The Trial Itself Violates the Daubert Standard

The trial itself has no scientific validation. It comes from the Scholasticist method of disputation, as a method of arriving at the answer of a difficult question. The rules of evidence violate multiple tenets of formal logic, critical thinking theory, and most do not meet Daubert standards. Then you have a jury. In 1275 AD it was a good advance. The jurors had knowledge. They brought the wisdom of the crowd. Those benefits have been removed. You now have twelve strangers who will be using their gut feelings to detect the truth, when lie detectors are prohibited. They will detect likability, if lucky, and no more. The lawyer is excluding people with knowledge, and even people married to people with knowledge.

Next, the lawyer hobbles the most experienced person in court, the judge. This is the oldest lawyer, who may have done the jobs of the lawyers, and has the biggest experience. If he so much as drives by the crime scene, you will crush the judge. Why? The trial is a fictional play. Any attempt to introduce real facts cannot be tolerated.

The criminal law, is in utter failure. It has a high false negative rate (1 in 10 major crimes is prosecuted). It has a high false positive rate (there is 1 exoneration for every 5 executions). It uses methods from the 13th Century, when anyone else trying to would be arrested as a threat to public safety.

Here is one potential remedy. I propose to exclude all lawyers from all benches, legislative seats and responsible policy positions in the executive. Waiting for that to come about, an intermediate remedy would be to end all self-dealt immunities. Prosecutors and judges should be held to professional standards of due care. They qualify for strict liability because their sole product is punishment. However, that would be too draconian and would ruin them.

There is no justification for prosecutorial or judge immunity from either defendant nor from future crime victims. I find it funny when ALI types dispute this idea as a potential cause of litigation explosion.