Was on a jury for a murder trial dec 2021. The trial gave me a new found respect for how trials are conducted, what evidence is allowed in, how defendants are protected, and the general thought and reasoning behind it all. Then, the jury deliberated and I lost a ton of respect for the ability of a jury of my peers to logically reason and responsibly decide. It was an absolute shit show in false pretenses, irrational conclusions, biases, logical fallacies. We ended up as a hung jury. I was in the minority opinion and we let the offending party ( again in my opinion ) walk.
Counterpoint, I was on a murder jury several years ago where every part of the justice system was pretty abysmal. Whether the police who were near incompetent in their investigation, the forensics people who could barely maintain chain of evidence or both sets of attorneys who couldn’t make logical arguments on either side.
The only people who came out looking good was the judge who was able to keep this circus from blowing up and my fellow jury members who despite the system all ended up reasonable and serious in their deliberations.
> "police who were near incompetent in their investigation, the forensics people who could barely maintain chain of evidence"
Are you sure they were all bad at their jobs? It's certainly possible. But it's also possible that you simply had unrealistic expectations for what the process looks like, exemplifying the "CSI Effect".
This is why I find these sort of pseudo-anonymous anecdotes very difficult to judge; I know neither the details of the case, nor you personally. It's like trying to get reviews for headphones online... suppose I read a review from somebody who says the headphones sound worse than a skinned cat. Is that review from a typical headphone user with reasonable expectations for sound quality? Or is it from an audiophile with very high, perhaps fanciful, standards? I have no point of reference for determining where that person is coming from.
A friend, A former police officer, said the most astonishing thing he learned as a rookie was how easily some people would confess to crimes they could not possibly have committed. Such persons were usually not very bright and, after hours of interrogation, could be convinced that they had indeed done a bad deed.
It seems like you might have very unrealistic expectations for the criminal justice system.
Defendants are constitutionally entitled to a jury trial. Even if they were caught on 4k video, with their face fully identifiable, their fingerprints all over the blood scene, and they walk straight into a police station afterwards to confess.
A defense lawyer with a client who confessed on video has an extremely difficult job; they must try to present a credible case while also not suborning perjury or violating ethical rules. Very frequently, they're not going to have a "logical" case; they're simply trying to poke whatever holes they can in the prosecution's case...because the Defense is not constitutionally required to prove anything (unless they're attempting to prove an affirmative defense, and if they were you'd know because the judge would explicitly tell you).
On the other hand, if the prosecutor and the police and the forensics guys were all as incompetent as you claim, the defense might have gone to trial despite the taped confession because there was a chance they could prevail with a jury if the prosecution messed up presenting the case. I won most of my jury trials because the prosecution messed up.
Your last paragraph was my point. The incompetence of the investigation left a chance at trial even though there was a taped confession.
If the investigation had been just workmanlike or followed basic protocols I cant imagine any defense attorney would have wanted to take it to trial. Though perhaps they still didn’t want that but their client demanded it. I of course couldn’t know that.
He was there at this trial, and served on the jury. The entire affair is an abstraction to you. You can't high-horse this; it doesn't even make sense to.
Different trial (attempted murder), but I too was on a Jury.
At the start of deliberation, it was an even split. Towards the end of deliberation it was 11/12 in favor of returning a verdict of guilty.
However... One juror opened up some bizarre Pandora's box arguing against the fundamental knowability of the universe. How could any fact truly be "known"?
At times, I love conversations like that. But not when a man has been stabbed twelve times and directly pointed to the defendant.
11/12 should be enough to convict for this very reason: there’s quite possibly one holdout who is totally inane. States have tried allowing non-unanimous juries but the Supreme Court has said it is unconstitutional. The process should be revisited. I actually think it might make more sense to have pods of 3 jurors discuss independently (to avoid groupthink) then require like 11/12 or something along those lines.
That seems like something to tell the Judge. I don't know how it works, but were there any replacement Jurors? I think the Judge should be able to disqualify that person from being a Juror.
I can see the headline: "Juror Dies Mysteriously in Chambers: Body Bears 11 Distinct Stab Wounds."
"Et tu, Brute?"
- lit. "You too, Brutus?" - from Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare, Act 3 Scene 1. The phrase is spoken by the Roman dictator Julius Caesar during his assassination to his friend Marcus Junius Brutus when Caesar realizes Brutus is also one of the assassins.
Your anecdote sounds like an example of the system working to me.
I'm absolutely sure your assessment is correct:
I lost a ton of respect for the ability of a jury of my peers to logically reason and responsibly decide
People as a rule are horrible at logical thinking.
But that's absolutely the right side to err on. Much better for twelve people to have to be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt.
Put another way, it's way more important for the justice system to minimize false positives (wrongful convictions) than false negatives, so I'm happy to hear anecdotes where it's seemingly biased this way.
In principle I agree, but it also works the other way round: people get convicted for crimes they did not commit due to unreasonable and unsound reasoning. The fact that things like the Innocence Project exist is by itself already a huge red flag.
On balance, I'm not sure if it's biased towards letting people go free. It might be interesting to compare e.g. the UK with some European countries (in the US the justice system is too bananas on several levels).
People "not being logical" renders their decisions random. Or biased in case, some common cause for such biased thinking is present. Like prejudice towards skin colors, poverty or whatever.
The former case results in GP's tie, the latter in the absurdly skewed prison population the US is known for.
> the latter in the absurdly skewed prison population the US is known for.
Are you sure? Since most homicides are intra-racial [1] (despite the impression one gets from those the media choose to focus on), we can use victim race as proxy for offender race (I'd use offender race directly, but then you'd just blame it on police racism). Since it's hard to manufacture a corpse, or fake its race, we can further assume that data is largely free of police bias.
So white+Hispanic are 50% of homicide victims [2] (which we use as proxy for perpetrators), and 58% of the prison population [3]. For blacks, its 44% and 37%, respectively. Doesn't look particularly skewed to me. There is some anti-white+Hispanic bias, but since we're looking only at homicide to avoid police bias, we're not seeing the whole picture, which may explain the disparity.
Not necessarily. People "not being logical" might simply mean that their decisions are emotional. Emotions are not logical, but that does not make them random or wrong. There are still reasons for emotions, and frequently there's a large degree of truth to them as well. They often do exemplify bias, but that's why there's more than 1 person on the jury, and why attorneys are allowed to disqualify jurors, and why a good attorney will try to get a jury panel that is at least representative of the population if not favorably inclined to her client.
> the latter [results] in the absurdly skewed prison population the US is known for.
This is not supported at all. I assume you're talking about racial demographics of prison population. It's a complex historical and socioeconomic problem, biased juries may have some role but it wouldn't be on the top 10 factors.
> I'm happy to hear anecdotes where it's seemingly biased this way.
Except that it's not.
For most jurors, being in the defendants chair means guilty. Consequently, it's rare to find people on the jury who will make the prosecution actually do their job.
A friend of mine was on a federal jury for a conspiracy charge. He came into the jury room figuring it would be a slam dunk verdict--the defendant was documented to be out of the country by the prosecution when the supposed in person conspiracy planning was happening. He didn't even understand why this was allowed to come to trial.
But, no, half the jury was basically "He's done bad things and should be in jail." It wound up a hung jury in spite of the fact that there was physical evidence presented by the prosecution that contradicted the whole case.
> it's way more important for the justice system to minimize false positives (wrongful convictions) than false negatives
True, but only up to a limit. The only way to avoid all false positives is to have no justice system at all, but in that case the criminal gangs essentially become the government and justice system.
If the justice system becomes too ineffective, then people will create their own justice "system" (i.e., vigilantism) to replace it. The entire reason for the justice system to exist is to prevent this.
> Then, the jury deliberated and I lost a ton of respect for the ability of a jury of my peers to logically reason and responsibly decide.
Isn't this a consequence of jury vetting on the part of the attorneys? i.e. the defense does not want logical/rational thinkers on the jury if they have a bad case (know the defendant committed the crime, lots of evidence against defendant, etc). In those cases they want people who think with emotions and who can be emotionally swayed. So really both sides (prosecution and defense) will play games to try to bias the jury in their favor, whether that means adding or subtracting STEM types from the jury.
Love that bias lol. "We do science therefore we are incapable of logical fallacies".
There are plenty of people they screen for and/or boot off of juries. When I went to jury duty the questionnaire asked about if you are / were / related to a cop or lawyer, if you had ever worked for a police dept or court system as a civilian, if you had experience with regulatory or GRC roles, or if you were a PI. They also asked about level of education and if you had experience in management or HR.
Keep in mind that this is not the court asking these questions, it's the lawyers.
I was on the jury for a simple drunk driving case where the cop, the only witness testifying, with no other evidence presented, was caught lying about being "run off the road." Lost a lot of faith in mankind that day.
He was driving home in twilight (after regular work day, no drinking involved) and a mad guy jumped in front of him on the road. My brother in law swerved and avoided the crazy dude and kept driving.
A kilometer later he was chased down by a angry violent police officer in police cruiser who arrested him, put him in cuffs, slammed him into the cruiser with no discussion. Turns out the crazy guy was a police officer running a hidden speed trap, but of course it was hidden so there was no police cruiser in sight, no lights, and the officer was wearing a plain dark vest and armor which just looked like regular clothes.
The complaint has been stalled for three years now of course. The officer still claims my brother in law was deliberately trying to run the officer down. Meanwhile my brother in law (like, THE most kind and easy going and peaceful person I know) is basically permanently scarred.
As a kid I thought police officers were like angel saints. Now I know enough of them to understand they're just people, doing a job. Some are good at it some are bad at it some are ass holes. But the job gives simply incredible amount of unchecked power,while they deal with worst in human kind.
Honestly never understood the rationale behind jury-based trials. You're having a group of people who aren't trained in law, forcing them to rely only on the bits of evidence presented in the court, and asking them to make an unbiased decision, when they clearly have not been given any training of the sort?
I mean, vesting all the power in the jury is just as bad as vesting all power in a single person/group of persons (judges). Perhaps a rational middle ground would be to give jury duty to only members of the bar?
The point of juries is to decide whether or not disputed facts are true. They don't need to know anything about the law because the jury instructions given to them by the court will deal with that.
The jury instructions essentially break the law down to essentially a flowchart, with the decision points being questions of whether or not some specific fact is true or not.
Both the prosecution and the defense will have geared the arguments and evidence they offered toward convincing the jury as to whether or not those specific facts or true.
The point is that, regardless of how logical you want the jury to act, they will still act inherently with some bias because they are not trained in the law. While lawyers and members of the bar are also inherently prone to bias, they at least have some degree of knowledge on what evidence is admissible and what evidence should not be taken under consideration.
FWIW, in France, a few years ago, there was an academic study on the impact of TV on jury decisions [1]. This study concluded that the content of yesterday's TV news had a measurable impact on the duration of sentences inflicted by a jury.
I seem to remember that this led to a reform which removed the popular jury (and replaced it with a jury of law professionals) for some cases. I don't know if the effect of that reform has been studied.
> Honestly never understood the rationale behind jury-based trials. You're having a group of people who aren't trained in law, forcing them to rely only on the bits of evidence presented in the court, and asking them to make an unbiased decision, when they clearly have not been given any training of the sort?
this is a democracy, and the power of a democracy is ultimately on people; these people can vote, and they get to vote on your guilt.
How many police depts have hour long wait times for 911 response?
How many 911 systems routinely delay or drop calls?
We had a story near here recently where a DUI accident investigation couldn't proceed because it took so long for police to arrive that the suspect sobered up enough
Or the woman who was hit by a car and the police took over an hour to respond
You can find these stories for every PD now
That said, NPR should be more honest an retitle this story to be about Oakland though, because that is what they wrote about
I think just about every industry gets more money when their KPIs go south, but in anything government-related (typically a natural monopoly) it all goes to one organization. Another example on the opposite end of the spectrum is that NASA did such a good job in the late 60's and early 70's of getting humans to the moon (a feat still never matched) that their budget was cut massively. Government problems attract money, solved problems result in budget cuts, it's an almost inevitable result.
That being said, you're not wrong that there is a severe morale problem among American police officers. I'm not sure we have the knowledge to figure out the solution, at this point. I suspect we are seeing the beginnings of something similar in public education.
I think pretty much all essential/monopoly/government industries get more money when kpis go south- health, education, sanitation, etc.
Pretty much all essential services get more funding when kpis go south. And I think that’s usually because lack of resources make kpis go south. Take a great teacher with 20 kids in their class. Make the class size 40 and KPIs will go down. Does that teacher become bad?
Their union is not demonized, but accurately described as the largest and most dangerous obstacle to actual police reform.
Their pensions have never been in question in my lifetime, not even as a source of funds for the endless successful lawsuits against them.
Their steadfast refusal to allow insight into statistics re office involved shootings means their training cannot be properly examined, nor altered in response to data.
And the political leanings of the police as a whole remain unquestionably conservative.
It’s not a slowdown strike, it’s gangland extortion. The mob is also famous for demanding “protection” money, where what they’re “protecting” you from is themselves and little else.
Why does the lead photo prominently feature a “racism is a sin” sign and the article immediately mentions PoC victims in Oakland? Isn’t the vast majority of PoC victimhood in Oakland intraracial? Not many Klansmen walking around Oakland. Annoying race baiting from NPR.
That's presumably the sign outside the church of the pastor they interviewed. He puts up wooden crosses for each homicide. Makes sense if you've read the article.
Yes, I read the explanation. The actual explanation has no racial component. The sign, and NPR prominently featuring the sign, implies that the explanation does have a racial component, even though it does not. Hence my complaint.
Oh, you asked why the sign was in the photo as though you thought it wasn't associated with the story in any way. It gives a little background context for the type of Catholic church whose pastor was interviewed. I don't know if you've spent much time in various Catholic congregations, but the sentiment that racism is bad is not echoed in a disturbing number of them. It's unfortunate that you are offended at the sign being used as a framing piece for the article.
Is "race baiting" really a sufficiently specific description? How often does NPR/NYTimes/Washington Post/CNN/.. highlight the race of white victims, as opposed to PoC?
Perhaps a graph of police resources used by race, per capita, could substantiate that claim. Because the article doesn't even make the claim (except perhaps implicitly), let alone offer proof of it.
That article doesn’t mention any number, and I was curious how that compared to suicides and road deaths. There are 7.8 homicides per 100,000 people, so about 26k per year. That’s staggering.
There were 46,412 suicides among adults in 2021.
37,461 people were killed on the roads. Given how frequent are hit-and-runs with accidents, I expected it to be more common in deadly situations, but it seems to be the opposite: 2,049 fatalities that resulted from hit-and-run crashes in 2016.
Finally, in 2021, a record 106,699 lives were lost to overdoses.
> 37,461 people were killed on the roads. Given how frequent are hit-and-runs with accidents, I expected it to be more common in deadly situations, but it seems to be the opposite: 2,049 fatalities that resulted from hit-and-run crashes in 2016.
Fatal collisions are more likely to disable the perpetrator and/or their vehicle, rendering them unable to hit-and-run even if they were so inclined.
If this is true then I expect hit-and-run to be more common in fatal car-vs-pedestrian crashes than for fatal car-vs-car crashes.
Thanks, makes you really think. No, I don't want to have people getting away with murder, but these numbers tell a lot. I wonder what the 'more getting away with murder' numbers look like if we start comparing to population increases rather than just last years numbers?
The comment section here is in poor shape. Violent crime is up all over the united states, and at least from what I've seen, there is not a single easy explanation for why. ie, I'm very sympathetic to the argument that "de-fund the police" has had very negative effects, however we're seeing violent crime rise in districts which were not de-funded. The whole red vs. blue states / cities thing doesn't seem to stack up either, as violent crime appears to be up just about everywhere.
My guess is that it’s a secondary consequence of the initial 2020-2021 wave of media theft-apologia, increasing liability for police, and defunding/prosecution-abstention: now it’s the copycat problem writ large due to social media. People seeing visceral videos and group chats of crowds, gangs, and individuals doing blatant petty and violent crimes in a few places (and oftentimes getting away with it) is probably emboldening would-be criminals to copy techniques they think would work in other places. I think the rise in mass shootings is another result of the social media copycat effect.
I think there's a much simpler and more historically universal reason: murders go up in bad economic times. Inflation is high, inequality is increasing, people are losing or have lost their jobs, and who has suffered this seems pretty random, particularly since other groups (like software engineers in 2020/2021, solar installers in 2022, tradespeople in 2023) are doing just great. All this makes people on the losing side very angry. Some angry people kill people.
There was a similar spike in murders during the 1970s and early 80s, and during the 1920s and Great Depression.
As NPR is the source of this story and I’m too lazy to look up actual statistics…
They had a story a week or so ago about how all crime is up and speculated that the police are less likely to interact with the public because they’re afraid the encounter will escalate and they will end up getting prosecuted for doing their job. Think they even had an “expert” to back their claim.
So what you get is police who won’t do their job out of fear of retaliation and people seeing there are no consequences for their actions just doing whatever they want.
And, of course, the current narrative is the police are “silent quitting” in protest because who else are they going to blame?
Low solution rates are nothing new. So is the lack of causality between police funding, crime, and police effectiveness. TBF another poster pointed out that hiring more detectives is effective, and that's plausible.
It's too bad nobody has the political will to get rid of and rebuild whole PDs. That's what it will take to get rid of bad cops.
I agree. And in real life, when the deceased is at least somewhat known, and there is a clear motive, a suspect is usually identified.
When a nobody is gunned down on a dark street corner in the middle of the night, for no apparent reason, and nobody in the area will talk to the cops, there isn't much that will lead to any suspects.
There are a number of factors at play here, one is certainly, as others have pointed out, that police are taking less initiative on the job due to low morale and their own form of quiet quitting.
However another major issue is that people are not talking to police like the used to. People do not trust police with information and more so they do not trust police to protect them. Volunteering information on a murderer is dangerous you have to trust the system can protect you.
And finally, murder clearance rates were focused on in the 90s and sometimes that led to closing cases early or other bad practices to increase superficial metrics.
"While reasons behind the drop are multi-faceted, Cook and other experts warn that more people getting away with murder in the the U.S. is driving a kind of doom loop of mutual mistrust: low murder clearance rates impede future investigations which in turn potentially drive up killings in some communities where a lack of arrests undermines deterrence and sends a message that the police will not or cannot protect them."
Interesting that the article mentions the sizable drop in clearance rates in 2020 yet does not offer up any explanation for why that may be the case.
Police didn't like the "defund the police" movement (which was most active in 2020, so there's your temporal coincidence). The theory is that they are deliberately doing a bad job to make crime worse. Just be bad at your job and you'll get paid more because the low morale and understaffing means it's harder to hire and your overtime pay goes up so that's a win-win. In general no defunding actually happened anywhere. If you google around you'll find plenty of articles about that [0]. From the article: "local spending on police increased in 90 percent of locations since 2019." Anecdote, I've only talked to one former Oakland cop in person, but when he talked about his experience literally ALL he talked about was overtime and how to get more of it, and this was years before the pandemic. So it seems to be part of the institutional culture now.
In Oakland, the police department is like 25% of the total city budget. Depending on the year and what you count as "budget" it can be closer to 40% of the general fund [1]. Either way, as a percentage their budget has actually gone UP significantly since 2019, mostly due to excessive overtime. It works "kind of" like a protection racket. Some back of the napkin math and the OPD budget is something like $500k per officer and $3.5 million per murder, which they don't prevent and barely bother trying to solve. I think a few million redirected to better mental health and homeless services would probably pay off. They have lots of new SUV's which they like to drive through residential neighborhoods really fast though.
You should take care of yourself. If you are in a vehicle or crime accident, good luck with justice.
How do you want to prove anything?
I have seen it in the case of accidents. If there is no well portioned camera, you can’t say much. Even if there is one, it can still be difficult to prove someone’s fault. In most cases the evidence is weak. And if you succeed, there could be some hurdles for the other side but nothing will replace your health.
> But a murder can also be declared cleared through what's known as an "exceptional means." For example, if a suspect is dead, can't be extradited or prosecutors refuse to press charges.
I don't see this as gaming the system. The police have done their job as far as it can be done. What do you want the cops to do in any of these cases? Are you accusing them of just stuffing random names into files?
One thing is kind of unclear to me, are we segregating by murder type?
For example (not sure if true):
It would seem a drop in easier to identity domestic violence murders would throw stats off for the others that were always hard to solve.
My googling is failing on getting the mix of murders by type by year.
> Relationship of Murder Victims to Alleged Offenders, 2021
> Of the estimated 4,970 female victims of murder and nonnegligent manslaughter in 2021, data reported by law enforcement agencies indicate that one-third (34%) were killed by an intimate partner (figure 1). By comparison, about 6% of the 17,970 males murdered that year were victims of intimate partner homicide.
> Overall, three-quarters (76%) of female murders and more than half (56%) of male murders were perpetrated by someone known to the victim. About 16% of female murder victims were killed by a nonintimate family member—parent, grandparent, sibling, in-law, and other family member—compared to 10% of male murder victims.
> A larger percentage of males (21%) than females (12%) were murdered by a stranger. For 1 out of every 3 male murder victims and 1 out of every 5 female murder victims, the relationship between the victim and the offender was unknown.
Incidentally you can play some interesting games with these numbers to present different narratives. For instance, the percentage of murdered men killed by their intimate partner was 6% while for women it was 34%, that's a huge difference. That's basically 5x as many! And that "five times higher" interpretation is emphasized at the top of the PDF as the alternate title.
But if you instead ask, of the people who were murdered by an intimate partner, how many were women and how many were men? That breaks down to 61% vs 39%, still a substantial difference but far short of that evident "5x" from the other framing. Viewed that way, it's more like 1.5x.
Oh yes, I can find them for a snapshot, was looking for a graph of the mix of the types of homicide over years. A change in this mix could drastically affect clearance rates.
Yeah, that's bullshit unless I guess you're in some very specific filter bubble. I'm pretty left on the spectrum and I didn't see the media "pushing" it. They've reported it because that's what was going on at the time. Maybe people confuse the two.
This doesn't deserve to be downvoted. Despite the "defined the police" bogeyman, it seems as though the police budgets of every city have done nothing but increase every year.
One reason why murder is a widely cited stat for police effectiveness is that it is harder to falsify the top line number. But as others have pointed out it's not impervious to being gamed.
