
Quoting
Mr. Knowitall
A year or so ago we had a bunch of these students posting inquiries in the forum. A lot of the inquiries looked like homework problems. A few students claimed that they had a class assignment to try to find answers to questions like this through Internet forums and services.
The fairness of a judge's verdict versus a jury's verdict is going to be somewhat contextual. That is, in some countries I would be more trusting of a judge than in others, although in those countries where I would be least trusting of a judge I suspect that I would not have any right to a jury, which moots the question.
Conventional wisdom is that a criminal defendant is more likely to get a fair shake from a jury, than from a judge who is likely to have once been a prosecutor and who is assumed to have "heard it all before" and thus be skeptical of a defendant's stories and excuses. Statistically speaking, it appears that judges on the whole do give defendants a fair hearing, and some argue that they are more likely to acquit than jurors, but there's no scientific means available to accurately assess the difference.