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Notes -
I sometimes feel like we over-medicalize things in modern society: we want to defer "hard" ethical decisions to "experts", and doctors are some of our favorite experts.
I noticed this acutely when I was called for jury duty a while back (I was not selected), and voir dire included some questions about considering about applying a legal label ("sexually violent predator") that does have a very loosely defined medical component, and I could tell a tangible number of potential jurors really wanted to hide behind "what does a/the doctor think?" in terms of something the legislature, in it's great wisdom, deserved a jury trial rather than a medical panel. Frankly, given the weight of the decision, I see why: there are plenty of horror stories of doctors involuntary committing people, and a jury seems a potentially-preferable way to evaluate such status.
There were also quite a few jurors that questioned their own fairness on the topic of heinous crimes. I didn't get selected (the defense busted the panel, as it turned out), but am I weird in thinking that sometimes "fair" is, after carefully weighing the evidence of guilt, "throw the book at them"?
Your last paragraph is the reason juries are rarely given much, if any, say in sentencing. The jury decides your guilt or innocence, and then the judge applies the appropriate standards and determines the sentence. This (in theory) lets the jury focus on the facts of the case without getting caught up in the emotions of also being responsible for punishing the convicted.
Though arguably this defeats the entire purpose of a jury trial in the first place by ceding too much decision-making power to unelected elites who can use their discretion over sentencing to usurp the jury's role in applying justice/mercy according to community values.
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