Was this consideration discussed by the supreme court in the USA?
(edits - no results ctrl-f for "conspiracy", "intimidation", "mafia", "organized" in https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/18-5924_n6io.pdf )
Yes, it means that guilty people will go free. But relaxing the constraints of what "convicted" means that by definition there will be innocent people convicted by 7-11/12 juries.
This depends to a large degree on the nature of the crime, as well as the implied reduction of risk of committing them. Abolishing criminal sentencing altogether would clearly reduce the number of innocent people convicted, but few would argue it would result in a net reduction in social harm.
Genuinely interested whether anyone's done some sort of study on whether dissenting jurors tend to be more 12 Angry Men style heroes who focus much more carefully than their peers on the standards of evidence rather than prevailing prejudices against the alleged perpetrator, or more stubborn contrarians whose prejudices against evidence presented by certain types of people or in favour of certain types of defendant haven't been uncovered by the jury selection process.
"It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer."
In the language of statistics, it is a trade-off between precision vs recall. In general, we cannot create a system that makes sure no innocent is behind the bars (other than not convicting anyone).
I believe this is by far the best way to handle it as well, but I did recently read a book that brought up an interesting point.
The line above is almost always the justification given. But, what if those ten were murderers, and by letting those ten escape, each one ended up killing another innocent? Now in your efforts to stop one innocent from going to prison, ten innocents have died, versus the one that would have been falsely imprisoned otherwise.
...
Utilitarian arguments (to which I adhere to, in general) are hard. There are so many consequences, including ones that are not immediate.
With putting people under arrest we often go for recall. Yes, it is a nasty experience for an innocent, but at the same time, it may avoid the case you mentioned.
Which long-term consequences? First, just because someone is a murderer, does not mean he/she is going to go on a rampage. Second, if precision is high, people can trust the system in the long term, and give some feeling of safety. Compare it with a lynch mob scenario, where it is easy to mishandle justice (and, long term, a lot of innocent are at risk).
If courts are unable to punish well connected criminals then it's difficult to keep a healthy democracy.
I'm not sure what the solution is, but it seems like there should be some redundancy in the system.
Juries are often sequestered meaning that by the time you figure out what to try you can't get at them.
Of course none of the above is perfect. You can get around them if you put in enough effort. Which is why it is a tradeoff as others have said.
We do, however, have the ability to dispense with a jury entirely and have a single judge decide on the case. I suppose that's not much better: a single professional jury of one versus one of twelve.
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.
How often do jurry opinions actually split purely along racial lines?
https://www.wwno.org/post/history-louisianas-non-unanimous-j...
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.
"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.
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.
It seems like difficulty in intimidating jurors would scale linearly, O(n)