>Anything other than random citizens would necessitate a full time profession of juror and would thus render members of this profession employees of the state in some capacity. This violates the idea of an independent judiciary.
What if we restricted jury duty to actively practicing lawyers? Who better to judge the work of a lawyer than another lawyer.
Aren't they supposed to be judging whether the prosecution has presented enough evidence for there to be no reasonable doubt that the defendant did commit the crime?
There are lots of ways to twist the language around to make it confusing, and that's all that this does. They are not evaluating the performance of one or more lawyers. They are evaluating all of the evidence before them (all of it that is admissible, anyway) to determine whether the defendant is guilty according to law (as opposed to according to their own feelings, etc.).
You can tell they aren't there to judge the prosecuting attorney's performance because not all of the evidence comes from the prosecuting attorney. Thankfully. If it did, you'd have a lot more false convictions. That's why we have defense attorneys even when we can't afford them ourselves. Likewise, you are not judging the defense attorney's performance, because that would require you to start with an assumption of guilt. Nor are you there to judge the combined performance of both of them. That doesn't even make sense. They are not a team working together. They are there to put evidence before the jury (or try to dismiss evidence in various ways) and try to convince them of a particular interpretation of that evidence. So their performance is affecting the outcome, but they are not the ones being judged.
What if we restricted jury duty to actively practicing lawyers? Who better to judge the work of a lawyer than another lawyer.