A convincing case for dumping juries simply hasn't been made.
After many years of pondering, I am still not a believer in an Australian Republic. I can not find there is sufficient benefit from toying with our Constitution over the simple conservative reality that our current system works.
And the same is true of jury trials.
Currently jury trials are required under the Constitution built on the traditions we inherited from England and the United States.
Juries aren't perfect. They don't always deliver desirable outcomes.
They're open to manipulation and can delay justice. But their imperfection isn't enough to have them scrapped. Juries can be biased and prejudiced and that bias can swing either way.
But the reason juries are fallible is because they're human. Not necessarily because of their design.
If we applied such a loose test universally to our institutions we'd probably abolish our Parliamentary democracy with all its shortcomings.
Juries play an important role in the extension of natural justice -- that everyone is innocent until they are proven guilty.
A court finding someone guilty is a judgment that should not be made lightly, especially in serious criminal trials, because of the potential penalties that can apply.
Agree or not, in our judicial system it is morally accepted that it is better to allow reasonable doubt to allow a guilty murderer to go free rather than to convict someone who is innocent of the same crime.
Juries ensure that the number of people who need to be convinced beyond reasonable doubt is risk-pooled, reducing the likelihood that the poor judgment of one individual can have a disproportionate impact.
It's far fairer for a wrongly accused innocent person to face the majority judgment of a dozen of their peers than a well-educated but similarly fallible individual. No one disagrees that judges have strengths; not least knowledge of the practice and application of the law.
But in cases where establishing that certain events occurred without clear facts, the judgment of the many is more comforting than the few.
But the primary reason juries should be supported is for the same reasons they were created in our modern judicial system.
While we currently live in an age where the independence of the judiciary isn't really questioned, we haven't always lived in that world.
There was a time when judges were often perceived as the extension of those in positions of influence, particularly the monarch.
The division of powers in our parliamentary system of governance between executive government, the parliament and the courts is a system designed to ensure power is never centralised and cannot be abused.
The point is to make sure that no single agency ever has too much power because, in our democracy, the people have a government, not the other way around.
Especially since the government has the power to force its will upon the people.
Juries were introduced to reduce the tyrannical concentration and reach of those in power and ration it back to the people.
The check and balance against this abuse of power is the right to pass judgment on our government through universal voting.
Juries operate in the same spirit, devolving the power of an arm of government towards the people by allowing them to make judgments. While Her Majesty isn't likely to attempt to seize back control of our dominion, every component of decentralised government power decreases the likelihood that the sovereign could ever try.
We aren't at the end of history.
Australians should be passing the structures of democracy on to future generations instead of the consequences of rash abandonment of an imperfect component of a working judicial system.
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