Courthouses of the West: The Jury.

Courthouses of the West: The Jury.: 

The Jury.

The entire time I've been a lawyer. . . well, no, well before that, I've been told that one of the "greatest" things about "the world's greatest judicial system" is that it uses juries.

Most legal systems do not, and those that do, have tended to pick it up from the English Common Law system, often through American influence.  Save for Louisiana, we use the English system, and the English system has long used juries.  

The system has evolved over time.  Originally it was an effort to gather those from the area where an event occured, and was truly a jury of peers. The danger was that they actually knew you, and therefore may be inclined to judge your guilt or innocence based on that, which was part of why it was conceived of as a good system. Over time, while it was still supposed to be a jury of your peers, they were picked, through the voir dire process, for their fairness.

I'm not about to say that juries always get everything right. They don't.  But lawyers are taught to respect the process and the juries, and for good reason.  Frankly, more often than not, juries are right.  Not always, but holding them in contempt is wrong.

The jury that found Donald Trump guilty of 34 felonies this past week in Manhattan was made up seven men and five women, and included two attorneys, a software engineer, an e-commerce sales professional, a security engineer, a teacher, a speech therapist, an investment banker and a retired wealth manager.   That is a highly educated jury, and frankly that probably truly is a jury of Trump's peers.  Leaving two lawyers on the jury is bizarre, as lawyers only rarely make a jury panel, although I've known one who did.  I've been called for jury duty once and did not get picked, as I didn't expect to be.  Having two lawyers on the panel is phenomenal.

It'd be interesting to know how that occured.  Trump's defense team may have thought that the lawyers would regard the charges as strained in regard to election interference, which a lot of legal analysts did.  They may have, instead, helped the jury wade through the piles of stuff they had and arrive at the conclusion which they did.

Anyway you look at it, they arrived at the opinion they arrived at, and that needs to be respected.

Which Wyoming's elected officials are not.

The jury has been slammed by all of our Congressional delegation, two of whom are lawyers, the Governor and the Secretary of State.

It's tragic.

Wyoming makes frequent recourse to the courts as a state, and now it's attacking the judicial system.  There's utterly nothing whatsoever to question the nature of this jury on.  It appears to have been well qualified for its role.  There's no reason to suspect that New York's legal system is deficient in any way.

It's inexcusable to attack the jury.