Deciding whether someone should spend the rest of their life in prison is a strange place to insist that professional experience is optional.Yet nine ordinary citizens are asked to assess technical evidence, reconcile competing expert opinions and apply unfamiliar legal tests, often in cases that have occupied investigators and lawyers for years.Lorin Scicluna’s acquittal of Lassana Cisse’s murder has revived questions that extend beyond this verdict. He was convicted of grievously injuring another man in an earlier attack but acquitted of murder and attempted murder. Whatever persuaded the jury to distinguish between those charges remains inside the jury room.There are two problems here: the competence required to assess increasingly complex evidence, and the impartiality expected of those assessing it. Neither is guaranteed by finding nine people willing to promise they will do their best, particularly when those people come from a society whose relationship with accountability is already rather flexible.The process begins by publishing lists of prospective jurors, then drawing names and allowing each side to challenge those it considers unsuitable. What it cannot do is establish precisely what each person has absorbed during the years in which the case has been unfolding in public.Long before anyone receives a summons, the case has already travelled through news reports, social media, political arguments and private conversations. The court can decide what evidence enters the courtroom; it has rather less control over what enters with the people asked to judge it.The law should require an open mind, not an empty one. The difficulty is establishing the difference in people who may sincerely believe that their prejudices are simply common sense. Familiarity with a case does not automatically disqualify somebody, but neither does denying prejudice demonstrate an ability to recognise it.Meanwhile, protecting the jury becomes everybody else’s problem. I’ve previously written about attempts to prevent interviews from being broadcast because potential jurors might watch them. A country discusses a murder for years, then an interview suddenly becomes an unacceptable threat to the impartiality supposedly preserved throughout.Trying to isolate jurors from information today is like trying to keep one room free of smoke in a building where it is circulating through every vent and crack. Banning an interview closes one door; it does nothing about what has already seeped in or the countless other routes still open.What do you expect when politicians spend years persuading people that wrongdoing is only a scandal if the other side does it, that an unwelcome investigation is a witch-hunt and that the real villain is whoever exposed the mess? This is a sustained campaign to make responsibility negotiable, aimed at the same public from which jurors will eventually be drawn.The lesson extends well beyond politics. Malta is comfortable with grey areas because there is usually somebody dodgy in the extended circle, some favour nobody examined too closely, some arrangement best left unexplained. Cast the net too widely in a densely populated pond and too many familiar faces might get caught.That convenience sustains a kind of everyday omertà. Stepping aside to protect an institution is treated as surrender, while even criminal charges become another opportunity to demand loyalty from people who should be demanding answers. The shame increasingly seems to lie in accepting responsibility when a more shameless person would have found a way around it.Criminal guilt must be proved against a specific charge. But that essential protection has been repackaged into a much broader proposition: anything short of a conviction excuses everything. Having spent years teaching people to think this way, why would nine of them suddenly become immune to the lesson?None of this establishes why Scicluna’s jury acquitted him. It does make the expectation that jurors can leave their social conditioning outside court look distinctly optimistic.The question of competence remains even if every prejudice could be removed. In this trial, jurors had to consider shared intent and complicity alongside ballistics, CCTV and disputed testimony. Understanding that someone was present is one thing; determining whether the evidence establishes the criminal responsibility alleged is another.A judge’s training does not confer omniscience, but assessing such distinctions is professional work for which judges are trained and experienced. Calling jury service a civic duty does not explain why comparable preparation becomes optional for those deciding the facts.Requiring reasons would at least make that decision open to scrutiny, allowing the public to see what evidence was accepted and where the prosecution fell short. It would not retrospectively supply an understanding that was missing when the decision was made.That is the case for replacing juries with independent, qualified judicial panels, required to publish their reasoning and subject to effective appeal. Their members would have prejudices too, but their conclusions would have to survive examination beyond a tally of votes.If juries are to remain, the alternative cannot be to preserve the assumptions and police the internet harder. A substantially larger jury might reduce the influence of individual fixations, although twenty, fifty or a hundred people can still share the same misconception. That is a proposal to test, rather than dismiss or treat as a mathematical cure.A more interesting possibility is to reverse the approach to information. If it is unrealistic to expect everyone to know nothing, why not work towards everyone having the same reliable information?A court-produced dossier could explain the chronology, technical evidence and legal concepts, while addressing significant false claims circulating publicly. When a misconception surfaces in deliberations, other jurors would have something more useful with which to challenge it than their own recollection of Facebook.Both sides would need to scrutinise the material, with the judge approving its contents, clearly identifying disputed claims and excluding inadmissible evidence. Those are difficult decisions, but courts already make difficult decisions about experts and evidence without concluding that the exercise is therefore impossible.Searchable records, digital tools and carefully supervised AI could assist that preparation. A system capable of deciding somebody’s liberty should be capable of considering something more ambitious than another restriction.These questions now hang over the proceedings against Francesco Fenech, who remains presumed innocent. A fresh jury is expected to assess his case after the furious reaction to Scicluna’s acquittal. Would that make its members harsher, more hesitant or more determined to resist public pressure?Waiting years does not necessarily answer that question; it may preserve the loudest impressions while allowing the details to fade. Any retrial following the appeal against Yorgen Fenech’s acquittal would face a similar problem. As previously argued, justice cannot become a succession of juries increasingly aware of which answer is expected.And beneath the legal arguments sits another uncomfortable possibility: that compassion is distributed according to familiarity. The young Maltese accused has a mother, a family and a future, while the dead man becomes merely “a migrant”. It becomes easier to imagine the damage imprisonment would cause than the damage the killing already caused.Whether that happened here cannot be known from the verdict. But Lassana had children, and his future has already been taken. Both he and the accused deserved a process whose fairness could be examined, rather than one that asks the public to take so much on trust.•