Should we do trial by jury?

[Sheilbh]

Anatomy of a Fall

[Razgovory]

What's the alternative to jury people visualize?

I kinda like Trial by Ordeal.  We should have pie eating contests.

[Josquius]

The point I thought interesting was the one about how the system boils everything down to a strict binary and a better system would seem to find nuance.
Which is the way things work, just not for the jury.


Also on the professionals get things wrong part - surely at least there they're getting it wrong based on something. It's a measurable error. With juries it's a coin flip.


Surprised to hear about the jurors being serious. Do they filter out the non serious folks first?- in tv shows I've seen like the OJ trial there is this big selection process first, how common is that?
 Or do the people who don't want to be there always find excuses to get themselves out of it since they would lose money to little benefit?

[HVC]

I've had to write letters for our engineers stating undue hardship to the company (ie we can't replace them). That was enough to get them out of jury duty. It had the added benefit of being true.

[grumbler]

People keep forgetting that the OJ trial resulted in acquittal because the investigative detective turned out to be a racist perjurer.   I'm not at all convinced that a judge-only trial would have turned out any differently.  The prosecution failed mostly because the LAPD made the error of hiring and promoting Mark Fuhrman.  What's a judge going to do when the chief investigator takes the Fifth when asked if he planted evidence in the case?

[DGuller]

I have a relevant anecdote from Ukraine.  A brother of our family friend was murdered in Ukraine.  His murderer was caught on the spot, and his trial was the first ever jury trial in Ukraine.  The way it was structured, there were two judges and three civilians on the jury.  The murderer was acquitted, with all the judges voting to convict and all the jurors voting to acquit.

Thankfully, there was no such thing as a double jeopardy, so the prosecutors appealed, and the murderer was sentenced to 15 years in prison.  My understanding is that factually there was no question as to who did it, so from that point of view, in a rather suboptimal legal system, the judges got it more right.

[HVC]

Was it a "he had it coming" type situation?

[DGuller]

Was it a "he had it coming" type situation?

Well, the victim was Jewish, so who knows?

[The Minsky Moment]

People keep forgetting that the OJ trial resulted in acquittal because the investigative detective turned out to be a racist perjurer. 

This.
Prosecution case based heavily on DNA evidence + FUBAR chain-of-custody for said DNA evidence + proof beyond a reasonable doubt standard = acquittal.

[The Minsky Moment]

I thought the article was pretty silly.  As BB points out, you can't draw any conclusion from what a fake play-acting jury does when they know in advance that they are a fake play-acting jury.  At most it proves that laypeople make shitty actor-jurors.

His judgment that juries dont work because two (fake) juries came to different conclusions is also silly.  Cases that don't settle and go to trial often do so because it is a very close call between guilt and innocence and reasonable people could come to different conclusions.  That appears to be so for the fake scenario which appears to have been designed to be a close call issue.

My experience is similar to BB: most jurors try their best to consider the evidence objectively and take their job seriously.  They are prone to errors in reasoning but only because they are human beings and all human beings are subject to error. 

A single judge is not an obvious improvement.  Judges may be slightly better on average on maintaining objectivity but most judges lack expertise with scientific and statistical evidence and are prone to falling into the same logical fallacies as anyone else.  Eg Sally Clark (the SIDS statistical fallacy case) was convicted by a jury but only because the judge accepted and let through flawed statistical analysis. And the lack of any check from 11 other observors with different perspectives is a negative.

[Tonitrus]

What's the alternative to jury people visualize?

I kinda like Trial by Ordeal.  We should have pie eating contests.

Who would the accused compete against...the judge?

[frunk]

I kinda like Trial by Ordeal.  We should have pie eating contests.

Who would the accused compete against...the judge?

Joey Chestnut.  100% conviction rate.

[Razgovory]

What's the alternative to jury people visualize?

I kinda like Trial by Ordeal.  We should have pie eating contests.

Who would the accused compete against...the judge?

Prosecutors would be expert pie eaters.  Stand aside BB, it's Raz's time to shine.

[Barrister]

Surprised to hear about the jurors being serious. Do they filter out the non serious folks first?- in tv shows I've seen like the OJ trial there is this big selection process first, how common is that?
 Or do the people who don't want to be there always find excuses to get themselves out of it since they would lose money to little benefit?

So jurors being serious - I can't emphasize this enough.  They really are.  It's the one really awesome aspect of the jury system (in the original meaning of awesome).

Yes there is a selection bias.  If you don't want to be on a jury you have an opportunity to say so, for whatever reason.  If the reason isn't great the judge will say "well I'm not going to excuse you, but maybe we'll just put you back in the pool".  But the reality is those people are not selected.  I believe I mentioned that juries wind up overwhelmingly being civil servants (because the government pays your salary while on the jury) or retired people.

[DGuller]

When I was selected for a jury in a civil case, we the jury existed for an hour, as the case got settled soon after the jury was selected.  The funniest thing was that for that hour, in the room with all the jurors, everyone seemed to be in a competition to express the greatest devastation and distress at being selected for a jury.  The truth is that no one would be there if they didn't want to be there.