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These are steps toward greater efficiency and commendable as such, but efficiency is not really the goal or the purpose of the jury system. It is, instead, a symbol of the idea that experts are fallible and that a citizen's security is best protected by his fellow citizens. Like many of the unwieldy instruments of representative democracy, therefore, it is designed as a check on the machinery of coercion, a check that provides time for mulling over not just the question of guilt or innocence but the conflicts in what society demands of its members and of itself. —By Otto Friedrich. Reported by Evan Thomas/Washington, with other U.S. bureaus