Why should Juries have more discretion?

The bureaucrat is not free to aim at improvement. He is bound to obey rules and regulations established by a superior body. He has no right to embark upon innovations if his superiors do not approve of them. His duty and his virtue is to be obedient. -Mises

Because the judges don’t have enough! From the law.com article:

If it made Robert Bryan "sad and a little angry" that federal sentencing guidelines in the 1990s forced him to impose draconian prison terms on two drug defendants, one can only imagine how the Seattle federal judge feels now.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals vindicated his sentiments in December when a three-judge panel granted his 2005 request to let him reconsider the two jail terms, citing Bryan's courtroom expressions of dismay. The judge had filed his order because the 2005 U.S. Supreme Court case U.S. v. Booker, 543 U.S. 220, had made the sentencing guidelines optional.

But this didn’t apply retroactively to the case unless "extraordinary circumstances" existed. That draconian sentences were imposed based on unconstitutional guidelines is not an “extraordinary circumstance” is an assault on reason. Clearly the politicos don’t care about justice so the juries must.

Public Defender in Jail for Properly Representing His Client

The judge wanted this public defender to go to trial with less than a day of preparation and then jailed him when he refused. Instead of being an impartial third-party, the judge has the same pay master as the prosecutor:

A controversial Portage County judge has drawn the ire of national and state lawyers associations because he ordered the arrest of a county public defender. Judge John Plough ordered sheriff's deputies Wednesday to take Assistant Public Defender Brian Jones into custody because he was not prepared to go to trial.

He was held five hours before he was released on bond.

This is the second time Plough has ordered the arrest of a public defender, said Dennis Lager, the county's chief public defender. He said Plough also threatened to take similar action twice in 2006.

In each case, Lager said, Plough expected the lawyers to go to trial within a day or so of being assigned to the cases.

When Judges Become Politicians

Like anybody a position of power, judges are prone to bias and
corruption. In a new article in Forbes, Alexander Tabarrok quantifies how
much worse the damages are if the judge is an elected official.

In research published in the Journal of Law and Economics, Eric Helland, associate professor of economics at Claremont McKenna College, and I analyzed thousands of tort awards throughout the U.S. We found that awards against out-of-state defendants were 42% higher in states that use partisan elections to select their judges than in states that appoint judges; a $363,000 per-case increase on average.
…
Such awards help judges get re-elected. In a remarkably frank admission, Richard Neely, a West Virginia Supreme Court judge (now retired), explained the incentives that govern elected judges: "As long as I am allowed to redistribute wealth from out-of-state companies to injured in-state plaintiffs, I shall continue to do so. Not only is my sleep enhanced when I give someone else's money away, but so is my job security, because the in-state plaintiffs, their families and their friends will re-elect me."

No surprise here – people respond to incentives. Giving a jury greater
discretion to determine rewards will, at a minimum, give more power to
a group of people who are not directly incentivized to lean one way or
another. This serves as another reminder that bureaucrats in costume
shouldn't be given the benefit of the doubt anymore than the next guy.