Jury Trial In The Philippines

 

     I rarely watch drama movies, where characters do nothing but talk and whine, but I found myself watching The Trial of The Chicago 7 (a 2020 Netflix movie based on real events starring Eddie Redmayne and Sacha Baron Cohen and Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and being vastly entertained in spite of the fact that the characters in the movie do nothing but argue. Maybe, because the acting was great and the direction wonderful.

     And speaking of court trials, some Filipino writers are fond of writing stories that revolve around a trial. And inexplicably, they like to write it jury trial style instead of a bench trial (where a judge solely decides on the case), which is what we have here in the Philippines. And people who would read it—upon learning that the writer chose a jury instead of just a judge, thus technically rewriting the justice system in the Philippines—would expect that the jury or the jurors would really be involved in the story, like one of the jurors getting passionately involved with the defendant thus affecting the case or some of the jurors would try to manipulate the outcome of the trial. I mean, you’d expect that the story would not move or would not be dramatic without the jury or some of the jurors. Alas, in some of these Filipino jury trial stories, you could delete the participation of all the jurors in the story and the reader wouldn’t even notice it.

     What a fraud!

     And I hope that the jury trial system would not be used here in the Philippines because aside from the justice system here being already screwed, many Filipinos, sadly, are easily scared or swayed and are easily corrupted. Filipinos love Kdrama, teleseryes and anything tearjerker so much that they'd probably acquit a defendant who whines and cries in court all day because he is an adopted child, even though the evidence against him is incontrovertible.