posted
Something I've been wondering about for a bit that I was reminded of by another thread.
It doesn't make sense to me that the plaintiff and defense (and to a lesser extent, prosecuting and defense) attorneys should have a role in jury selection.
I understand the need to screen potential jurors and I'm all for having a disinterested panel identifying problem jurors, but what good purpose is served by having the people who are trying their best to win the case do it?
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posted
I'm more bothered by the fact that we think 12 people selected at random have the proper analyzing and reasoning skills to determine a person's guilt or innocence.
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posted
What would you prefer? The good old days when elites who had no clue what it was like to be in the place of the defendent got to pass a sentence that they knew would never be applied to them?
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posted
I think we should all have cameras implanted in us at birth, which also record our thoughts and this will thus eliminate the need for trials in the first place.
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posted
but in all seriousness, as far as I understand, it still is the elites that "pass a sentence", with the jury's job to determine guilt or innocence. and that's only in a jury trial. there are plenty of situations where a jury isn't used.
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quote:I'm more bothered by the fact that we think 12 people selected at random have the proper analyzing and reasoning skills to determine a person's guilt or innocence.
Well, that's the point of screening out problem jurors. There are also safeguards put into the legal system so it doesn't rest solely on these people no matter what.
It's definitely not a perfect system, but I'm personally not all that troubled by the random selection of the population thing, or at least not anywhere near as much as the people whose selection is influenced by adverserial advocates for their own ends.
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posted
I don't know how the system works. Do they strike them alternately until they are down to 12 + alternates?
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quote:Originally posted by Strider: I think we should all have cameras implanted in us at birth, which also record our thoughts and this will thus eliminate the need for trials in the first place.
Now we know that those can be altered.
edit to add: Can't defendents opt for a trial with a judge instead of a jury?
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quote:It doesn't make sense to me that the plaintiff and defense (and to a lesser extent, prosecuting and defense) attorneys should have a role in jury selection.
I understand the need to screen potential jurors and I'm all for having a disinterested panel identifying problem jurors, but what good purpose is served by having the people who are trying their best to win the case do it?
Because the way essentially all non-trivial decisions in a trial are made is by having two interested parties present their strongest arguments for a particular point to a neutral arbiter (the judge), who then makes the final decision. Whether a juror should be struck for cause is non-trivial.
Moreover, whether a juror has a bias that actually matters can depend a lot on how each party will present its case. They deserve the chance to present particularized arguments concerning reasons to strike a juror based on their much more complete understanding of the case than the judge has.
The justification for peremptory challenges is different. I can't find anything reasonably brief or cogent on the issue right now.
However, even if peremptory challenges were to go away (as some have argued), I think there's still a place for adversarial jury selection.
quote:Can't defendents opt for a trial with a judge instead of a jury?
It depends. In civil cases, often both parties have the right to demand a jury trial. In criminal trials this varies. In Virginia, the prosecutor, the judge, or the defendant can demand a jury trial. In other states, the prosecutor can only request one and the judge has to decide whether to grant it, while the defendant can always* have one if he wants. I think there are still states where the defendant can demand a bench trial.
*There are a few exceptions based on possible maximum sentence that aren't central to this question.
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posted
How accurate is the common perception/mis-perception that juries are biased toward lower income and lower education populations because people that are not in those populations may often get out of jury duty since "they have something better to do"?
I can point to more than a couple portrayals with that opinion, but I have no idea if it is true or not.
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posted
I've seen numerous counterexamples, both in court and from talking to professional friends who had jury duty. Obviously, that doesn't address whether there is bias or not. A quick search didn't turn up any studies that address this nationally, but I'm sure they are out there.
The Connecticut Law Review published a study on this topic for jurors in Connecticut District Court (federal) called "IS THERE A BIAS AGAINST EDUCATION IN THE JURY SELECTION PROCESS?" 38 CTLR 325, February, 2006. I can't link it, unfortunately. It found no evidence of disparity in education level between the jury pool and the juries actually empaneled from them.
Some of it's conclusions:
quote:We begin by exploring the survey results as a whole, aggregating across all the juries. This is little more than first-stage exploratory data analysis, but consistent biases, if strong, would likely appear. In fact, we see no statistically significant evidence that the jury is undereducated relative to the venire. As shown in Table 1, roughly 50% of the venire has sixteen years of education or greater (which we treat as equivalent to a college degree), as does roughly 50% of the jury. [FN53] To be sure, there are slight shifts within the distributions, but these shifts are expected in a study of this size.
...
Similarly, as we compare the overall distribution of education of the venire to the jury in Figure 1 below, we see that the educational attainment of jurors reflects the venires from which they are chosen. In other words, we do not see the sharp drop in education from the venire to the jury that theorists have led us to expect. The slight differences that we see between the distributions are consistent with what we would expect if selection were completely random.
...
we once again find no evidence to support the hypothesis of systematic biases against (or for) educated jurors at any stage in the selection process. The one possibly surprising element of Figure 4 is the relatively high proportion of defense challenges in criminal trials of jurors having sixteen years of education. Upon examination, however, this spike is of no real significance, particularly as it occurs near the center of a distribution of a relatively small number of individuals.
...
Finally, in Table 3 we compare the educational attainment of jurors to that of the Connecticut population as a whole, as reported by the 2000 census. The differences between the census and the jury venires are striking: jurors appear to be significantly better educated than the general population. Among the general population in Connecticut, 31.4% attained a bachelor's degree or higher. However, fully 46% of jurors in our study completed sixteen years or more of education (roughly equivalent *343 to a bachelor's degree).
posted
After finishing some of the Dune books, I realize Frank Herbert seemed to like the idea of the all powerful jury, that is, juries with power beyond the specifics of laws.
Then again, the people who'd be on these juries just so happen to all possess upwards of tens of thousands, if not millions in some cases, of previous lifetimes in their memories, so... maybe such a thing would work better with people such as that.
Random amusing side note complete. Go back to your discussion. I'm just furniture here.
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posted
When I got called for federal jury duty last year, I sat there while the judge went through and started weeding us out. This was even before the lawyers got into the act. He started at the beginning (we were seated in the order we entered the room) and asked us questions.
One of the questions he asked was, "I'm going to tell you what the law is. You will have to make your decision on the basis of that. Do you think you can do this?"
Every single lemming (scuze, I mean person) said, "Yes", without the slightest hesitation. When he got to me, I said, "It depends. If the law appears just to me, then yes. But if there's a situation where I feel that morality is in conflict with the law, then I'd have to go with what I consider to be the moral decision."
The judge announced a recess for lunch as soon as he finished with me. While we were milling around in the hall waiting to be let back in after eating, a bunch of people told me that they were going to answer "yes" to that question, but after I said what I did, they were going to say the same thing I did.
I didn't get to hear whether they really did or not. I got excused from jury duty as soon as we got back in.
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quote:Originally posted by Strider: I think we should all have cameras implanted in us at birth, which also record our thoughts and this will thus eliminate the need for trials in the first place.
We can have them made by the good folks at Diebold. <grin>
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posted
"I'm all for having a disinterested panel identifying problem jurors"
I think herein lies the problem. How do you determing a disinterested panel? Who will pay for said panel? Who will hire them? Who will choose them? If it is the state, that almost certainly creates an interest. I'm just not sure how you go about finding a party that doesn't have an interest. So if all parties would have an interest, then an adveserial process becomes the best way to equalize things.
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quote:Every single lemming (scuze, I mean person) said, "Yes", without the slightest hesitation. When he got to me, I said, "It depends. If the law appears just to me, then yes. But if there's a situation where I feel that morality is in conflict with the law, then I'd have to go with what I consider to be the moral decision."
It's fun for me to imagine what you might say if a juror or juror candidate were to say something in a situation where you were on trial.
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posted
If the decision is to be made by exactly what the law says, no matter what the moral positions of the jury, why have a jury?
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posted
That one, at least, is easy. To determine if a particular situation meets the standard of a law, because often the truth is not clear, and an attempt must be made to interpolate it from the data available.
I happen to agree about morality having a place in jury deliberations, but it is clear there would be a need for a jury even in cases where it is merely a case of the law applying. After all, there are frequently lengthy deliberations in brutal murders, and I doubt it is because people are wavering over whether or not brutal murders are immoral.
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posted
The law-as-written part is pretty important from what Chet told me. When they'd heard all the evidence, they got a card with the various crimes the guy had been charged with. They were supposed to start at the top with the most serious crime, see if the guy met all the criteria under the heading, and stop when they got to the first one that did.
The jurors didn't all agree on whether the guy had intended to try to kill the guy. (He shot a guy several times, but the guy lived.) The easiest way to figure out what exactly he was guilty of (cause that was never a question) was to go down the card and say yes or no to each bullet point.
I'm not sure how well it would work in a less clear situation. I guess if you go down the list and don't get all the criteria of any crime, he's not guilty. I'm not sure I like the idea of a checklist for deciding guilt, but for picking which crime it is it sounds like it worked pretty well.
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posted
Dagonee: Thats actually a somewhat heartening result (if results in a specific US state can be extrapolated to the US as a whole and then to Canada, which is a big if ... but still much better than nothing)
It is somewhat surprising though, I'm a little curious about the third bit "we once again find no evidence to support the hypothesis of systematic biases against (or for) educated jurors at any stage in the selection process." vs. the fourth bit "The differences between the census and the jury venires are striking: jurors appear to be significantly better educated than the general population".
If there is no systematic biases at any stage, why is the result significantly better educated (not that I'm necessarily complaining)? As a guess, is it that only better educated people bother responding to jury summons?
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posted
Everyone always tells me that I will never be on a jury where DNA evidence is used (ABD in biochem phd- hoping to start writing soon). However, I do know postdocs who have served on juries where DNA evidence is used, so I am pretty sure that assumption is wrong. However, in one, I think her phd did bias her since one of the lawyers never called the expert witness Dr (he had a phd) and my friend was annoyed at the disrespect.
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posted
From what I understand, going to law school is almost a sure way to never actually get empaneled on a jury. So hopefully I'm safe now.
The only time I was called to Jury Duty I was in California in the Army and I just wrote back to my county in Wyoming and let them know and they excused me.
posted
I served as foreperson on a federal (civil) case in Alexandria about three years ago. The trial took two weeks (nine days). Our deliberations took a full day, too, just because there was so much paperwork and testimony.
I would gladly serve on a jury again. It was remarkably inconvenient to miss that much work, not to mention commuting about 2 hours one way, but it was also a really cool experience. I felt like we (the jury) were doing something really important. It was a civil case that never made the news anywhere, as far as I could tell, but it sure made a difference to the people involved.
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quote:It is somewhat surprising though, I'm a little curious about the third bit "we once again find no evidence to support the hypothesis of systematic biases against (or for) educated jurors at any stage in the selection process." vs. the fourth bit "The differences between the census and the jury venires are striking: jurors appear to be significantly better educated than the general population".
If there is no systematic biases at any stage, why is the result significantly better educated (not that I'm necessarily complaining)?
Because the selection process only compares the jury to the venire - the selection of people who are eligible to be jurors and who answer the summons.
I assume there is a difference in response rate to the jury summons, but there are other factors: people in prison can't be on a jury, and they tend to have a lower education. Moreover, many jury wheels are filled only with registered voters, which likely has a bias toward the educated as well. There are probably other factors that I can't think of now.
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