Comment by civility | Hacker News Reader

Comment by civility | Hacker News Reader

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> Luckily, lay people are qualified to make those judgments. Whenever I have seen an actual jury at work, I have consistently been impressed by the degree to which folks can absorb the information presented at trial.

Having been through a jury trial for patent infringement, I saw nothing of the sort. My company was defending, and the plaintiffs dismissed every juror who had anything more than a high school degree. They were incapable of understanding any nuance in the engineering or math, and so they sided for the home team (the plaintiffs managed to get jurisdiction in their home town).

If you like, call it sour grapes because my company was on the losing side, but I think the majority of jurors are completely unequipped to understand basic science, mathematics, engineering, software, medicine, or technology.

>My company was defending, and the plaintiffs dismissed every juror who had anything more than a high school degree.

Your problem appears to be that you had a biased jury rather than a comment for trials by jury in general

His point is that the bias is systemic.

The jury is always biased by design. It’s never a goal to make the jury objective and/or competent, ever.

I thought both sides get to pick who is on the Jury?

I'm not sure how much the rules vary, but in our case there were 18 candidate jurors and both sides were allowed to dismiss 3 without cause or justification. Additionally, if either side could argue there was a cause, additional jurors could be dismissed (requiring new jurors to be summoned), but that didn't happen. The plaintiffs removed the 3 with any college at all.

Is the problem not that only 3 out of 18 had college-level education? That seems like a very low number.

That could be a representative sample of the area the trial was held in. Trial by jury of your peers means that some juries will be composed of mostly and sometimes even all "peers" with less formal education that most would think appropriate for the subject matter being discussed.

Right and both sides try to make the jury as biased as possible. trying to select for objectiveness is harmful.

Harmful to the side doing the picking or harmful to the justice process in general?

i would argue, both

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