Well for a start, it assumes good faith on the part of the participants, rather than the default assumption of bad faith and corruption you'd like to project.
There are also built-in controls in the form of reviews and appeals.
And more generally, humans are squishy and imprecise, trying to apply precise, inflexible, code-like law to immensely analog situations is not a recipe for good outcomes.
Why should anyone assume good faith about or trust any part of the government? It is well known, studied and documented that justice is not uniform in practice. Yes, ideally it is not, but we do not live in some abstract utopia where judges are not corrupt.
It's so odd that people would say that it is a feature that judges are inconsistent. Juries are one thing, but judges driving their own agendas independent of lawmakers and juries is not a great look.
>going through life with that attitude seems like a recipe for unhappiness and frustration.
Going through life in blissful ignorance of the incompetence and malice driving the systems of violence and control around you is even worse. Unhappiness and frustration are necessary prerequisites to any improvements to quality of life. Terminally happy people are just grazing cattle, fit only for the slaughterhouse.
> Going through life in blissful ignorance of the incompetence and malice driving the systems of violence and control around you is even worse.
I’m not ignorant of that, I disagree that it matches reality.
And see that’s what I’m talking about. There’s no reasoned view of the world here just unthinking, unfocused vitriol.
> Happy people are just grazing cattle, fit only for the slaughterhouse.
Yet here I live in a stable democracy with a historically unprecedented standard of living. It’s not perfect, but the idea that judges should not use judgement and compassion in the application of the law just seems nuts. It’s a human system for humans, not some branch of mathematics. :shrug:
The reason you live in a stable democracy with a historically unprecedented standard of living is that generations of unhappy and frustrated people made it so. It certainly isn't thanks to the people satisfied with the status quo, who maintained faith in either the virtue of the Church or the Crown. Progress depends on unreasonable people doing unreasonable things like killing monarchs and nailing theses to church doors.
>It’s not perfect, but the idea that judges should not use judgement and compassion in the application of the law just seems nuts.
I agree with you. They should. Absolutism in terms of the law reduces to fascism, and even the "code is law" crowd discover religion as soon as they realize code can have loopholes just as laws can. But we shouldn't assume by default that the courts will act fairly, because they won't, they will act in their own interests as all power structures do, and fairly only when fairness isn't a threat to those interests.
For the same reason we shouldn't assume software created by humans and controlled by the those very same power structures would be any better.
Those unhappy people were not, for the most part, mindless reactionaries who declared everything was shit and every human a demonic mire of corrupt motives.
I’m not “Happy with the status quo”, that’s a gross misrepresentation of my posts. I’m critical of mindless cynicism and the pointless stress and unhappiness such people put themselves through because their distrust is aimless, facile, ungrounded and as a result useless.
I would argue it also belongs in decisions of whether to convict and what to convict someone of.
The law cannot encode the entirety of human experience, and can’t foresee every possible mitigating circumstance. Given the fact of a conviction regardless of sentence can have such a huge impact on someone’s life, I think there is room for compassion and good judgement in multiple places.
In systems I'm familiar with, magistrates handle a lot of the minor criminal cases without juries, and civil cases don't usually have a jury either, which covers probably a majority of all court cases.
True, but they do involve judgements, and magistrates courts do involve convictions. And you’ll get decisions from public prosecutors in the US or UK whether to take something to trial in the first place, which can involve a determination of whether a trial is even in the public interest.
:shrug: either way, as I say, IMHO having a flexible system that involves informed judgement in lots of places but with the possibility of appeals, reviews etc is a feature, not a bug.
There's plenty of room for flexibility while still being honest and consistent about the rules. If a judge thinks someone should get away with murder, say, just be honest about it rather than invent ways to avoid calling it murder.
There are also built-in controls in the form of reviews and appeals.
And more generally, humans are squishy and imprecise, trying to apply precise, inflexible, code-like law to immensely analog situations is not a recipe for good outcomes.