What qualifications do you think they possess to pass legal judgements, to understand victims and the wider effect on society that the crimes can have? The ones up here are absolute wet blankets and constantly let violent criminals off!
Prime example;
Callum McAlpine, who has a history of taking charity boxes from shops in the city centre, has once again walked free from court
www.chroniclelive.co.uk
Well the thing is, Magistrates are meant to be representative of the people they are dealing with...
That's their entire thing, they're meant to be volunteers from the local community who do not deal with the law every day, so they are as close in background to those appearing before them as possible.
What they do get is training on the law (quite a lot actually*), and every magistrates court has a highly qualified "clerk" who gives them guidance on the actual law, and will recommend (which the magistrate would be daft to ignore) if the case may need to be seen by a "magistrate" court where one of the members is a Judge, and they only ever deal with low level cases, or the first step in higher level cases.
IIRC any offence you can go to jail for more than 6 months is automatically passed onto the crown courts, with any appearance at the Magistrates being purely to do things like confirm that, and if someone will be held in custody.
It's amazing how people complain about "judges are out of touch with the people" then complain about the very part of the legal system in the UK that is meant to most closely mirror the "people" by deliberately involving people in non legal professions.
*Not in the find detail but how to assess the facts, how to consider different things, and then in specifics for certain types of cases (and IIRC they won't see cases that they've not been trained for).
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