Sometime today, I am likely to be locked in a small room with 11 other people and denied access to the internet. Normal service should hopefully resume tuesday evening.
There are various things I'd like to comment on - the Blackball vigilantes, the Listener piece on class in New Zealand, the police-rape investigation's descent into secrecy - but it'll have to wait.
Go with whatever Henry Fonda says.
ReplyDeletei bet this is all down to a couple of stupid people who do not grasp the simple concept of innocent until proven guilty. That was the clincher for the jury i sat on - worryingly the woman who stuck to her guns for the longest (that he hadn't proven he was innocent) was on her fourth jury...
ReplyDeleteWhich is why juries are dodgy.
ReplyDeleteLets go continental and just use a pannel of investigative judges (or lawyers if you want to save money).
It would be good to be sure the people making the decisions understood the system
The right to trial by one's peers is made problematic by the propensity of one's peers to be dumbasses? The question is, are judges necessarily any better?
ReplyDeletei recall a disturbing Legal Ethics lecture when one of my fellow students stated very boldly that judges should never be questioned because they are "the cream of our society" - he was speaking against rights of appeal. The extra worrying thing was that I knew this guy was repeating Ethics (which is necessary at UOA to get bar admittance). But he'd already made it through most of law school *shudder*
ReplyDeletedc_red,
ReplyDeleteWhatever criteria you use (for example being a dumbass) for being a poor judge should obviously be used as a criteria for selecting those judges or part of judge training.
In the same way that doctors are indeed better at giving medical treatment than random people off the street.
Genius - many is the time I've wanted to cry "physician heal thyself" when confronted with gross incompetence in a GP's office or emergency room.
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