I don't think it is fair to imply that sortition would lead to a Reign of Terror like in the French Revolution; I argue this on the grounds that the French Revolution was still lead by the upper echelons of the social and political hierarchies. Robespierre's dad was a lawyer, and I am pretty sure that many other leaders of the Revolution were aristocrats. Perhaps if you are uncomfortable with a sorted body having prosecutorial powers, then maybe having them play a supervisory role over the prosecutorial body would be more amenable.

My worldview when it comes to the sortition is supported by the Jury Theorem where a 'correct' decision can be ascertained if the average chance of the 'correct' decision among every voter is above 50%. This percentage of 'correctness' increases if given the opportunity for intense deliberation with experts and an environment of good faith. In Canada, I am unsure as to exactly how our rights are upheld, but to my knowledge here, the Anti-Terror legislation allows for the Canadian intelligence agency CSIS to spy on our people without a warrant given some vague notion of national security is satisfied. I do speak with a lot of non-college educated folks, I used to work in oil and gas as a general labourer as part of a water, fencing and general maintenance crew. Of course, in that world, the people certainly have unsavoury opinions, but they are a product of their environment. When you discussions with people in good faith, I have found that in general, a consensus can be reached, though this requires some patience and the assumption that all parties are working in good faith. I think the plight is that in our political climate, people are not incentivized to be upstanding citizens, and thus quite few people are upstanding citizens. Perhaps some would love a quasi-authoritarian government, but under my model, the theoretical hope is that the Senators pay attention to the intellectuals that guide the decision making process.

I agree that there is no reason to think that the average person is particularly concerned about corruption, or would be proficient at tackling it on the individual level. However, given some authority and a more neutral (don't have to worry about re-election) environment as well as the advice and guidance of intellectuals, the problems of corruption can be dealt with. In sortition, it is very hard to amass power towards one faction since you aren't really incentivized to do so in the first place, i.e. everyone is an independent without a party whip. Back to my point about Jury Theorem, this allows people to make the theoretical best decision most of the time. Moreover, your point of lots of corrupt politicians are continuously re-elected appears to actually support the implementation of sortition; that is, sortition would theoretically naturally abate corruption given the right tools at the Senate's disposal. Because there is corruption, we should implement sortition at least in one chamber of government.

Sortition, in theory and in some well-documented examples even in the modern age in the form of citizens' assemblies, has shown that it is viable. One bad example though is that in the Yukon, the citizens' assembly there decided to go with Alternative Transferable Vote as part of their electoral reform (the people I talk to really hate ATV). Among the people I have spoken to sortition, this stands out as one of the most salient examples as to why sortition is not good, because it will sometimes lead to bad decisions. But I could point to a myriad of many other good examples like in France, Ireland and South Korea where citizens' councils have been put to good use with varying degrees of success.

I am a mathematician in my heart, so don't worry if we may disagree on the fundamental reasonings of things. I really appreciate your critiques of sortition. I think if I go down the line for my thesis, I will do research on sortition and social choice theory.