A jury is not a 'bunch of randomly selected individuals'. It is a 'bunch of randomly selected individuals who have had to sit around and assess arguments from both sides, to the exclusion of most other activities'. You might legitimately be eager to see what such a group of people might think; especially as opposed to, or in addition to, a judge.

Possibly, dare I say it, it might even be more interesting than the weighted average of 12 random members of the Brains Trust here on HN reading a blog for 5 minutes and forming an opinion...

Yes, a jury is drawn from a pool of randomly selected individuals, yes. But the pool is first filtered, by striking (1) people who appear to the judge to have too much potential for bias; (2) people who convince the judge they have a good excuse for not serving on the jury; and (3) up to X people peremptorily struck by the lawyers, where X typically equals 3 per side.

(In technology-related cases, item 3 often results in the exclusion from the jury of anyone who knows anything about the technology---one or another team of lawyers will want the jurors to know only that which was presented to them for the first time at the trial.)

My understanding is that (1) is typically argued by the opposing trial lawyers, who can appeal for "Strike for cause"[1], which doesn't count against their arbitrary $X strikes. I assume this is actually decided upon by the judge, based on those arguments.

[1] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Strike_for_ca...