[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.