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Yes. Scale up the judicial system and cut laws if needed.

Also, there will likely still be some pleas. Some people own up to being guilty and want to move on.

There is an absolute dearth of lawyers to support this. We just need more courts and more judges for the initial surge of a couple of years.

So most property crimes will not longer be prosecuted?

Also how exactly are jury trials superior to e.g. Magistrates Courts in the UK?

Isn’t the American legal system already very bloated and inefficient? So spending even more money on it might not be the best idea?

> Also how exactly are jury trials superior to e.g. Magistrates Courts in the UK?

The purpose of the trial is to separate the innocent from the guilty, and there is intended to be a presumption of innocence. But because the prosecution has to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt, they'll tend to only bring cases when there is a high probability of guilt -- a good thing -- so then let's say 90% of the defendants are probably guilty and 60% are guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

A judge is going to become intimately familiar with that. ~90% of the defendants are actually guilty, so the judge develops the intuition that a new defendant is very likely guilty. That's a presumption of guilt. Soon even the innocent ones are getting convicted, when the whole point of the process was to prevent that.

A jury is a fresh set of eyes who look at the defendant as the only case they're going to be deciding for the foreseeable future and haven't been prejudiced by a parade of evildoers sitting in the same chair. It's also twelve separate people who each individually have to be convinced.

Yet the conviction rate in England was 84 % in magistrates courts (misdemeanors and low level felonies) and 78 % in crown courts (more serious crimes) which is not that different. Especially if we consider how a lot of crimes like DUIs are somewhat open & shut compared to more serious offenses.

> so the judge develops the intuition that a new defendant is very likely guilty.

A good judge wouldn’t do that. Also by and large random people are relatively dumb and biased. Why exactly are they less likely to convict an innocent person? (Let’s assume that the conviction rate is the same in both cases)

> Yet the conviction rate in England was 84 % in magistrates courts (misdemeanors and low level felonies) and 78 % in crown courts (more serious crimes) which is not that different.

The conviction rate can't really tell you anything because prosecutors will calibrate to bring cases they think they can win in a given system. Systems willing to convict more innocent people will have similar conviction rates but more innocent defendants.

> A good judge wouldn’t do that.

What about a human judge?

> Also by and large random people are relatively dumb and biased. Why exactly are they less likely to convict an innocent person?

Because you have to convince all twelve of them.