This is one of the reasons I keep advocating that we abolish the House of Lords and replace it with a People’s Assembly, with voting powers, selected in the same manner as a jury trial.
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Trouble with doing that is that it easily becomes a mirror of the House of Commons filled with people with more political affilation than expertise
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That is a reasonable assessment until you actually look at who is in the House of Lords.
Doesn’t seem to happen with jury service. How do you see it getting there?
Depends on how the members are selected. Only the strongly poilitically motivated will put themselves forward. If there is some form of election is becomes a party political exercise just like the commons
I said in my original post; like jury service.
The whole point of that was to avoid the mirror of the Commons you predicted.
So random people are summoned to serve?
Yeah, if it’s good enough to decide someone’s guilt or innocence in Crown court cases, why not? Would it be any worse than the cronies that are in the Lords?
Have you done jury service?
What is that supposed to mean?
As a matter of fact, yes. It left me with a lot more faith in our justice system than I had before. I don’t whether we got lucky, but we had a very good mix of analytical and emotional intelligence.
Very different then from my experience of being on a jury (I ended up foreman). I did not find very much intelligence.
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I had a bunch of morons who had been watching too much CSI on mine 
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Regardless they also vote and they are also part of the population, distinctly snobbish and a bit fascist this slant on juries, I take it you all understand why they are from all parts of the community?
So they’re representative of said community, the Lords isn’t, its selected on what basis?
Is this some inverted wind up of trying to be superior, its failed to me,
Barry, if you ever end up on the jury at my trial I’m sure I can count on you to confirm that the money was only resting in my account. 
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Not a problem, don’t even need to ask.
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When I did it many years ago a fellow juror had made her mind up about the defendents guilt because he had tattoos. That was good enough for her. I pointed out that the guy in the peaked hat guarding him in the Dock also had tattoos but it made no difference. He was guilty as fuck though, bang to rights.
Lol. Did you tell them that? Could you have done the trial on your own? 
Personally, I was very glad to have 11 other jurors with me. I was offered the foreman role but declined it as I felt I’d had too much influence already and decisions made were going to affect lives.
One person accused me of railroading them! But really, the judge’s summing up made things perfectly clear and, despite multiple explanations, the concept of “beyond reasonable doubt” was too difficult for some.
That’s probably why they’ve changed guidance since. Did mine seven years ago. New words are “satisfied so that you are sure”.
I’m surprised that very simple concept wasn’t adequately conveyed with a judge in session and a writer as foreman.
Judge just said if you think the defendant is probably guilty, return not guilty. You have the be satisfied so you’re sure.
Reasonable is far too subjective, imo.