"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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 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?
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.
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).
"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.
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.
[+] [-] YorkianTones|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ketralnis|10 years ago|reply
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 sure hope I never have a jury deciding my fate.
[+] [-] geomark|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] visakanv|10 years ago|reply
Most "justice systems" on Earth are really just thinly-veiled vengeance systems, unfortunately.
[+] [-] dnr|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ckozlowski|10 years ago|reply
I agree, it's a total mess.
[+] [-] MichaelApproved|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rayiner|10 years ago|reply
Thats basically the racial composition of the U.S. Indeed, people of color are over-represented in that jury.
[+] [-] kibwen|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geomark|10 years ago|reply
The US racial demographics are White: 64%, Hispanic: 16%, Black: 12%, Asian: 5% [1]
Looks like Blacks and Latinos were overrepresented on that jury.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...
[+] [-] wfo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluedino|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] piker|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wtbob|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] TheRealDunkirk|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] geomark|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pc86|10 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] amateur_soclgst|10 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] jrockway|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacobolus|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] the_ancient|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] forrestthewoods|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] thwyperson|10 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] toast0|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] fucking_tragedy|10 years ago|reply
Yours is more of a bias to believe in a presumption of innocence for certain crimes because of personal reasons.
A good attorney won't give you details of a case.
[+] [-] justinpombrio|10 years ago|reply
---
> 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?
[+] [-] michael_storm|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] noonespecial|10 years ago|reply
It takes a lot more courage to let a possibly guilty person go free than to convict a possibly innocent one.
Always show up for jury duty if you can.
[+] [-] RyanZAG|10 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] shiro|10 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] EdiX|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jvvw|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rwmj|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fengwick3|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jerf|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] 4ad|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MaysonL|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cgm616|10 years ago|reply
Then again, I knew about some of this from the excellent Illustrated Guide to Criminal Justice, so I wasn't totally surprised.
In the end, does it even matter if it happened?
[+] [-] masterponomo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] facepalm|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheBeardKing|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matt4077|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] pc86|10 years ago|reply
> 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!
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] peteretep|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akg_67|10 years ago|reply
The fundamental principle of criminal law are
* presumption of innocence
* burden of proof on people (prosecutors)
* proof beyond reasonable doubt.