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Jury Duty

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Re: Jury Duty

#181

Post by ckozlowski »

astrafoo wrote: post #178
ckozlowski wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the job of the defense, who's trained and has done the research. It's their job to call bullshit on the prosecution in your presence. So you have two sides who are trained and have (hopefully!) done the research i.e, the facts of the case. Provided they have (and the judge can and will throw out cases where this hasn't been done), then the judge will instruct on the points of law being decided here, which the…

> That's the job of the defense Which might not exist depending on the jury's job. See a few recent of the recent cases were a jury decided to not indict police officers for killing blacks based on citations from the law given by the DA/SA which were "accidentally" wrong. No defense involved.

Indictments are different. There's no defense because no one's been charged. (high profile cases aside, this is to keep the potential accused from even being mentioned because no charges have been given.) So it's entirely a matter of determining if there's enough cause to go to trial. Once at that stage, then the person becomes an accused, and defense becomes involved.

Re: Jury Duty

#182

Post by lukasm »

YorkianTones wrote: post #29

"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 t…

People have really skewed idea of what is the point of the system. It's not for a revenge or to find a scapegoat. It's to protect innocent, minimise violence.

Re: Jury Duty

#183

Post by smackfu »

_pmf_ wrote: post #174
RyanZAG wrote: post #118

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 spo…

> As a non American, the USA justice system honestly sounds like the worst possible system for justice imaginable. You just have to love a justice system where the police chief, the district attorney and the judge are political offices and must appeal to the masses.

What do you mean by political offices? In most of the country, those are not elected positions.

Re: Jury Duty

#184

Post by newjersey »

ckozlowski wrote: post #167
newjersey wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moreover, jury selection is a touchy subject itself. http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/discrimination-jury-s... > In order to show that the prosecutor’s dismissal of a juror was discriminatory, a defendant must show that it was based on race, ethnicity, or gender. A good legal defense is already out of reach of many people. I'd think this alone (fta) should cause a judge to throw out the prosecution from the cas…

That the defense didn't object to this, or ask the alternate ("Does anyone in here intrinsically trust the police?") perplexes me.

> That the defense didn't object to this, or ask the alternate ("Does anyone in here intrinsically trust the police?") perplexes me.

Actually, it didn't occur to me. You made it sound very simple but I didn't see it as a possibility at all. So if someone says yes, we just throw them out of the jury. Now I think this should be a standard question for any case where the police is a witness.

Well, on second thought, we will probably still need a sympathetic judge if we are throwing out someone "with cause". There are only so many we can throw out without a cause.

Re: Jury Duty

#185

Post by a_c_s »

ckozlowski wrote: post #163
TheBeardKing wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you read into how big a sham our grand juries are? I'm currently serving on a federal grand jury, and several times a month they pay travel and per diem for dozens of people to listen to a one-sided argument by a US Assistant District Attorney to bring a case to trial. No defense is offered, and they can withhold as much evidence as they like. It's a total waste of time, and I'm sure costs the tax payers million…

An indictment is not a successful prosecution. And it does cost money...money, in my opinion is well spent, because in brings in skeptical people such as yourself with the power to check an overzealous prosecutor with simply arresting people on flimsy charges. There's no defense because no one has been charged; and if you decided that the prosecutor is full of shit, then it means an innocent person is not disrupted o…

I recently served on a New York grand jury and in my experience the biggest problem was that in 38/40 cases we only heard one side of the story. There were two cases where the defendants testified. Like the other cases, the story of the other witnesses (often cops, sometimes civilians, sometimes some of each) was quite straightforward... until the defendant testified.

It may have been in the defendants' best interest to "muddy the waters" as much as possible, but in both cases we obtained impartial evidence (video, 3rd party records) that corroborated parts of the defendants' stories and conflicted with those of the police officers. (There were other parts of the story where the reverse was true too). In both cases once we heart the defendant's side we needed additional evidence, beyond what the DA had initially provided, for us to be able to decide on whether or not to indict.

Wo some cases it is hard to imagine there being another side (somebody is accused of selling drugs to an under cover cop or there's video of somebody committing the crime), but it makes me wonder if how many of the others were less straightforward than they seemed.

Re: Jury Duty

#186

Post by fnordfnordfnord »

puredemo wrote: post #148
the_ancient wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you believe what is described in this article is working and healthy justice system then I am sad for you.

Sure, letting a murderer off who signed a confession is pretty daft.

>Sure, letting a murderer off

http://www.falseconfessions.org/fact-a-figures

Re: Jury Duty

#187

Post by wtbob »

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.

Re: Jury Duty

#188

Post by jerf »

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.

Re: Jury Duty

#189

Post by ckozlowski »

a_c_s wrote: post #185
ckozlowski wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An indictment is not a successful prosecution. And it does cost money...money, in my opinion is well spent, because in brings in skeptical people such as yourself with the power to check an overzealous prosecutor with simply arresting people on flimsy charges. There's no defense because no one has been charged; and if you decided that the prosecutor is full of shit, then it means an innocent person is not disrupted o…

I recently served on a New York grand jury and in my experience the biggest problem was that in 38/40 cases we only heard one side of the story. There were two cases where the defendants testified. Like the other cases, the story of the other witnesses (often cops, sometimes civilians, sometimes some of each) was quite straightforward... until the defendant testified. It may have been in the defendants' best interest…

I'd be interested to know under what circumstances a defense is called in during an indictment hearing. Maybe it depends on the evidence being presented, and whether or not it could be refuted easily (before going to trial?) I dunno. Interesting, thanks for sharing.

Re: Jury Duty

#190

Post by geomark »

wtbob wrote: post #187

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. Perh…

You are so fortunate. I served three times and each was a frustrating and disheartening experience.
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