[treebeard901]

You're still better off with a jury trial over letting one judge make a decision. Your chances of finding impartiality among 6 or 12 jurors is much greater than taking chances with one judge. Unless you're a company or politician who has a financial or political leverage over a judge, then you want to avoid a jury. Sometimes a counter party can have all kinds of quid pro quo, indirect, leverage over a Judge or even a District Attorney. It's a lot more difficult when you have 12 people to deal with.

[DFHippie]

The vetting and training process for judges is a lot longer and deeper than the vetting process for juries (though voting for judges kind of throws this out the window). Presumably part of the purpose of this is to establish whether the prospective judge can judge impartially despite their private feelings.

Most of the world does without juries. In the US we don't use juries for all trials. The Supreme Court and circuit courts do without juries. If we don't use juries for our most important legal decisions, why are they better in the cases in which they are used?

I'm not a legal scholar. I'm sure untold volumes have been written about this. Just on its surface, though, it looks like nothing more than an accidental quirk we inherited from the English legal system.