It’s a silly bit of theater and American exceptionalism.
Infamously, “grand juries” are supposed to be a check against bringing frivolous charges, but they’ve never done this: there’s a famous quote about a prosecutor being able to get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. They’re also used to kill trials which are politically inconvenient but which the government doesn’t want to take the blame for burying, usually for killer cops: just tell the grand jury not to indict and then say “welp, nothing we could do.”
All the romantic stories about jury nullification being a check against government overreach are also crap. Historically the most common use in practice, by far, was when juries would exonerate people who’d been caught dead-to-rights lynching black men.
Ironically, grand juries refusing to indict frivolous political charges has been in the news quite a lot in the past couple of months.
It's true that jury trials have a less than perfect history of applying justice (though of course I think it's fair to say that the judges presiding over those trials exhibited similar trials so the counterfactual of a bench trial may have been the same outcome). That said, my understanding is that jury trials are just generally favorable to defendants compared to bench trials.
FWIW jury trials are arguably less vulnerable to corruption, which is a benefit. Would be hard to pull off https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal#Criminal... (which wrongly put thousands of children in jail for the financial benefit of judges) with juries.
I think calling it 'American exceptionalism" is a little reductive. The idea that a jury trial is a protector of civil rights in a system that upholds the law as something no-one is above literally dates back to Magna Carta. Suggesting that this throughline of civil liberty is "silly theater' is not a serious proposition.
Infamously, “grand juries” are supposed to be a check against bringing frivolous charges, but they’ve never done this: there’s a famous quote about a prosecutor being able to get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. They’re also used to kill trials which are politically inconvenient but which the government doesn’t want to take the blame for burying, usually for killer cops: just tell the grand jury not to indict and then say “welp, nothing we could do.”
All the romantic stories about jury nullification being a check against government overreach are also crap. Historically the most common use in practice, by far, was when juries would exonerate people who’d been caught dead-to-rights lynching black men.