Lawyers Disagree Over Planned Expansion of Citizen Judge System

Transcript

00:00A movement to reform the court system is getting a big new win.

00:04For the past two years, so-called citizen judges, select members of the public,

00:09have been helping professional judges deliver verdicts in serious cases, including murder, on a mixed panel.

00:15And from next year, the range of cases they will help decide will grow much wider,

00:19to every case where a prison sentence of ten years or more is at stake.

00:24The idea is to create transparency in the justice system

00:28and counter-criticism that professional judges are out of touch.

00:32But the system has been used in fewer than 300 cases so far,

00:36and some who work with the law worry laypeople aren't ready for the wider variety of cases to come.

00:42Murder can be understood intuitively, not just by a knife or a gun.

00:47But in a case of corruption, there is a certain kind of retribution,

00:52such as compensation, remuneration, and so on.

00:55The explanation of these different components will affect the course of the case in a different way.

01:00So the difficulty will become more abstract.

01:03There are also fears of greater burden for lawyers,

01:06who now will need to put more effort into communicating with the non-specialists on the panel of judges.

01:31But not everyone is so pessimistic.

01:34Some lawyers even think the wider life experience people outside the legal profession have

01:38could help the cause of justice, for example in fraud cases,

01:42something that can stump younger professional judges.

01:45I'm not surprised anymore when I see judges and prosecutors look at a bunch of forged, fraudulent documents,

01:52and then they say, oh yeah, but I just can't tell that he really meant to steal the money.

02:01And I look at that and I'm like, since when did this 90-year-old man want to buy 2,000 air compressors?

02:10And you like to hope that a citizen judge in the middle of this could look at this

02:16and have the same outraged reaction I have when I see Taiwan courts regularly come back unable to find fraud.

02:27Whatever criticism is made about the citizen judge system, and there has been a fair amount,

02:31those in charge of the justice system are certain it's here to stay,

02:35and its role in society is going to grow.

02:38Ryan Wu and John Van Triest for Taiwan Plus.