It seems to me that all this wrangling and instructing juries is an argument for having dedicated, technically and juridically trained jurists decide these cases.
A random pool of people is nearly impossible to corrupt.
Make someone's full-time job as a juror and the system WILL corrupt. A pool of "experts" will become a bidding war and only the large pocketbooks will win. Everything from patent infringement to murder will be based not on the letter of the law but on how much money you are willing to use in bribes.
I'm really surprised to see this even be something that needs to be debated. Randomized juries is like a fail-safe against judicial corruption. Every case is a unique pool of individuals, you simply cannot take one person out of the country (say, a full-time expert juror) and blackmail them for life. You've got one trial, 12 random people, and only one shot to convince, appeal, coerce, intimidate or bribe.
> I'm really surprised to see this even be something that needs to be debated.
I've seen it come up in other places for other, arguably nobler, reasons. ("Fixing" unemployment by preferring the unemployed as jurors.) But yeah, taking out the randomness is a bad idea, with a huge, huge burden of proof on why it'd be better another way.
A solution used in many countries including some definitely first-world countries (Japan, Germany, France, Sweden) is to have a mix of professional judges and lay judges. Seems that it preserves the benefits you talk about, at the same time fixing a lot of the problems we see with jury incompetence.
