[frostwhale]

Yeah its a trade off, as the article mentions, against alienating a minority voting bloc in juries. In the US most relevantly black vs white jurors.

Juries will generally be majority white meaning the opinion of the black jurors would be discounted often.

Neither solution is ideal, and this topic interests me greatly, it seems very similar to the questions of fairness and bias in statistics / ML.

[CivBase]

> Juries will generally be majority white meaning the opinion of the black jurors would be discounted often.

How often do jurry opinions actually split purely along racial lines?

[bitcurious]

I don’t know of any present day statistics, but it looks like it was a motivating factor in moving away from unanimous convictions, at least in the case of Louisiana.

https://www.wwno.org/post/history-louisianas-non-unanimous-j...

[papermachete]

Why is there a racial functional difference between jurors in your mind? Why should black people be judged by black people only?

[bluGill]

There shouldn't be a difference, but in the real world humans are not perfect and we all come with our own biases that we can't always overcome.

People should be judged by a fair impartial jury. I have no idea how to ensure this. Race is one known factor. All white or all black juries are somewhat likely to be partial in the same way and thus not give a true result (as if that is possible) so you want a mix that reflects the community, and also has enough that the one other person isn't intimidated. Easy to say, hard to do.

[frostwhale]

There's a racial difference between jurors in my mind because there's a racial difference between jurors in reality lol. Pretending otherwise is foolish, lawyers literally pick their juries based on this obvious fact.

"Why should black people be judged by black people only?" Is a racist strawman argument. I am saying black people should not be judged by white people exclusively, as can happy if every jury is majority white.

[wonderwonder]

They should not be, but historically and continuing into this day, there are some areas including entire states where there is a clear bias against minorities. This means the defendant is potentially at a disadvantage before the first prosecutor has spoken. Placing a minority on the jury of a minority defendant does not guarantee an acquittal in anyway but it does help to mitigate any ingrained bias the jury may have.

In addition, we are supposed to be judged by a jury of our peers. Considering minorities make up ~40% of the population I don't think its a stretch to say at least 20+% of the jurors should be a minority.

The bar to convict should be high and this helps to ensure that. Rather 10 guilty men go free than one innocent man go to jail.