Why not remove the human element from the courtroom? What I mean by that is the jury wouldn’t know who is on trial, they would only know person A vrs. person B. No more celebrity trials, they would be the same as anyone else. The jury could be in the same building, but not the same room. Under some type of supervision they could listen to the proceedings and be shown the items entered into evidence. A time delay so any name slips could be bleeped… Decisions would have to be made on just the facts, not who the person is.
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As professors, we are often asked to grade tests where the students are given a code number--for this very reason.
Agree. Also a person should not be judged by his/her appearance. With the advance of IT, may be people can design a program where juries can attend a trial in a differenct room through a computer and with all the faces covered up.
Keeping an accused person's identity secret would involve a lot more than physically concealing the person and removing references to his/her name.
Witnesses who testify would discuss the accused's name, where accused lieves, how they came to know accused, accused's occupation, place of business, hobbies, personal quirks, etc. Documents, videotapes, etc. would have to be sanitized - not just of someone's face/name but of all other characteristics that identify them. Then you would have to prevent the human curiosity of jurors from seeking to find out. Then, if one juror found out, that juror would presumably tell others in deliberations, if the person's identity ended up being an issue, then others would now.
Just like the Rule 11 sanctions a few years ago - rules of judicial procedure intended to eliminate frivolous motions, by allowing a judge to impose sanctions when lawyers filed frivilous motions ... it only increased the problem it intended to solve.
I think this would be too costly. This is the reason both set of lawyers have to agree on a set of jurors.
Communication between people depends a great deal on more than words. Gestures, facial experssions, special linguistics, etc. All of these add up to whether testimony is believable or perhaps an obvious or not obvious twisting of the truth. Getting at what really happened is not simple and surely distorted by personal views. Depriving a jury of all the possibilities of gauging testimony will not help a difficult situation.
Part of a person's testimony is not only what they say, but how they say it. Demeanor on the stand by a witness can create, or destroy, credibility. If you remove the 'human element', you remove this tool from the jury. This is why videotaped depositions are sometimes so much more powerful than just the written transcript. Think of how different a play is when it is read, as opposed to made alive by an excellent actor. Read or acted, the words/data are the same, but the gestures, facial expressions, etc. make the actor's protrayal so much more powerful.
and what of a good actor? is it fair to believe someone more if they are better at faking those gestures?