"Edith looks up from a game of solitaire and casually mentions that she actually thinks the murder was committed by the accomplice, who was never found and is not on trial. But since the defendant’s lawyer did such a poor job exonerating him, she concludes, she’s going to deliver a guilty verdict. My jaw drops. No one questions her obviously flawed reasoning, because she’s on their side."
This, for me, was the most terrifying bit in the article. To convict a man of murder, and to send him to life in prison or perhaps to his own death, when you think he's innocent? It shocks me what people are capable of sometimes. But this article doesn't shock me, because I know what people are capable of. Kudos to the author for sticking to his moral compass in the face of adversity.
Brings back memories. I served on the jury when Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys was on trial for including a rude poster in one of their albums[1]. Jury deliberation was a circus. One woman hung the poster up (it was pretty rude [2]), looked at it for a while, and said "Kinda makes you horny".
Ahh yes, the PMRC. I remember those "concerned parents", led by Tipper Gore. The best part of that time was Dee Snider from Twisted Sister testifying before Congress (their song "We're not gonna take it" was squarely in the sights of the PMRC).
When John Denver testifies against you, you're really off track.
Of course she voted to acquit. So did the old guy who shouted "Nothing is obscene!" the moment he entered the jury deliberation room, despite the fact that Jello was not charged with obscenity. And the girl who said "The defense attorney is pretty cute."
"Distribution of harmful matter to minors." The law requires a warning that says it shouldn't be sold to minors. Instead, they put on a sticker with a snarky remark about how some people might find the contents objectionable, "but life is like that" (something like that). So kids were buying the album and parents were freaking out when they found the poster hanging in their bedrooms.
There was never really any notion about being charged with obscenity. Most people reject that out of hand anyway. The issue was that there is a law that attempts to ensure parents get some warning so they could decide if some materials may not be appropriate for their kids. The matter before the jury was to decide if that poster was that kind of material, and if the snarky sticker was sufficient warning.
Reading that quote was incredibly disheartening; That people could be so cavalier about sending a person to jail (possibly forever) even when there's obviously reasonable doubt. I've never served on a jury, but it seems like the state should put more effort into teaching jurors that "beyond a reasonable doubt" isn't just an abstract idea...
Don't worry this is very uncommon the vast majority of cases never see trial and are instead decided by the prosecutor threatening to destroy the life of a defendant guilty or not if they don't sign a (likely false) confession called a 'plea' in exchange for mercy.
Isn't it that the best way of not getting jury service is to admit that you know anything about law or logical reasoning? I have an impression that the system actively selects against right people for the job.
The reality is actually the opposite of what you're thinking. "Beyond reasonable doubt" is taken by MANY jurors to mean that _any_ doubt no matter how remote means "not guilty".
The idea is not that science or some "expert" judges those under trial.
It's that the society they live in finds them either guilty or not.
Jury's are representatives of what the society things happened.
It's an extremely democratic institution, and juries and their role they have been devised and praised by "trained people" including the very best legal minds.
Of course it's not fool prouf -- the same ways society and laws are not foul prof (e.g. consider racism). But those for things, an expert wouldn't help either.
That is not always true, it really does depend on the crime. Jury Nullification does still exist and is becoming more popular especially for things like Drug Laws.
Also some self defense cases are better for Jury, where as some may be better for a Bench Trial
It depends on if your guilt or innocent hangs on an emotional reaction, or a strict application of the law.
I've recounted my jury duty experience several times on HN (e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10056421). So, I won't retell the whole thing. The short version is it was a DUI trial for a guy having a party in his front yard and playing music (too) loudly from his truck. That is, he wasn't driving or planning to drive, but he was intoxicated with his keys in the ignition of an automobile – technically a DUI. I ended up being the sole not guilty vote. Technically, he broke the law, but I wasn't going to give the guy a DUI for that behavior – possibly a felony, probably lose/suspend his license, possibly lose a job, etc. Anyway, it was really hard to be the lone dissenter when everybody else just wants to be done and go home to their families or whatever.
I just wanted to comment that most people seem to be totally unaware of jury nullification, and you need to be careful explicitly mentioning the idea. Judges can and have removed jurors who are openly engaging in jury nullification.
So, educate yourself on the topic beforehand if you get a jury duty summons. Thankfully, I'd discussed the issue with a lawyer friend.
> That is not always true, it really does depend on the crime. Jury Nullification does still exist and is becoming more popular especially for things like Drug Laws.
How is that a counter-example to the guideline "if you're guilty you want a jury trial"? It sounds like you're saying if I'm guilty of drug possession I want a jury trial.
Some judges are anything but impartial, and are seemingly committed to getting a conviction at all costs. In fact this is one of the problems that the jury system is designed to protect us from.
You're saying a jury will reach the wrong verdict more than 50% of the time, and a bench will reach the right verdict more than 50% of the time? I don't disagree, but are there statistics?
That's not necessary. If we assume that both juries and judges pick the correct verdict with a certain probability independent of what the correct verdict is, then all that is required that the jury has a higher probability of being wrong than the judge.
Yep, makes sense. So is there some kind of data to back up the claim that a jury is wrong more often? Perhaps verdicts are more likely to be overturned for juries?
In this article, and apparently this happens a lot, jurors are not allowed to research the laws they are supposed to reach a verdict on. Also, the jurors cannot get the court transcript or ask the prosecution to repeat the charges.
How is this the best alternative? Why can't jurors learn what they are incarcerating for?
> In this article, and apparently this happens a lot, jurors are not allowed to research the laws they are supposed to reach a verdict on
The judge includes the law the defendant is charged with violating and an explanation of what must be proved and what legal defenses that are (with advice from both the prosecution and defense on what to include and on the wording) in the jury instruction material given to the jury before deliberation. Unless the judge and the defense attorney seriously screw up, that should give the jury everything they need to know about the relevant laws.
Part one, with jury #1, just considers the facts. It does not attempt to apply the law to the facts to render a guilty/not-guilty verdict.
Part two presents the facts as determined in part one to jury #2 (which was not present during part one), and jury #2 applies that law to those facts to render a verdict. The facts as presented to jury #2 are cleaned up to replace names with pseudonyms, and race, gender, etc., are removed (unless they are relevant to the applicable law).
Nothing can be as biased and conservative as "trained professional judges".
Not to mention they tend to reflect the interests and prejudices of their kind and class -- not the society at large, who is supposed to be the one whose moral system and will is to be enforced in the legal/justice system.
Is it really worse than delegating it to general population, whose interests and prejudices are shaped by bullshit media narratives, and whose primary interest in the case is to get out of it as fast as possible?
In Japan lay judges (citizens) were re-introduced into trials in order to offer defendants a possibly more sympathetic audience.
In Japan, due to quite a few idiosyncrasies[1], prosecutors achieve upwards of 95% conviction rates.
An imperfect jury system is likely better, in criminal cases, than having cozy professionals decide cases.
[1] often no attorneys during interrogation, forced confessions, detentions without charges, taking up only choice cases, declaring "accidents" rather than pursuing murder, etc...
My apologies, but I find your comment somewhat confusing.
> In Japan lay judges (citizens) were re-introduced into trials in order to offer defendants a possibly more sympathetic audience. In Japan, due to quite a few idiosyncrasies[1], prosecutors achieve upwards of 95% conviction rates.
> often no attorneys during interrogation, forced confessions, detentions without charges, taking up only choice cases, declaring "accidents" rather than pursuing murder, etc...
How are any of these problems solved by introducing lay judges ? Aren't they attacking the wrong part of the problem ?
> An imperfect jury system is likely better, in criminal cases, than having cozy professionals decide cases.
I find it hard to believe that professionals would be more incapable of sympathy.
Unfortunately I was talking about two things simultaneously without making the connection.
One, with professional juries (judges) a high conviction rate is achieved in Japan, possibly contributed to by the cozy relationship between attorneys and judges as well as some deficiencies in how its determined when to take a case in addition to laws and in addition to police misconduct.
One of the reasons (there were others, such as decreasing backlog) for the introduction of lay judges ("peer" jurors) was because it's thought they could prove more sympathetic to defendants.
> How are any of these problems solved by introducing lay judges ?
Haven't studied this, but I would expect that it's in order to break the cozy (word used above) inner-circle relationship of professional lawyers who work in courts, switching roles between judge and prosecutor. The problem being isolation of the legal profession from "lay people".
Impartiality and expertise are not necessarily correlated. In fact in my experience, experts tend to hold much stronger personal opinions about their area of expertise, than do members of the random general public.
I was going to post this same quote. It blows my mind. Not only does she think there's a reasonable chance he's innocent; she actually believes it's likely!
People have really skewed idea of what is the point of the system. It's not for a revenge or to find a scapegoat. It's to protect innocent, minimise violence.
I sat on a civil jury trial between a boilermaker in the Navy that had been exposed to asbestos and developed mesothelioma, and a company that made asbestos insulation.
Neither side could actually put the man and the company or its insulation in the same room at any point in the past. Lots and lots of companies made this type of insulation. (In an "accidental" outbust from one of the attorneys that we were instructed to ignore, we learned that he was in fact suing most of them.) The Navy kept meticulous records about where he had worked, and both the Navy and the company did the same about work orders and where the insulation had been installed. The best evidence the man had was "I saw their truck in the parking lot once".
This type of civil trial only required a 9/12 majority and the other jurors really only saw this as a chance to stick it to the company. "Of course this man should be repaid for the damage done to him!" Any sort of nuance like, "okay sure but should this company be the one to pay it?" was totally lost. He's hurt, so somebody should pay up. That was it. That was their justice. The jury instructions like the actual claims to damages were totally ignored.
I feel the same way. The three times I served on a jury were all the same. Very few people bothered to read or try to understand the jury instructions. Few considered the evidence that was presented. Most were utterly clueless, totally lacking the ability to perform any logical reasoning. Most just voted their biases.
Although, if you have a sharp attorney he could very well get a hung jury for you even if the evidence is slam dunk for a conviction. He just needs to be really good at jury selection.
these same people are voting for your president or prime minister or MP.
If anything, the (unfortunately, long term..) solution is to educate these people, not to abolish jury duty.
Good luck with that. We'd have to start with totally remaking news media, or even getting rid of them altogether - it's them who present a new outrage every day with a handy judgement to cache and retrieve the next time you see a similar looking situation.
But "free speech!", "free media - the cornerstone of democracy!", something something.
Remove economic incentives from news media, perhaps. You'd think news-organizations-as-charities would work, but even being donation-driven still incentivizes populist pandering at the expense of real journalism.
We need something that is to current journalism as the Senate is to the House: unable to be blown around by society's ephemeral tastes.
The simplest method is probably to pay for journalism through taxes. The BBC is a decent model. Ideally we'd want to retain a multiplicity of viewpoints, though. Maybe a BBC-alike as a grant-funding organization, where small independent journalist groups get grants to go out and investigate, in exchange for an agreement to publish their stories onto the BBC-alike's news wire service (which would then be freely licensed to distributors—basically putting those stories into the public domain.)
Rather than the BBC-alike deciding who to hire, let a Journalist's Guild decide who's good enough to publish; anyone allowed into the profession will be trusted to have done something valuable whenever they submit a story, and will be automatically paid out. It's the Guild's responsibility (i.e. that of the other Guild members) to catch their peers submitting nonsense and report them, and have those people's journalistic credentials suspended or disbar them entirely.
That'd neatly realign the concept of "journalistic integrity" or "journalistic ethics" to stand at the same strength-of-force on journalists as the equivalent concepts in medicine and law do for their professionals.
That's it, but I'm out of ideas how to do it. Charities are not good enough; you need to disconnect the incentives for writing the stories from how readers like them. News, after all, is about observable reality so it shouldn't be affected by the moods of the society.
Yeah, BBC may be a step in the right direction. The grant-funding organization idea is interesting. Or maybe the reverse? Let's make news just like a public agency - collecting data (stories) and releasing it as a public service, just like NOAA does with weather? But then again, we'd need a way to incentivize the reporters to dig into government/whoever-funds-this problems and make sure that such reports get published as well.
It's a hard problem, and alternative solutions won't be perfect either, but the current situation of constant outrage-fueled brainwashing is taking a heavy toll on the ability of our society to reason, so IMO it's worth considering a change.
BTW. I think that a regular change of such systems may not be a bad idea. The problem with media, or with justice, or democracy, or even with markets start when they're getting too optimized, and thus start to deviate from the original purpose. So i.e. if you look at the arguments about why democracy is awesome and all, they all seem to make sense... if applied to the system from 100 years ago, back when it wasn't so thoroughly gamed. We want our systems efficient, but not too efficient, because they're not perfectly aligned with our shared values.
Presumably this pandering is less effective on people that have the sort of education being talked about here. (if not I'm not sure I agree that such education is a worthwhile goal).
So why are you so certain that the problem starts with the media?
> This type of civil trial only required a 9/12 majority and the other jurors really only saw this as a chance to stick it to the company. "Of course this man should be repaid for the damage done to him!" Any sort of nuance like, "okay sure but should this company be the one to pay it?" was totally lost. He's hurt, so somebody should pay up. That was it. That was their justice. The jury instructions like the actual claims to damages were totally ignored.
Most "justice systems" on Earth are really just thinly-veiled vengeance systems, unfortunately.
I was on a civil trial jury for a very similar situation. Construction worker 30 years ago, exposed to asbestos, lung cancer. Oh, and also a lifelong smoker. Originally sued ~30 companies, whittled down to 3 by the time the trial started, 1 by the time the trial ended, a company that mined asbestos.
The striking thing was the degree to which the other jurors seemed to be making decisions based almost completely on emotion and which side told a better and more sympathetic story, with little regard for facts or reason. One of the jurors at one point gave a blatantly incorrect explanation of a simple statement about probabilities, and got angry when I corrected her.
The jury ended up awarding a pretty significant amount of money, because the plaintiff was relatively poor and sympathetic, and because the company had acted somewhat shady with regard to knowledge about the dangers of asbestos and warning labels. That's despite the tenuous connection between the asbestos they mined and the asbestos that may have been in his lungs (there was no direct evidence of asbestos in his lungs), and the significant probability that the lung cancer was caused by his smoking and not asbestos at all.
The scary part is that I felt like most of the jury was at least trying to do the right thing, using the cognitive tools that they had available to them (mainly empathy and reasoning like "they acted shady so they deserve to be fined"). If people didn't even try, it could have been much worse. As it is, though, I pretty much lost my faith in the jury system.
> In the end, only two men of color make it to the jury, and I am one of them. The other is Latino. There are two Latina women, one African-American woman, and one Asian woman. The remaining six jurors are white.
Thats basically the racial composition of the U.S. Indeed, people of color are over-represented in that jury.
Juries are drawn from local populations, whose demographics can differ radically from the national average. We can't know whether or not people were under-represented or over-represented without knowing where this took place.
Juries are composed of 12 people. Saying there are discrepancies between the jury pool and the US of less than 8 percentage points is somewhat silly -- making even the smallest change would not reduce the size of those errors.
Indeed. One jury is far too small a sample size to draw any conclusions (too obvious to even state but I did anyway).
When comparing proportions (in this case racial makeup of juries versus racial makeup of the population) you want a sample size large enough that you have at least 5 expected cases for each group. In this case the expected cases are the population proportion (p) times the number of jurors (n). So you would need n * p >= 5 and since Asians are the lowest proportion at 5% you would need data on at least 100 jurors. Then you could do a Chi-square goodness-of-fit test to see if something is really going on.
If it seems like I'm being geeky it's only because I just recently worked on a problem exactly like this, determining if jury demographics matched population demographics. Turns out in many cases there IS something going on, but then the reasons for it aren't always what you think. One reason is that in some communities there is a shortage of eligible jurors due to high rates of felony convictions.
In the particular case, this jury has two missing whites and a full extra "hispanic", so swapping the hispanic out for a white would improve everything. The other missing white is filled in for by a partially-black partially-Asian guy.
really? There are places in Texas or California, for example, where the population is over 50% latino. In that case having only 1 of 12 Latino jurors would be sign of something, right?
A single jury is still too small of a sample size to be statistically significant. If you have more than two groups in the population (races in this case) then you need at least 5 expected cases of each in order for analysis of the actual versus expected proportions to be meaningful, which you can't get with 12 jurors. The closest you can get to it is if there are 3 groups evenly divided in the population, which gives you 4 expected cases each. If you had only 2 groups in the population that were each 50% then you would have 6 expected cases each. However, when analyzing sample proportions of 2 groups you need at least 10 cases each.
Those minimum case numbers are needed in order for the central limit theorem to be applicable in the statistical analysis.
Huh, interesting, thanks for the explanation. Is there a nice summary/term I can search for that explains your needed sample side for things to be statistically significant?
Comparing proportions is the general topic. You are typically comparing a sample proportion (like the demographics of a jury) to a population proportion (like the demographics of a community from which jurors are drawn).
There was one black woman and no black men [1], so that should be 1/12=8% Black. I don't see anything in the article that lets us figure out what category the author belongs in. He's a male non-black non-latino who describes himself as a person of color, which leaves open a lot of possibilities.
[1] "Every black man had a story: police harassment, spurious arrests, intimidation. They were all eliminated"
Oh, I misunderstood that he was a black male. It's a mystery to me what race a non-black non-latino person of color is.
The sample size is too damn small!
Added: I guess I'm not used to the term "person of color." It means "a person who is not white or of European parentage." Many people other than blacks and latinos could identify as people of color.
On the other hand, we're supposed to be judged by a jury of our peers so, demographics aside, it's disturbing how often a person of color is convicted by a primarily white jury. We're seeing nationwide testimony, by how certain isolated events are receiving reactions that indicate that they aren't isolated, that police misconduct towards minorities is far more common that we white people would like to believe. And yet this story shows just how easy it would be for the minority jury members (both in terms of race and dissenting opinion) to cave in and allow someone to be convicted based almost entirely on the presupposition that the police did nothing wrong.
> On the other hand, we're supposed to be judged by a jury of our peers so, demographics aside, it's disturbing how often a person of color is convicted by a primarily white jury.
What the hell? Are you saying that people of color are automatically peers with each other because of their race?
peer: a person of the same age, status, or ability as another specified person.
No, over-represented with respect to the U.S. population which is irrelevant. Chinese people were criminally underrepresented with respect to the population of the world. It depends on the local demographics which we don't have access to. What we do have access to is the fact that there were many, many more people of color in the selection pool who were removed because of racial discrimination.
That statement you quote does not imply that the author is black. All it says is that he's not white and not Latino. That leaves at least Asian, Indian (either definition), and Pacific Islander open.
This article is an interesting narrative depicting the exact sort of nuance that the term "reasonable doubt" is intended to elicit once criminal prosecution reaches jury deliberation. As others have noted, this seems a somewhat comfortable result, albeit at a human cost. Justice delayed/served.
The author touches on it, but another interesting aspect of the criminal justice system is the funding, politics and police practices that motivate the prosecution of minor crimes that never see a court room. Many unnamed players in this story had vested financial and political interests in particular outcomes. In this case, the stakes were large enough that the jurors lost sleep and distressed over the details. One wonders if softening the charges to lesser charges would have weakened his resolve.
It's poetic that at trial, the defendant, the witnesses, the prosecutor, the defense attorney, the judge and the jury cannot lie. Police, however, are trained to do so during investigations as a best practice in pursuit of justice. That fact probably contributed to the author's initial distrust in the system, sewing the seeds of this mistrial.
I've served on two juries, one for murder and one for a far lesser offense. In one the defendant was a fairly wealthy young man; in the other a poor woman. One defendant was guilty; the other not.
My experience in both those trials was nothing like the author's here. Indeed, I wonder how much of his experience was due to his own concern about things like race and politics instead of, y'know, guilt and innocence. Perhaps had he not been looking down on his colleagues and arguing from emotion, but rather from facts, he could have convinced them to find not guilty.
In both cases, we started with a preliminary vote. In both cases, we argued cordially, with a deep and abiding interest in justice and what the right thing would be. We took turns arguing against our own positions, in order to try to better discover the truth of the matter. We were scrupulous in our decisions, and I feel confident we chose correctly both times.
Both experiences were profoundly inspiring. I'd do it again in a heartbeat.
As an aside, I won't claim that the author is lying, because this may vary from state to state, but after both of my cases the judge and both sides of lawyers came in and spoke with us, asking questions about the case and our decisions; there was no notion of post-decision jury confidentiality the author alludes to.
Also, we were intructed in both cases to use our life experiences, not ignore them as the author indicates. Again, this may vary from state to state. Suffice it to say that the system the author depicts is not the one I experienced twice.
I was the foreman in a murder trial, and the experience, for me, was also inspiring and uplifting. There was only one bump in the road for us. Early on, people starting bringing up a hesitation of rendering a guilty verdict, for fear that the man would be put to death, and they didn't know if they could do that. I don't know about other districts, but we weren't voting on the sentence. The judge would do that later. It was an easy argument to point out that this wasn't under our purview, and people dropped that concern quickly.
We were done in 2 hours. It was a drug robbery; someone got shot and died. "Felony murder" makes it really clear: everyone involved is guilty. The statute made things very easy.
The thing that haunts me about my case is that, out of 3 people (the shooter and his 2 accomplices, who were to be tried together in a separate case), our guy produced the gun for the police. If anything, the case made me wonder why there isn't tribal knowledge (unfortunate phrase wording, in this case) among inner-city, young, black men that YOU DO NOT DO THIS? It was open-and-shut, despite all the nonsense about a coerced confession and its subsequent retraction.
> I don't know about other districts, but we weren't voting on the sentence. The judge would do that later.
The one time I was called to jury duty, the judge told us the same. We're not doing the sentencing. We're just there to decide if the evidence shown should render a guilty verdict.
But I found that to be sort of a half-truth. Sure, we are not giving the actual sentence. But if I give a man a guilty verdict, I can't really pretend that I had nothing to do with his sentence.
If I know someone is likely to burn down a house, and I give him a match, how can I pretend to not have anything to do with the house burning down? I knew it was likely going to happen. Likewise, if I know the judge is likely to send someone to jail for 30 years, how can I pretend to not have anything to do with it if I render a guilty verdict? My verdict gives the judge the ability to sentence, just like my hypothetical match gave the hypothetical psycho the ability to burn down the house.
I have served once and would have to agree it was frustrating. Some people on the jury were not willing to even talk about their viewpoint after a few hours into deliberation.
> The judge has already instructed us directly that we are not to do any research on the law while sitting on this jury. This is the first of several times I will violate those instructions.
Why do people do this? Why blatantly disregard the instructions of the judge when you're tasked with determining the guilt or innocence of someone and potentially sending them to jail, ruining their professional career, etc?
To completely ignore the instructions of a judge when tasked with something this important should have much more severe consequences than being dismissed and causing a mistrial.
Honestly I can't imagine ever abiding by a rule like that. No outside research? So I'm just supposed to trust everything other jurors say and ignore facts and statistics? I think not. Juries are already horribly misinformed as it is (see: almost every case involving tech/computers) and to rule that no one can even attempt to educate themselves is quite frankly disgusting.
You are to take the case as presented by the prosecution, the case as presented by the defense, and rule one way or the other.
You are not, as someone with no legal training, no background in law or litigation, and no experience in the courtroom outside of being on a jury, supposed to start reading decades old case law and attempting to interpret it.
Lawyers are not paid $300 an hour because they've come up with a sweet gig, it's because the average person (yes, even the average software developer) does not have the context or experience to understand the finer points of the laws in question.
Yes you interpret it, as it is described and presented (in lay terms) by both the defense and prosecution, as filtered by an impartial judge.
And incompetent representation is grounds for an appeal. I'm not sure what exactly that has to do with the fact that John Doe off the street is probably not equipped to read primary source material on legal precedent and interpret it correct on his own.
The guy that wrote the article talks about doing "research" in one breath and then telling the judge something he heard from Law & Order in the next. I'm assuming people like him are the reason for the "no outside research" rule.
Wait so this article is basically him saying that the system worked?
That's the impression that I got. Even disregarding his early learnings towards high-school level leftist protest and mistrust of the government, doesn't his careful consideration of the case show the reasons why we use a jury system? Even if the 'mob' e.g. the other jurors decide that a person is guilty, one or two reasonable arguments can decide otherwise.
It seems to me that everything worked out as it should. I wouldn't feel bad if I was the author. (oh and he'll be back in court, serving a case in most states only gives you a 3-5 year reprieve from jury duty)
If you admit you were ever on a hung jury, you are much more likely to be struck from the list, so while the author will have to serve jury duty, there’s a good chance the author won’t be on another jury any time soon, especially in another serious case.
I wish that had worked for me. I served 3 times, first time was a hung jury, next two were burglary and battery. Terrible experiences all of them. Wish I could have been excused.
I really enjoyed this article, but it made me realize that I don't have a good understanding the goals of the voir dire process. It reminded me of job interviews, where certain questions are off-limits in order to hopefully limit the effects of some of the personal biases of the interviewer.
From a game design point of view, it's fascinating. The selection process attempts to give both opponents an equal chance of eliminating undesired pieces from the board. But from the system's point of view, balancing that power against the delivery of justice as innocent-until-proven-guilty/burden-of-proof/reasonable-doubt seems kinda suspect.
I'm totally going down the rabbithole reading about this over the weekend :)
Yes. They asked if I had served on a jury before and if the jury had reached a verdict. The battery case was the second time I served. I answered yes that I had served and no the jury did not reach a verdict. They then asked what the prior case was about - maybe since it wasn't related they didn't boot me. The third time I served it was a burglary case so I answered that yes I had served twice before, once was a hung jury and once we arrived at a verdict. No further questions.
I believe his point is that although it worked in this instance it seems likely that it DOESN'T work in many other cases.
Then again 10 people would argue the system doesn't work because 2 stubborn knuckleheads refused to issue a guilty verdict when that obviously should have been the ruling.
Not quite jury duty but this story did strike a chord.
I'm someone who strongly believes, in theory anyway, in the presumption of innocence and that everyone is entitled to a strong defense. A prosecutor should have to earn a conviction. However I also feel strongly that perpetrators of some crimes, upon conviction, should face harsh punishments.
Earlier this week, we got a message from a defense attorney inquiring about our services to assist with a criminal case. There were no other details left, so we googled the attorney and found that this attorney is involved in a very high-profile criminal case defending someone accused of an extremely heinous crime. It's a Law and Order-type crime, and it happens to be in one of the category crimes that I find to be particularly egregious.
I'm torn. The part of me that believes in the right to a strong defense wants to assist, not necessarily because I support the defendant, but because the prosecutor shouldn't be a rubber stamp. The other part is wondering what happens if I help defendant get off and he hurts someone else.
We left a message with the attorney asking for more detail and haven't heard back. It may be that the attorney found someone else, decided our field won't help, or maybe just can't afford us. But if we do hear back, if we are able to assist, and if the attorney does want to retain us, I don't know how we'll respond.
I hope I have the courage to say yes. But I don't know that I do.
(throwaway account to mask my normal HN identity).
> I'm torn. The part of me that believes in the right to a strong defense wants to assist, not necessarily because I support the defendant, but because the prosecutor shouldn't be a rubber stamp. The other part is wondering what happens if I help defendant get off and he hurts someone else.
If the defendant has committed the crime, but the verdict is not guilty; then there was insufficient evidence to meet the burden of proof, and the system worked as designed. You have done your part as a defense expert witness to help the system work as designed. It may also be the case that the prosecutor does a poor job of presenting evidence, or law enforcement did a poor job of collecting or preserving evidence.
The goal of a criminal case is not to determine if a defendant is guilty or innocent or not guilty; it's to determine if the evidence shows if the defendant is guilty, beyond any reasonable doubt, and if not, to acquit the defendant of the specific charges and leave the matter closed. It's not quite the same. You don't always get one of those results though, if you have a hung jury, or other exception.
Even if the defendant is guilty, he should have a strong defense -- the system (and the state) must be kept honest.
And what if you don't help, and the defendant is innocent but goes to jail for a heinous crime they did not commit? Does that possibility hold less weight with you?
---
> not necessarily because I support the defendant
Suppose the defendant is innocent until proven guilty. Now that they're innocent, would you like to support them?
In general no, in this specific case, yes, because the evidence is so overwhelming. Think "twenty dead bodies found buried in defendant's basement next to bloody knives with defendant's fingerprints." I know this might be an unsatisfactory response, but I really can't be more specific without pointing to the actual case and I don't want to get into specifics in case I do decide to assist.
Ah, then you needn't worry much, because when your evidence is presented the jury will be thinking instead about the twenty dead bodies buried in the basement, right?
If the evidence is overwhelming, a little defense shouldn't hurt, and if it isn't, maybe they're innocent after all.
Why do you assume the defendant is guilty? What if he's innocent, but your refusal to help provide a strong defense causes him to be found guilty? Why do you presume to do the judge and jury's job for them, but with no access to the facts or judicial procedure?
If prosecutors can ensure that a strong defense is impossible simply by accusing someone of an appropriately heinous crime, then the criminal justice system has failed. Please don't be complicit in that.
I really appreciate the cognitive dissonance you're experiencing related to this case. Blindly accepting presumption of innocence, which I support in the justice system, is not something people typically do. This situation seems similar to the idea of jury nullification, which the article mentioned. If you choose not to help because you disagree with potentially helping the system make the wrong choice, I would support it for the same reason we choose juries. In the existing American justice system, the primary reason for juries is to have peers not ingrained in the system making judgement calls on the evidence they have.
As a non American, the USA justice system honestly sounds like the worst possible system for justice imaginable. I don't think I could design a worse system if I tried. Do you all just keep the system because it keeps so many people employed following the pointless bureaucracy of it all?
The people making the decisions have no training in law at all, yet they have to decide if the law was broken. They get a brief spoken explanation of the law, but only after they have been given the testimony. Why would you not have someone trained in the law decide if the law was broken? Why would you not allow the jury to interrogate the witnesses when they must bear the responsibility of the decision? The idea seems to be that random people off the street will somehow be more willing to consider all angles and if they disagree, you get another random sampling and try again. Try enough times and eventually you'll get a bunch of people who are annoyed enough by being forced into jury duty to just agree so they can go home. Real justice right there.
You might say that the jury system allows for a justice even if the judge is compromised. But obviously it doesn't - the judge controls what information can be fed to the jury and the jury must make the decision based off that evidence. If the judge is biased, the jury will be forced into a particular decision anyway. Why not just have the judge do their job and have an appeals system and punishments on the judge for bad decisions? And yes, that system works fine. See the current Oscar Pistorius trial for a working system (imo).
Every complex system can be defined in terms of trade-offs, right? Trial by Jury has a fairly extensive history outside of the US, and while not perfect it is a balance against a potentially corrupt establishment. I think if I had to choose trial by a jury of my peers, or by a judge, I'd probably opt for my peers.
I think the bigger problem in the US appears to be mandatory minimums, prosecutors driven by win ratios, pre-trial plea bargaining, and clearly a deep vein of institutional racism (something many other countries also suffer from).
Beyond that, I thought the original article was beautifully written, I enjoyed it.
The thing is, "peers" has had its meaning mutated beyond recognition over the ages.
A jury of your peers used to mean exactly that - people who were familiar with you, the social circumstances that lead to your being in the dock, who had empathy both for you and for the law. Part of the tradition comes from the Frankpledge and tythings, which required you and your peers to collectively police one another, and endure collective punishment if you failed in your duty to justice. In addition, early juries were responsible for investigating the purported crime themselves, and were allowed to acquire information for themselves.
This of course all lead to a degree of corruption (in fact, significant corruption in later years), but was potentially an ultimately fairer system, less biased in favour of conviction.
Having a jury prevaricate on the outcome of a trial concerning someone who comes from a different world to them, who don't understand the nuance of the reality that faces them, who are not allowed to educate themselves about legal facts or the facts of the charges, frankly beggars belief - but it's what we have.
> In order to show that the prosecutor’s dismissal of a juror was discriminatory, a defendant must show that it was based on race, ethnicity, or gender.
A good legal defense is already out of reach of many people.
I'd think this alone (fta) should cause a judge to throw out the prosecution from the case:
> The first thing the prosecutor did during voir dire was ask all the men of color whether we trusted cops. Every black man had a story: police harassment, spurious arrests, intimidation.
> That the defense didn't object to this, or ask the alternate ("Does anyone in here intrinsically trust the police?") perplexes me.
Actually, it didn't occur to me. You made it sound very simple but I didn't see it as a possibility at all. So if someone says yes, we just throw them out of the jury. Now I think this should be a standard question for any case where the police is a witness.
Well, on second thought, we will probably still need a sympathetic judge if we are throwing out someone "with cause". There are only so many we can throw out without a cause.
I thought this was commonly asked, but maybe it varies by state. In my city in Pennsylvania we get a standardized form that does ask this question. It states, "Would you be more likely to believe the testimony of a police officer or any other law enforcement officer because of his or her job?" [1]
So what kind of answer are they expecting for that question? I genuinely can't tell. It seems obvious to me that people who answer "yes" should be excluded, yet I feel the opposite is true.
"are not allowed to educate themselves about legal facts or the facts of the charges"
Because they're not trained lawyers, and they haven't passed the bar. It's to keep them impartial and prevent them from presuming they know the law better and therefor enter with a conclusion without all of the facts.
That's why the judge (who, depending on the level, is either directly-elected or appointed by the person you elected) is there, not to determine guilt, but to be the impartial legal expert and identify the points of law to be decided on, and act as umpire to respect the rights of the plaintiff and accused. These are tasks that just cannot be given to the jury without establishing some sort of certification on them, which would remove from ordinary people the ability to determine justice.
That's rebutted by the Janet Malcolm quote the author includes.
The absences of knowledge isn't impartiality: people don't render decisions from ignorance + logic.
They simply fabricate their best attempt at knowledge and apply that to the situation. So in this respect, it's not a choice between "relying on legal experts to provide legal information" and "using your own amateur legal knowledge" but rather "bastardizing legal experts' explanations to fit your own views" and "using your own amateur legal knowledge."
From that perspective, the latter seems a lot more preferable...
I think the intent is to have people "relying on legal experts to provide legal information". What often happens is "bastardizing legal experts' explanations to fit your own views". I suspect there's a fear that trying to apply the law on one's own leads to the latter happening more. But one could argue that it happens anyways, as you point out.
I wouldn't argue the absence of bias, we seem to be in agreement there, and I think that's the real point of the article. A lot of the arguments on this thread seem to be aimed at the jury system in general. In my opinion, it's not a fault of the jury system, but a fault of people. The jury system, and the instructions given (that we're debating now) are meant to try and minimize that, but they're far from perfect.
The question then becomes, "how do we best get jurors the information they need, while preserving their impartiality?" And I think that's a hard thing to do.
I think a start would be to have a truly impartial legal consultation system that jurors could avail themselves of at any point. The responses would be given with a minimum of contextual information about the case necessary to answer the question.
In practice, the judge is supposed to serve this role, no? But I think it's readily apparent from the variances in judge activism that judges are people too. In hearing all the details about the case they can't help but form an opinion and are in a position to act on that opinion to varying degrees should they so choose.
Juries are weird. Supposed to inject mercy into the system, right? They are your 'peers' and supposed to know better than the lawyers about your situation. Deliberately not experts in law, and not supposed to be. I'm not sure 'impartiality' and legal information are what Juries are about.
I sat on a jury once. The way the judge explained to us how we should decide which evidence to consider or not consider, especially with regards to evidence that is 'clear and convincing' was extremely convoluted. And this is from someone who works in very convoluted systems, has read significant amounts of law, worked with lawyers, and who has taken classes in law. I can only imagine how other jurors who haven't had any significant experience with legal matters felt.
That's the job of the defense, who's trained and has done the research. It's their job to call bullshit on the prosecution in your presence.
So you have two sides who are trained and have (hopefully!) done the research i.e, the facts of the case. Provided they have (and the judge can and will throw out cases where this hasn't been done), then the judge will instruct on the points of law being decided here, which the jury will then decide on.
It's far from perfect, because people aren't perfect. But it's a degree better than the State simply deciding your guilt.
Sometimes the parties show up with half a case, the jury can't agree, and the foreman throws up their hands and says "This is all bollocks", and everyone goes home. Which is what happened in the article.
Which might not exist depending on the jury's job. See a few recent of the recent cases were a jury decided to not indict police officers for killing blacks based on citations from the law given by the DA/SA which were "accidentally" wrong.
Indictments are different. There's no defense because no one's been charged. (high profile cases aside, this is to keep the potential accused from even being mentioned because no charges have been given.) So it's entirely a matter of determining if there's enough cause to go to trial. Once at that stage, then the person becomes an accused, and defense becomes involved.
Yes you make a series of perfectly good points, and I learned about the Frankpledge, so thanks for that.
I agree it is not a utopian system by any regard, but I still think a country that has trial by jury is superior to one with bench trials only. Perhaps not in each individual case, but as a means of rebalancing the power of the establishment vs the people.
I've a friend who is a prosecutors assistant in Australia, having quite a dim view of the ability of my peers I asked him just last week how he rated the performance of the trials he had watched and he said he didn't think he had ever seen a jury get it wrong.
Then again he's just a big bag of relatively well educated prejudice and blind-spots like all of us, so there is that.
Yes, but the counterpoint is that if they let their buddy off the hook and this is later found to be the case, they all end up on a considerably pointier hook.
Speaking of, "the hook" was what you got in the Ottoman Empire instead of a jury trial. You'd be sat upon a large metal hook until you confessed or died.
The US justice systems != all jury systems. I've experienced the justice system in both England and Scotland (they're different!), from the Scottish perspective as a police officer and the English one as a member of a jury on two cases.
In both instances the lawyers who practice, especially in more serious cases, need "a right of audience" - that is they are either an English barrister/Scottish advocate or a solicitor who has undergone additional training. For a case like a murder trial both sides will have solicitors who appoint experienced counsel to actually make the argument in court. This is the key that the American system doesn't have - those counsel almost always act for both defence and prosecution - they are not professional prosecutors or defenders. Some specialise in one direction or the other, but they avoid the tribalism and chasing of conviction rates. There is the equivalent of the DA, that is the senior state lawyers who rarely actually appear in court, but they come up through the tradition of the independent bar.
What that leads to is a prosecution and defence that both tend towards the interest of justice. Given that you end up with the professionals all striving to test the burden of proof, not grandstanding - which leads to a more harmonious jury experience. Many of my friends from university became lawyers, some of the brightest minds in the country practice at the criminal bar and conduct "legal aid" defences - i.e. act as public defenders. It is the equivalent of the defence attorney in the article's case being a Harvard Law graduate.
No legal system is perfect, many are starved of funds, every one has had prominent scandals over the years. I would submit that the jury system is still a valuable check and balance and works remarkable well when combined with an independent, professional, bar which avoids perverse incentives.
Have you read into how big a sham our grand juries are? I'm currently serving on a federal grand jury, and several times a month they pay travel and per diem for dozens of people to listen to a one-sided argument by a US Assistant District Attorney to bring a case to trial. No defense is offered, and they can withhold as much evidence as they like. It's a total waste of time, and I'm sure costs the tax payers millions of dollars a year. After witnessing how ridiculous the whole process, I read that in most countries the prosecutor simply offers their evidence to a judge, who determines probable cause.
But the most outrageous stories you've heard recently about grand juries are that even though they'll "indict a ham sandwich," police officers accused of crimes rarely get indicted because it's in the prosecutor's best interest not to aggravate the department from whom they receive most of their work.
And it does cost money...money, in my opinion is well spent, because in brings in skeptical people such as yourself with the power to check an overzealous prosecutor with simply arresting people on flimsy charges.
There's no defense because no one has been charged; and if you decided that the prosecutor is full of shit, then it means an innocent person is not disrupted or tainted with legal action. That they withold evidence is to protect their sources....which is a trade-off for them, because to withhold is to weaken their case.
I see nothing ridiculous about it at all, really. You're serving a hugely important role as a check on the ability for the executive to go after people. It's a rare occasion where the government is directly answerable to YOU. Hold them to a high standard. And if you think they're trying to pull one over on you, the people, send them packing.
I recently served on a New York grand jury and in my experience the biggest problem was that in 38/40 cases we only heard one side of the story. There were two cases where the defendants testified. Like the other cases, the story of the other witnesses (often cops, sometimes civilians, sometimes some of each) was quite straightforward... until the defendant testified.
It may have been in the defendants' best interest to "muddy the waters" as much as possible, but in both cases we obtained impartial evidence (video, 3rd party records) that corroborated parts of the defendants' stories and conflicted with those of the police officers. (There were other parts of the story where the reverse was true too). In both cases once we heart the defendant's side we needed additional evidence, beyond what the DA had initially provided, for us to be able to decide on whether or not to indict.
Wo some cases it is hard to imagine there being another side (somebody is accused of selling drugs to an under cover cop or there's video of somebody committing the crime), but it makes me wonder if how many of the others were less straightforward than they seemed.
I'd be interested to know under what circumstances a defense is called in during an indictment hearing. Maybe it depends on the evidence being presented, and whether or not it could be refuted easily (before going to trial?) I dunno. Interesting, thanks for sharing.
It can still ruin a life. The social consequences of being indited can be the worst part of some crimes. Especially for charges that people keep saying 'well better safe than sorry'.
Absolutely. That's why, as some people asked elsewhere, why there's no defense. Because they haven't been disturbed yet (in most cases). No reason to drag them in and suffer the social stigma because of some overzealous prosecutor's witch hunt.
You raise many good points, and I don't disagree with many of the faults you point out. However, there's other considerations at play.
The purpose behind a "trial by one's peers" is to ensure that the people, and not the government, is delivering the verdict. The judge's role is to instruct the jury on the points of law being argued on, because he or she (along with the other lawyers in the room) is the trained expert.
For the trial to have gotten to this point, the judge needs to determine that there's enough evidence to even bring the case. There's already been an expert check prior to the jury stage to determine if there's a case at all.
Of course, as the article points out, many cases aren't exactly "Law and Order". (This has been cited as having an influence on cases), in that there simply aren't the resources on behalf of both the prosecution and the defense to pile together tons of evidence or research every possible defense. I liked the references to 12 Angry Men for this reason, because the case in that story had little to go on.
The jury trial system, while seeming strange in all of the restrictions, are intended to try and obtain an untainted jury pool and find those who are as objective as possible. To the author's point that "all of the people of color had been weeded out", I'd note to the defense that it'd be wise to ask the jury pool if they believed people of color to be more likely to commit a crime, or other question to determine a presumption of guilt (just as the prosecution had weeded out those with a presumption of innocence.)
I can think of far worse systems of justice whereby state-appointed judges hand down judgements and sentences behind closed doors. So I'm skeptical about the USA's system being the worst.
But it's certainly imperfect, and that's because judgements are handed down by imperfect people. And as I'm sure as any African-American will attest, it's hard to feel you're being judged impartially when you're looking at a jury of 12 white men.
But you could switch to any number of systems, and at the end of the day it's simply men judging men. The problem is not solved completely by a system, but by solving ourselves.
I found it heartening though that in this story, the structure of things helped. With everything arrayed against the defendant, there was no conviction. It just takes one person, one doubt, to look and go "I'm not certain" and that's it.
And that's exactly what happened. And exactly the way it should be.
> As a non American, the USA justice system honestly sounds like the worst possible system for justice imaginable.
You just have to love a justice system where the police chief, the district attorney and the judge are political offices and must appeal to the masses.
In the UK, the Crown Prosecution Service is supposed to act in the public interest. Not indulge the public's every whim.
It's an imperfect system, but they do put a lot of care into weighing the different factors, far more than I ever will. I'm happy it's their job and not mine.
The chief DA is elected in Texas. The police chief isn't elected but works for the Mayor/City Council. Many judges are elected and others are appointees. Differences in local politics and structure exist, but IMO it is fair to say that those positions are political.
>>and must appeal to the masses.
As to GP's assertion that those people must appeal to "the masses", I think that one must be very careful as to how they define "the masses"; to me "masses" is not the correct word since IMO there is usually a much smaller faction of the local population(s) of people that vote, and/or are active in local politics.
"I imagine what an inverse 12 Angry Men would be like, starting with 11 jurors ready to acquit and Henry Fonda as the only one willing to convict. "
There's a Japanese film, 12 Tender Japaneses, which is exactly that---at the beginning everybody casually votes to acquit except one who insists more discussion. It's of course an homage to Reginald Rose, but it also depicts very well how typical Japanese people behave when they face to make a decision. (And there's a twist in plot so it's not just a reverse of 12 Angry Men, anyway).
The only thing I can find googling this is a worldwar 2 aircraft carrier. Can I have the original title in romanji I want to see if it has been dubbed or subtitled.
I did jury service a couple of years ago in the UK - obviously a different system to the US. I came away feeling although in many ways a jury is a terrible way of deciding verdicts, that it is probably better than any of way of making a decision - in the same way that democracy can be considered the worst form of government apart from all the others that have been tried. Our jury did feel like a good cross-section of people (even if many of them had flawed ideas of logic) and that the value of the jury lay in the collective decision-making not in a simple aggregation of the individual decisions.
Despite the other negative comments, I actually find this a vicarious account of the judicial system - a poignant reminder that behind any democratic system lies humans.
Friendly note: I think you want some word other than “vicarious”, which doesn’t make sense in context, the way the sentence is constructed. (I’m not precisely sure what you were trying to say, so I won’t suggest alternate words.)
Pretty sure this is a first-hand account. The author experienced the judicial system directly, as a juror. Then he wrote this first-hand account. If you told someone else about it, that would be second-hand.
The way he used the word “vicarious” is not idiomatically correct usage.
I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but I think he might have been trying to say that the author’s description was so vivid that he could vicariously experience the jury process through reading it.
In fengwick3's comment, "vicarious" modifies "account". Assuming "account" refers to the linked article, then it's first-hand, and not vicarious. fengwick3's (or your or my) experience of the judicial system through the linked article might be vicarious, but the article itself wasn't.
In a lot of the world, justice decisions are made by professional judges who have a lot of literature (laws, other decisions, and interpretation by higher courts) to guide their decisions. Which has the upside of more informed decisions (in France, it's interesting to see that professional judges seem more harsh than public jury tho.)
A general comment on a lot of the comments here: You can make anything look good by only considering the positives, you can make anything look bad by only considering the negatives. Rather a lot of the latter going on here. To come to a proper decision about what is better, you need to consider both the negatives and the positives of multiple alternatives.
Before rushing to condemn jury trials, I'd also recommend considering that it is a deliberate creation, and that you ought to consider the forces involved in that creation and where it came from before rushing to condemn it. For instance, many are suggesting we can just leave it to one judge, but if you are, for instance, concerned about systemic racism, why would you leave the entire decision to one possibly-racist judge? Wouldn't you be better off in a process which makes it so that the prosecution has to collect 12 racists onto the jury, procedurally battling the defense all the while, instead?
Part of the reason that the jury system exists is precisely that the mental model of a judge as a disinterested, literally inhuman arbiter of absolute truth was concretely, repeatedly disproved by history. The reason we have a "justice system" at all is precisely that we don't have access to perfect humans. If we did, there would be no problem to solve with "judges" or "juries" or anything else in the first place; we'd just consult the perfect humans! If your "better than a jury" model upon closer examination implicitly contains perfect humans in it, throw it out; your model is already worse than what we have, because at least what we have has the virtue of existing, and yours can't even reach that bar.
Look... at the risk of being a bit harsh... condeming jury trials, then offering as an alternative a system that implicitly contains "perfect humans" in it is frankly being every bit as irrational, unrealistic, and disconnected from reality as the humans that just disappointed you in the jury trial description you just read.
If that sucks... yeah, it sucks! But unfortunately, "it sucks" is not actually a logical argument that "it" can't exist, nor is it any form of evidence that there is anything better than "it". If you're going to produce evidence of a better system, it's going to be a great deal harder than merely saying "this system sucks", unfortunately.
And of course, even though this jury didn't convict the defendant, seemingly correctly (at least from the author's perspective), it's entirely possible for the prosecutor to move for a retrial, and this time keep all the black men off the jury, and get a conviction. Or if the defendant isn't out on bail, or maybe even if he is, to convince him to take a plea bargain to second degree murder, or manslaughter.
It's interesting to look at if this article is fiction or non-fiction. It is certainly amazing writing with a strong message, but seems to be so strange to be non-fiction.
Then again, I knew about some of this from the excellent Illustrated Guide to Criminal Justice, so I wasn't totally surprised.
When I sat on a jury in 1989, the main goal of most of the jury was to get the decision over with in time to pick up their kids from school. We quickly found for the plaintiff against the main defendant. There were a slew of co-defendants, who aside from the reading of the charges had not been mentioned at all during the trial. No evidence, no description of their supposed involvement, nada. The foreman started to copy our verdict onto the forms for them as well. I objected, pointing out that we had only discussed the one defendant and needed to consider the others separately. Much protesting and eye-rolling ensued, but the urge to leave won out and the jury agreed to find all of the co-defendants not guilty. I was pleased with the outcome but appalled by the process. I would hate to be judged so carelessly by my peers. Yes, having 12 jurors does increase the odds of having someone put on the brakes and insist on proper procedure, but it is by no means guaranteed.
Non-American, don't know how the system works - how come they can eliminate people from the jury pool? I would have expected the jury selection to be completely random? There is no way the system can be fair if they get to select the jury.
Both the prosecution and the defence get to exclude ("challenge") a certain number of jurors. The idea is that you want jurors to be "generic", i. e. they should each be an average person without any experiences relevant to the case.
So, for example, a recent victim of crime makes for a bad juror for the defence who will probably boot him/her of the jury.
It is an absolute failure of voir dire that this person made it onto the jury. A few select quotes:
> The judge has already instructed us directly that we are not to do any research on the law while sitting on this jury. This is the first of several times I will violate those instructions.
> a jury...is not quite about justice but instead about the direction of the tide.
> I do believe in jury nullification. And I think the American carceral state is so corrupt that I’m starting to doubt if I could bring myself to render a guilty verdict under any circumstances.
To clarify the above, any mention of jury nullification is a sure-fire way to get removed. And if you're not 100% sure you could render a guilty verdict "under any circumstances," you have absolutely no business sitting on a jury.
> I keep thinking of Walter Scott, whose uniformed murderer is seen on camera shooting him while he runs away, and who plants a weapon on his freshly killed corpse.
Blatantly false.
> I don’t necessarily have a problem with ignoring the judge’s edict
> Outside of court, I tell everyone I can’t talk about the case. Then I usually talk about the case a little.
> because [a coerced confession] was not presented by the defense, it’s merely a conspiracy theory and we can’t consider it. Secretly, I’m considering it too.
> Henry and I splinter off from the others. Jurors aren’t supposed to talk about the case outside of deliberations. We talk about the case.
> Again I violate the judge’s instructions
> An accusation from another juror: You lied during voir dire!
I am not surprised with the position of author. That is the principle of law. His narrative seems to indicate other 10 jurors took the position you are advocating which goes against the principle of law.
This guy seems like a terrible, terrible juror. Bragging about violating the rules, annoyed because the judge is called "your honor", implying that a jury with 6/12 people white is somehow a sign of massive racial bias?
What is supposed to be redeeming about this article? I'm not reading it all unless there's something somebody says is worth reading.
EDIT: It gets more readable in the jury section, but I still don't get what if anything this guy is trying to say, other than simply "it's like The Breakfast Club".
No, this guy seems like a real human being. Jurors are supposed to be humans, first and foremost. That's why juries are made up of your peers and not a bunch of legal professionals.
There's lots of "rules" in life, and our job as humans is figuring out which ones matter.
I agree. A juror who believes in following the rules for the sake of following the rules is terrifying. The goal of our legal system is (or should be) justice rather than mere law enforcement, and it's never appropriate to ignore the fact that every component of the system is fallible.
Agreed^million. Terrifying in a Stanford Prison meets Milgram way. I think all jurors should be put through Milgram-like experiments as condition for service, to determine if they're cowed by authority or possess their own moral compasses.
And a decent, rational, moral, courageous person whom realizes legality is rarely the same as justice.
Too many people find it expedient to just shirk their responsibilities and send innocent people to prison, to death because "it's too much work" or "don't want conflict."
> Jurors are supposed to be humans, first and foremost. That's why juries are made up of your peers and not a bunch of legal professionals.
Juries do not exist to selectively exercise "humanity" by ignoring the rules. They exist because any more narrowly-drawn pool of decision-makers could more easily be accused of bias and partiality.
It's not about accusations of bias, it's about the fact of bias. Specialization tends to narrow your worldview and breed conformity. That's how regulatory capture happens even in the absence of overt bribery. Juries aren't just for show.
Now consider this: if the addition of the diversity of juries tends to improve the fairness of our legal system, it has to be due to the influence of jurors that don't think and act and decide according to the norms of the rest of the legal system.
I largely agree, although couldn't the same argument be used by those who would enter a guilty verdict in the presence of reasonable doubt? It seems many people believe it's just to convict a person they believe to be guilty, even if it's conceivable that they aren't, and that "innocent until proven guilty" is just a meaningless rule.
It is one persons detailed account of a very important aspect of our society that few people know much about (I personally do not know anyone who has actually served on a jury let alone in a murder trial). I enjoyed reading it. I think it would be worth reading to understand how someone felt throughout this process whether or not you agreed with that persons feelings or interpretation. After all, if you are on trial this juror (or jury) may be representative of who will judge you.
I think the problem is that people don't have respect for the system. The judge isn't the system, he's only one part of it, yet the author projects his lack of respect for the system onto the judge. Calling him "your honor" is a part reminding people, hey, we all need to be on our best behavior and be respectful.
Respect is something very lacking in society today.
I mean, it was a well written article and at the very least, a good story. It seems kind of silly to "save time" by not reading the article and then spending time complaining about it in the comments. Maybe press the back button and go get yourself a free SSL certificate ;-)
He puts himself on quite a pedestal, comparing himself to Fonda like he's the righteous movie star, but I'm no psychologist.
It might be hard, but try to understand the minority perspective in viewing the system, you might trust any part of it, and you'll see things like bias and privilege even when they don't exist.
Ignore that guy. He's a new account that specialises in trolling. I've seen him in other threads where his comments are so downvoted that they're barely readable. I think they're either deleted or removed at this point.
Your quote would seem to support the idea you object to. "I'm no Henry Fonda" explicitly draws a comparison between yourself and Henry Fonda, and this kind of rhetorical device is often used to suggest things that the bounds of propriety forbid you from saying outright.
Imagine two political rivals campaigning against each other, Mr. Lowbrow and Mr. Classy. Mr. Lowbrow releases campaign literature to the effect that Mr. Classy is a pussy. Mr. Classy responds "a less courteous person might observe that my esteemed opponent washed out of seventh grade... but I won't. This race is about the issues."
The particular rhetoric Mr. Classy is using there doesn't mean it makes sense to defend him against charges that he called Mr. Lowbrow stupid. (Hey, he specifically said he wasn't doing that!)
In this case, the author is clearly comparing another juror ("Henry") to Henry Fonda, not himself. Which is definitely not comparing himself to Henry Fonda.
> Perhaps this was the time to mention that having witnessed the murders of Eric Garner and Walter Scott on video made personal experience unnecessary.
Eric Garner said "I can't breathe" 11 times.
Any person that has experienced a chokehold, knows that if you can't breath, you can't move air in and out of your lungs and throat, you can't say anything, not even "I can't breathe" 1 time. Certainly not 11 times - unless it was a purely stationary-type hold.
Also, chokeholds which result in death leave physical damage, that was not present in the autopsy (no damage to the windpipe or neckbones).
Eric Garner was not "murdered", he died in the ambulance from the situation exacerbating his health complications.
Anyone who thinks he was literally "murdered" is racially motivated to see it as such, not based on facts nor common-sense, the later which the author brings up multiple times.
Second, as this is written anonymously and rolls a "white-jury" racial narrative from the start to the end, you have to consider that 9 out of the last 10 racial incidences (of the national news proportion) ended up being hoaxes done to validate someones need for there to be racism where there was none. At some point you get tired of the lies. And there is absolutely nothing in this story that allows the reader to verify it.
sethammons is saying (I believe) that the defense of "the choke hold didn't literally kill the man" is not a defense in a criminal case. The action, though not the direct cause of death, directly contributed to triggering the underlying condition that precipitated the victim's death.
-> Any person that has experienced a chokehold, knows that if you can't breath, you can't move air, you can't say anything, not even "I can't breathe" 1 time.
This is also a little misleading. In a past life, I had to certify in combatives training and you most definitely can pass out from a choke hold (the kind applied in this case) and should the applier of the choke hold not release they can, exogenous of intentions, kill the person. As mentioned, all that doesn't matter though.
This, for me, was the most terrifying bit in the article. To convict a man of murder, and to send him to life in prison or perhaps to his own death, when you think he's innocent? It shocks me what people are capable of sometimes. But this article doesn't shock me, because I know what people are capable of. Kudos to the author for sticking to his moral compass in the face of adversity.