The Establishment of All-Citizen Juries as a Key Component of Mexico’s Judicial Reform: Cross-National Analyses of Lay Judge Participation and the Search for Mexico’s Judicial Sovereignty
TEXAS HISPANIC JOURNAL OF LAW AND POLICY Vol. 16:52, 2010
49 Pages Posted: 12 Sep 2014
Date Written: September 13, 2010
Abstract
The American anti-drug aid package to Mexico, termed the "Merida Initiative" (or "Plan Mexico" by its critics), has promised nearly $400 million worth of military and intelligence assistance to Mexico, becoming one of the key elements in the joint U.S.-Mexico strategy to combat the threat of drug trafficking in Mexico and across its borders. Currently, approximately eighty municipalities are considered to be dominated by the drug cartels. Equipping the Mexican military for the struggle against drug trafficking has nonetheless been viewed as a pretext to label and criminalize protesters, political dissenters, grassroots organizers, and social activists in Mexico. The military involvement in the "drug war" has also increased corruption within governmental institutions, leading to the commitment of unnumbered human rights violations and the failure to effectively deal with the trade in narcotics within Mexico‘s own borders. This military solution has also distracted public attention and diverted governmental resources away from the long-term reforms that are necessary to eliminate corruption in the domestic police and law enforcement branches, in order to effectively deal with the inter-related problems of illicit drugs, crime, and violence in Mexico. Dependence on the military, meanwhile, has come at the expense of adopting much needed structural reforms to Mexico‘s judicial institutions in order to establish more effective court systems that are free from corruption and are able to identify, prosecute, and punish documented drug traffickers.
This paper proposes that the re-establishment of the jury system in Mexico could lead to important structural reforms to combat political and institutional corruption within the judicial branch of the government. We argue that a restructured jury system would constitute a major judicial reform, strengthening the rule of law and combating police and judicial corruption. Further, the re-introduction of a civic panel guiding legal institutions would strengthen Mexico‘s efforts to increase both accountability and transparency of the criminal justice process, and promote the civic oversight function of government institutions.
Keywords: Mexico, Jury Trial, Adversarial Procedure
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