Should a dog's sniff be enough to convict a person for murder?

But, I agree - it must first and foremost be a jury of the accused's peers - but that doesn't mean "man on the street style average joe" necessarily.

I think the ‘jury of your peers’ thing is meant to be in the sense of ‘all men are created equal’. They don’t, I presume, intelligence test the defendant and if they score lowly, screen the jury to admit only dumbasses.

In regards to the first disagreement GPs proposal wasn't "a process that optionally allows an attorney to strike some jurors they find have low comprehension" it was "there really ought to be some basic comprehension and reasoning test for jurors." as in a hard requirement to have some level of comprehension regardless if the attorneys wish to strike a juror based on this fact.

In regards to the second disagreement you aren't guaranteed to a jury of your peers in the US you are guaranteed to an impartial jury. Jury of your peers was part of common law and guaranteed e.g. high class people would only have juries of other high class people and is not part of US law. A "special" or "blue ribbon" jury like the GP proposed are allowed to been used as deemed necessary by the court in many states and actually by the Supreme Court itself in it's only jury trial (they drew from a pool of merchants) they are just not mandated for every trial.

Again I do side with your opinion that special juries shouldn't be the default but that's not what is under question.

I'd believe a juror getting dismissed for knowing statistics and being persuadable by logical arguments, before I'd believe a juror being dismissed for being in a demographic who favors police and emotional arguments.

Personal feelings decide outcomes. I know this person is not guilty but this guy who loves the free lunches won't ever change his mind and I am worried about my mortgage.

All the grand jury members are ordinary citizens with no special education or training. The state sends you a letter, you show up at the time and place they say, and there is no "jury selection" that excludes jurors. You're truly just a pool of random people from the county.

(This is the New York State system. The federal system is different. And some states don't even have grand juries. It's kind of an unusual thing.)

To more directly answer what you're getting at; yes, I felt like something a little fishy was going on. It is all conjecture from chatting with the other members of the jury while sitting around bored for 8 hours a day. Some of them were very good at collecting information about what goes on behind the scenes. The cases should probably be randomly load-balanced between juries, without the prosecutor knowing that one of them has difficult people on it. I would venture a guess that there are rules around this, and then there are "the rules" on how it's done in real life, and people are generally fine with "the rules". So it goes. Ultimately, the grand jury is the people's power over prosecutorial aggression. You, as one of those people, have to decide what to push for and how the jury should be run. My group had a lot of people in it that very strongly pushed back against the power of the state. Some other groups might not have that. That's the luck of the draw, I suppose.

I'll also say that we were not being difficult for the sake of being difficult. They presented some cases that were very clear-cut, and we easily agreed to indict based on the evidence that was shown.

The transcripts of the actual grand jury session are "secret" but generally available to the defendant's attorney, but not the public.

Information on when a grand jury went home might not be restricted though, and might be available, if it was recorded somewhere.

> "My dog would never bite. He just snarls and snaps like that when he's nervous."

If you ever hear this, the dog is being socialized in a bad, counterproductive way before your very eyes. The owner is ignoring manifestly severe distress, as well as generally unacceptable behavior in public.

> "My dog is a good dog at heart, but she's a rescue so you have to make allowances."

The word ‘allowances’ here is kinda strong, in that it sounds like you're not only giving up on eliminating certain negative behaviors/feelings in your dog, but also in managing them.

But it's really close to something that I think is fair to say, which is that you can't expect your dog to instantly recover from trauma, and that you will have to make gradual progress on teaching your dog that the world is safe for them and how you expect them to behave in it. At the same time, it's your job to manage those behaviors along the way, so I'm not sure that counts as ‘making allowances’ in the sense of simply permitting otherwise unacceptable behavior. So it might be fair to give that one to the GGP, too.

> "My dog is only growling because you are showing fear."

This is useless information even if it's true, and it pushes responsibility for the dog's behavior and comfort onto others (probably including random strangers, given the character of the examples). This is poor socialization in action again.

(Aside: growling is good. It is good for dogs to give warning. You probably want to address the thing they're growling about (food possessiveness, fear, anxiety, mistrust of strangers), which may not be good. But you probably don't want to suppress growling per se or treat growling as bad behavior. That's a good way to get a less predictable dog.)

> "If you got bit, you must have done something to the dog. No dog bites without good reason."

If someone says this about their own dog, they're showing a stunning level of disinterest in their own dog's behavior, comfort, and impact on others. If someone tells you your dog bit them, you need to be very interested in all of the details so you can figure out what was going on and what you need to do about it.

Anyway my point is not to deny someone that they've had unpleasant or even traumatic experiences with dogs, but to point out that moderately detailed stories, like the one you just shared, are much more informative than judgments given without context.

The burden is on those interpreting the behavior of specific sniffing dogs in a way that demonstrates their is actual reliability in general, and in the specifics. No the other way around.