countries like from the Indian subcontinent, even after their higher education in USA with master and doctoral degrees speak and write with very little sense of grammar and parts of speech, and surely very inferior in legal English language. It is the same pathetic situation for immigrants from middle east, Mexico, South America and most parts of Africa. Their English vocabulary is far inferior to some of us privileged with high caliber oral and written English. We could also rename the “Jury of the Peers” as the “Jury of Unequal Brains”.
This problem extends to American born citizens also. In addition to the on par English oral and written abilities, logical thinking is not bestowed on all human beings, as all humans are not born equal, not educated equal, not intellectually equal, not equal in emotional intelligence. Common citizens are commoners, and surely not knowledgeable in law, legal proceedings and corpus of legal and logical knowledge. The legal discipline is very specialized, requiring many years of university education, specially in the field of law. Even those who are attorneys by profession with many years of education, training, internship and professional practice, including those in legal academia and judges specialize in one area of law.
Murthy's Novel Paradigm in Jury System and Methods
The current jury system is ridden with numerous loopholes, as explained in previous paragraphs. I conclude that the Jury system is not suitable to be continued, especially in the 21st century. I propose that we develop a computer based artificial intelligence tools and techniques, with additional machine learning or deep learning schema. If we have autonomous cars, autonomous airborne systems like drones, UAVs (Unmanned Areal Vehicles), airplanes, air force and other military jet speed airplanes, rockets, satellites, moon and mars landing spacecraft, and spacecraft journeying to far away planets even destined to outside our solar systems, AI and expert system capable jury system could be trained using machine learning to takeover as the “Jury of the 21st Century”.
The courts in many of its functions, including all legal trials, should embrace the computing, AI and expert systems paradigm. Please contact me to discuss if you are interested at:
KRS Murthy
or if are from outside USA on Skype ID: DrKRSMurthy
