The review of the Colin Craig defamation ruling raises some interesting questions about how we do things round here.

A judge has come out and said that the sum to be paid to Jordan Williams for being defamed by Colin Craig is too high. The sum was decided by 12 jurors. The peers, the ordinary people. Having heard the evidence they decided Colin Craig was out of order and then in a separate decision decided that the offence was worth Mr Craig paying Mr Williams 1.27 million dollars.

So this has caused some people to be confused. A jury decided, so how can one guy, a judge, unilaterally dismiss the honest opinion of 12. Well in my opinion it's because he's right and the system is wrong and it took one of my children's impromptu comments to spark this.

As my son said over dinner, juries decide guilt or innocence and then their job should be over. Judges are the ones who know precedents and know what an offence is worth. After all they spend half their job sentencing.

So why in defamation cases do we have juries, amateurs in the law, being judge and then executioner deciding on the monetary value of the offence?

In New Zealand, thanks to ACC and our moderation, we have not developed the litigation culture that you have in the United States. There the pursuit of damages has reached steroid-enhanced levels. But the American damages virus may be spreading. Perhaps the Craig jury thought that to an allegedly wealthy man $1.27 million was nothing. But what was the cost of the offence? That's a hard thing to evaluate and should not be predicated on the overall wealth of the defendant.

Judges are judges because they've spent a lifetime doing this stuff and get it. Juries are juries because they are innocents and peers and that makes them well suited to figuring out right from wrong but not the penalty.

With the the Little and Craig defamation cases roaring back into life, wasting everybody's money for the second time it may be time to look at our current model of civil legal process. Let juries decide guilt or innocence but then give the job of penalties to professionals who know what they're talking about.