Post a reply to
Should We Abolish the Jury System?

JohnD
Tuesday, July 12, 2011 at 1:13 PM

Maria:There's arguably a constitutional problem with the "revamping" of the jury system you suggest.The Sixth Amendment guarantees a trial by an "impartial" jury. If it can be shown that more educated people tend on average to harbor certain political leanings, couldn't excluding the less-educated from service potentially implicate the impartiality of the panel?...Ironically given your stance on the death penalty, the over-educated actually tend to skew liberal, not conservative.~~~And on the subject of the death penalty... The material you quoted about how it is predicated upon respect for the moral agency of the accused is interesting, and I'm going to look into that futher.I'm not sure I'm convinced, though, that the state would be incapable of fulfilling its law and order and public safety obligations without the availability of the needle.My native Canada, for example, has a far lower rate of violent crime than the United States, and we abolished the death penalty about fifty years ago.Texas has a lot of crime, and also has the death penalty.Michigan also has a lot of crime, and that state abolished the death penalty before the Civil War.New Hampshire has a low crime rate and the death penalty.Vermont has a low crime rate, and they have abolished it....To my way of thinking, there's no clear relationship between the availability of the death penalty and the prevalence of violent crime.Moreover, I don't see how life in prison without possibility of parole isn't a suitable replacement for the ol' potassium chloride shot.

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