I’m always amazed Americans seem to hate it. I’d love it if we had that here in the Netherlands.
When someone commits a crime, they’re not only hurting a specific victim, they’re also hurting the community as a whole. It makes people feel less safe. The victim and offender are represented in the courtroom, so the broader community should be too. A jury feels like a nice way to give them representation.
I’d absolutely sit on a jury if they had it here.
You have to miss work and your employer is not required to pay you while you’re gone. In a country where most people live paycheck to paycheck, this fact makes jury duty not very fun.
Fair enough if that’s the case. Over here, we get at least a month of paid vacation time and a bunch of days on top of that. So basically, it would just be slightly inconvenient to colleagues if someone had to take a day off. But that’s the same as any sick days, so not much of an issue.
Still though, if you can, I think you should. If nothing else, it’ll give you a front row seat to seeing your judicial system in action. And if you’re a bit more engaged, reading up on things like ‘jury nullification’ is smart if you’re ever called for jury duty.
The best part is that the jury is the right of the criminal, not the community. Rather than having a judge decide your guilt you get to have ordinary people, guaranteed to be your peers, pulled off the street and vetted by the defense and prosecution to be as unbiased as possible to determine your guilt.
Many aspects of the American justice system that seem odd basically come from the goal to ensure fairness for the accused. We’re supposed to take jurisprudence very seriously. And in that vein it would be very nice if we could reduce sentence length to not be an outlier.
You don’t have jurys in the Netherlands?
It seems it’s not universal in Europe.
Nope, not a thing in the Netherlands. I know some countries here do have it, like Belgium for particularly serious or specific offenses.
In the Netherlands, you usually face a single judge for smaller crimes and a panel of three judges for more serious offenses. Basically, the judges determine guilt based on the evidence and pass sentences based on general guidelines for similar offenses. Jury trial is something we only know from US TV shows, but it’s not something most people here would miss or be comfortable with. The idea is that judges are considered to be impartial enough to be trusted to do their work fairly and honestly. Of course, there are procedures to replace judges in cases where they might not be impartial.