>I disagree. What if the trial is for a 30 year old mother of 4 who was physically abused for years and years and she fought back and killed her husband. Now if the first 12 potential jurors are all mothers in their early 30s who are married to abusive husbands, how impartial or balanced is that? Or the first 12 are all the abusive husbands? A jury of all men? I can think of other examples as well but that was a quick one.

>With both sides dismissing and accepting, at least it gets some appearance of a somewhat balanced jury.

That is the theory, yes.
However, in practice, the lawyers get to exclude whole categories of citizens.
They no longer exclude racial minorities, but political minorities are still systematically excluded. This is fundamentally wrong.

Like I said, if you accepted the first 12 people who would swear to be fair to both sides, you would get a much wider, truly representative, cross section of viewpoints.

The point of having citizen juries is that the case must pass "the stink test" for all citizens.

We can take freedom of press for granted in this country because of the Zenger case.
12 citizens refused to convict Zenger for printing "seditious libels" that were in fact true.

At that time, the law was "truth of a libel is no defense."
Now, to our american sensibilities, that is just ridiculous.
Convicting somebody of libel for printing the truth just does not pass the stink test.

http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/zenger/zengeraccount.html

The critical point here is that this fundamental american right to freedom of the press would have never happened if the lawyers had been able to hand pick a jury.

We all know in our hearts about the fundamental "circuit breaker" function of juries.
We are letting it slip away.