The most brilliant statesman of the 20th century, Lee Kwan Yew, opposed juries due to his own successful experience with them as a defense attorney:
“In his first case he was “was assigned to defend four murderers.”
Fleeing the Japanese, a Dutch woman had entrusted her daughter to a Malay muslim. She came back after the war, reclaimed the daughter. The Chief Justice, then an Englishman, pending hearing of the case, sent the girl who had been converted into Islam to a convent to be looked after, and hell broke loose. The police force mutinied. Malays and Muslims took out their knives and a lot of white men, who had nothing to do with the case, were killed just becaue they were white. These four men were accused of killing a Royal Air Force officer and his wife and child. They were travelling on a bus from RAF Changi down to town.
Lee Kuan Yew, who had been assigned the case, explains that he did what any advocate does: He “worked on the weaknesses of the jury — their biases, their prejudices, their reluctance really to find four Mussulmen guilty of killing in cold blood or in a heat of great passion, religious passion, an RAF officer, his wife and child.” And he employed “the simple tricks of advocacy — contradictions between one witness and another, contradiction between a witness and his previous statement to the police and the preliminary enquiry.”
When the jury acquitted the murderers, Lee Kuan Kew reports, “The judge was thoroughly disgusted. I went home feeling quite sick because I knew I’d discharged my duty as required of me, but I knew I had done wrong.”
He thereupon concluded that no government in which he had a say would employ this foreign, “foolish, completely incongruous system.” Pointing out that the French and other Latin nations do not use trial by jury, Lee Kuan Kew argues that it is too “alien” to the basic social attitudes of many other cultures, including those of Asia.
It’s not just alien to the basic social attitudes of many cultures, but to women as well. The ability to adjudicate dispassionately is rare enough among men from an Anglo culture, it is entirely absent from the solipsistic sex and the more tribal cultures. It simply cannot function as designed in situations profoundly different than those in which, and for which, it was originally developed.
After all, one can only be tried fairly by a jury of one’s peers. And if the jury is diverse, then it is not a jury at all.