California is about to allow former felons to serve on juries

The woman being questioned for jury duty was asked about being a victim of crime. She said, "I've been a bank teller for over 20 years. I've been robbed at gunpoint three times, and every time it was a black man. Black men are always guilty".

I was shocked she would say such a thing, but even more shocked to see her back the next day. She wasn't dismissed.

That's not been my experience, and I've sat through the process in San Francisco 3-4 times so far.

note: my experience is in San Mateo county jury selection as a private citizen. I am also a former lawyer, and almost all of my lawyer friends have never made it past jury selection. I served once, only because I emphasized that I practiced tax law, which is very different from criminal law.

Yep, voir dire is designed to weed out anyone with knowledge of the legal system or knowledge relevant to the case at hand. Then those people are expected to make decisions based on legal standards they've no familiarity with.

It's the best system in the world.

It's called parole, sometimes released on licence. First you have to get past the parole board who will assess your suitability for release. The theory is to grant you supervised access back to society to regain your place in society. While on parole there's all sorts of reason you can find yourself back inside. Half or two thirds of sentence is pretty common too.

What America does different is not having post sentence - that's post release and parole - rehabilitation, you are always an ex-felon, even after 50 years law abiding. Other nations find offenders can often reform and regain a place in society, particularly if given a fair chance...

Custody credits. For crimes committed after October 2011, defendants who do not misbehave while in jail will receive 1 day of "conduct credits" for every 1 days of actual jail time served. Felons will similarly receive 1 day of conduct credit for every day of actual time served in prison while on good behavior. However, felons convicted of a violent crime only receive 15% conduct credit for time served (so 1 day of "conduct credit" for every 15 days of jail time served) and 0% credit if convicted of murder.

The only crimes you can (or could) receive 30+ year sentences for in CA are violent crimes (like rape, armed robbery, or murder) or 3-strikes sentences, and such sentencing is no longer possible for a 3rd strike unless the 3rd strike is a violent crime.

So lawyers game this so that the felons stay in these prisons/jails longer than other prisons and come out faster.

The police officer is lying. Credits are based on statutory formulas and no facility provides any more custody credits than any other, because the facility doesn't determine how many credits you get.

Seriously, so much this. The thing should be stateless. You made a mistake, there were consequences - but once that's over, you ought to be good as new.

Eternal punishment only ought to have a place in dumb mythology.

The Magna Carta, which secured the right to a jury trial, only concerned the rights of the landed gentry. The jury trial was about the landed class having the right to deliberate on the disputes of its own members. It was copied from the system used for matters pertaining to Church lands and clerical crimes; matters that were required to be settled by other clergy through a parallel court system administered by the Church, whose rights and powers were derived from papal authority.

This notion isn't entirely antiquated today. Some scholars argue that one of the reasons the American criminal justice system has become so harsh on minorities is because juries are usually composed of members who live in separate communities from the accused. Their interests are in tamping down on crime, with little incentive to consider the disruption caused by wrenching away men and women from the labor pool and their families. According to this perspective, we should maybe return to a system where jury pools are called from much smaller geographical districts--literally the neighborhood where the crime occurred.

When share cropping was still a thing in the South, before penal labor became a state enterprise, and even during slavery, juries were often quite lenient toward the working class, including blacks. (Conviction rates were much closer to parity between white and black defendants!) Jury members knew that the accused likely worked for someone else in the community, and owed debts to others; unnecessary punishment[1] of the accused indirectly punished jury members' friends and families. Things worked similarly at the turn of the 19th century in major cities, when ethnic communities were compact and courts weren't centralized downtown. Jail time meant leaving a wife and kids without needed income, creating an immediate burden on the community (e.g. more expenditures from the neighborhood church's coffers).

If juries were again composed of members from the community directly impacted by a crime, then it might still make sense to penalize felons from serving. Juries would once again be more about the community policing itself, as opposed to today where we principally conceive of juries as impartial and fair (in the roulette sense) adjudicators of guilt and gatekeepers of retributive justice. Fortunately, most crime is still local. "Black-on-black" is a catchphrase today, but crime is generally neighbor-on-neighbor everywhere.

[1] Of course, if you were black then "unnecessary" would need to take into account the need to sow fear in the black community. But so long as slavery and share cropping kept blacks tied to the plantations and farms, that was far less common than in later years when they became more mobile.

And then the city banned plastic bags...

People who've been to prison are much more likely to be grounded in visceral reality and weigh things properly compared to much of our increasingly sheltered society, especially along the coasts.

Sorry for diversion of a subject, can't resist.

I'm never understood such blind chauvinism, particularly here in light of all that's been said in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21710564

Is it? How about professional jurors. Would that be an improvement? Or a mix of the two; some peers, some professionals. Or what about short-engagement professional jurors - selected from the citizenry at large, but then given some proper training and acting as jurors for a year. Or perhaps a cadre of professionally trained jurors who take a few months to become trained, and then simply do jury duty alongside their untrained colleagues. Is a simple jury of peers really the best we can do?

A hypothetical issue with the concept of "a jury of our peers" could be defining "peers".

Are there situations where the issue being litigated is sufficiently specialized that the average person would not constitute a peer? For example, determining whether an engineer followed proper practices.

At least in America, is so little shared world view between different segments of society (Democrat and Republican, rural and urban, upper class and working poor, west coast and deep south, etc.) that a given pair of citizens might effectively not be peers?

These concerns could be especially important since the law often depends on determining what a "reasonable person" would do in a situation which might vary depending on the "reasonable person's" background.

I mean I know our justice system is busted and you'd have to be insane to say it actually reformed people instead of just locking them away because we don't give a shit about doing anything else, but either way...

In general, rights should be restored, yes. There should only be exceptions if there is reason, which the judge judges. The judge may rule that an attempted suicide bomber doesn't get to work with bombs in mining operations, or someone who repeatedly caused fatal accidents not get a new driver's license (though I guess that might be an issue in the USA, I hear it's necessary for normal life there, but it's about the example), or someone who committed voting fraud doesn't get to run a place where people vote during elections, etc., but otherwise I don't see how it shouldn't be equal for everyone.

In our existing system, both sides get to rule out a set number of jurors for whatever reason they want (unless can be shown that the lawyers intended to discriminate on a few set characteristics), and then an unlimited amount of jurors if they can show the jurors might have any kind of bias, through a process called jury selection or voir dire. This is a giant industry, encompassing everything from body language experts to data analysis. For example, here's what TransUnion had to say about their new big data product:

> With little time to research potential jurors using manual methods, attorneys and consultants traditionally pick juries based on what they can observe — age, gender, answers to background questions during voir dire and body language — leading to jury pools selected at least partially based on stereotypes and hunches.

> Cutting-edge research tools like TLOxp® by TransUnion make it easy and affordable to quickly find more accurate, actionable information on potential jurors. TLOxp uses proprietary linking algorithms to scour 125 billion records on an estimated 95% of the U.S. population within seconds, uncovering insightful information and establishing patterns and relationships.

https://www.tlo.com/blog/smarter-data-is-a-game-changer-for-...

In other words, you aren't the first person to consider that people on juries might be biased, and in fact in my opinion we go far too far in the other direction.

Furthermore, juries don't (generally) just get to decide whatever they want, they are instructed in what factors they are allowed to evaluate, and what tests they must use, by the judge. An appeal can (generally) only challenge the process, not the decision by the jurors.

Here's what the article had to say about this:

> The new law won’t interfere with this process. The attorneys or judge retain authority to dismiss a potential juror with a felony conviction from a particular case, for cause — but a felony conviction does not, in and of itself, constitute cause.

In other words, either side could come up with a vague reason they didn't like a former felon and get them off the jury even if they had already used up their free strikes.

Perhaps it's time for the US to follow the lead of most of its common law brethren in the Commonwealth and get rid of the terms "misdemeanour" and "felony".