If you Google “suspects wrongly convicted” the long list of people having been set free after many years in prison may shock you. 

Typically we read these stories singularly as they make the headlines. So our depth of perception is not as good as when we make a concerted effort at an overview.

One might also add a condiment to that perception by searching those people who were executed after being wrongly convicted.

The development of DNA testing and improvements in a broad array of forensic techniques have punched some holes in our system of jurisprudence. 

Now someone will apply a ratio factor and say that the number of mistakes compared to the number of people put on trial makes the issue much less menacing. Well, such analysis may illustrate mathematic prowess but it you are the one who is wrongly convicted and most of your life is taken away because of error, likely you would toss arithmetic out the window.

No, our system of jurisprudence is not perfect. It probably never will be. And yes, it works more times than it fails. 

But we must strive to make it more perfect than it is and than it has been. We are talking about peoples’ lives here.

And while we fully expect modern science to continue to shave that margin for error, we must also expect the human element to improve exponentially in the jury process.

Often we hear otherwise intelligent sounding people wanting to know how they can get off of jury duty. Really? Is that the mentality that is the center — the very crux — of our legal system?

Our jury system is different from most countries. We have juries of our peers, not a panel of judges that decide guilt or innocence. But unless we have intelligent, upstanding people willing to serve on juries then at some point we may not be able to boast our “jury of our peers” concept over that of a panel of judges or even a single judge.

Some view jury duty as a burden or a dread rather than a responsibility or even an honor to uphold and uplift a non-apartisan system of reviewing evidence and arriving at decisions to determine one’s fate in criminal and civil proceedings.

We can thank our brilliant scientists who have given us better tools in this process. And we can hope that their endeavors will continue in that venue. 

Meanwhile, we should rethink how we view the role of our juries as to the importance of intellingent people not only willing to serve, but to desire to serve.