>A Belgian lawyer told me that in Belgian criminal cases
>juries ere available only for murder trials, of which
>they have about five a year over there. Judges also
>have an investigative role, determining facts as well
>as setting forth the law in those systems.
No juries in Italy. There's a great Italian case study called "The Judge and the Historian" by Carlo Ginzburg.
>Judges and historians, Carlo Ginzburg argues, have a good deal in
>common. Both have the weighty responsibility of examining the
>written record and drawing from it conclusions about what happened
>in the past. Yet judges bear the greater burden. Historians'
>mistakes can be corrected by later historians building on their
>predecessors' work; but when judges err by falling prey to logical
>fallacies and thus reconstruct the past incorrectly, innocent people
>go to prison, and the very concept of justice is corrupted.
>Ginzburg, himself a historian who has specialized in the Inquisition
>and who teaches at UCLA, wrote "The Judge and the Historian" to call
>the world's attention to what he sees as precisely such a gross
>miscarriage of justice in his native Italy.
[....]
>Ginzburg regards the convictions in the Calabresi case as the 20th
>century equivalent of the witchcraft and heresy convictions under
>the Inquisition. The contemporary Italian courts, he says, cared
>just as little for the evidence as the 16th and 17th century
>Catholic ones: Suspects could affirm their crimes, deny all or
>remain silent, and all these possible responses were regarded as
>evidence of their guilt. The Calabresi judges ended up believing the
>informer, Leonardo Marino, despite the dozens of problems Ginzburg
>cites with his story, any one of which, he says, should have created
>more than the shadow of a doubt and led to acquittal.
http://dir.salon.com/story/books/review/1999/08/13/ginzburg/index.html