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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

If they came back in tears and were removed from the jury, then the system worked. A clearly impartial potential juror was removed and a past victim was saved from a horrible experience of sitting through such testimony. But what about those who have been abused but aren't in tears? This came up very recently. One of the Ghislaine Maxwell jurors discussed his history of being abused with other jurors. The question becomes then whether anyone who has been abused can ever be impartial about abuse. To say that they cannot, imho, does victims a great disservice.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59884806

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If you remove any jurors with history of abuse, do you not remove all the people that have life experience that could be relevant?

With a jury of only lets say strong white males that have never been abused or abuse adjacent, but have had several experience where they felt woman didn't give them enough respect are we that would seem a lot worse to me. Obviously this sounds like an extreme example, but the reality is that such a large part of the population has been the victim in abuse situations that you are going to disqualify into a situation similar to this.

I'm a white male who's never been sexually abused but I can clearly see that's wrong.

This, and being more objective / less emotional (due to not seeing it personally) would probably make me a better juror in such a case than someone who's personally experienced it.

I don't know, I am also a white male and I feel I cannot understand how abuse really works. Of course this might just be me being dense, doesn't say anything about you or anyone else.

With no experience of abuse, you might more likely to be persuaded by arguments like "why didn't she report it earlier" than people with actual experience, who know exactly why.

I think the whole concept of random citizens being pulled in for jury duty is idiotic.

Jurors should be professionals who are trained in being jurors: who, for one thing, thoroughly understand topics in critical reasoning such as fallacies, and cognitive biases.

They should be properly paid, and so are not sitting there on a Saturday morning, socking it to the defendant out of spite for being dragged out of their regular lives without adequate compensation.

That system exists. They are called bench trials. No defendant is forced us submit to a jury. The defendant doesn't want a jury because he thinks that it will "sock it to him" on a Saturday. He wants a jury because he thinks that his fellow citizens will see that the government is improperly accusing him of a crime. The defendant has the right to a trial by people who are not part of the same government that has accused him. The fact that the jurors don't want to be there, that they have lives away from the court, is exactly what the defendant wants.

Among the small share and number of federal defendants who went to trial in fiscal 2018, those who opted for a bench trial – that is, one in which the verdict is handed down by a judge – fared better than those who opted for a jury trial. Around four-in-ten defendants who faced a bench trial (38%) were acquitted, compared with just 14% of those who faced a jury trial.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/11/only-2-of-f...

I have to imagine the defendants who opt for a bench trial have reasons for making that choice that don't necessarily apply to the defendants who choose a jury trial.

So the ones who choose Bench trial are more likely to be innocent?

> exactly what the defendant wants

Only if the defendant is a fool. People being the way people are, are just as likely to resent the defendant as the root cause of why they have to be there at all as the are to resent the system (and side with the defendant out of spite for the system).

The latter will likely only happen in a trial that is between the defendant and the system (i.e. the state).

In, say, a criminal trial in which the victim isn't the state, reluctant, resentful jurors will sock it to the defendant. If there is any uncertainty in the decision, that sentiment may sway it.

Resentment of the jury duty concept will predispose jurors to cave in to their social prejudices. Oh, he must have done it; he's a tattoo-covered, prematurely-aged chain smoker with three gold teeth. Everything about this guy says "criminal". Fuck this asshole for making me be here on a Saturday.

Time is an issue. People who are impatient and just want something to be over will not do a good job of sifting through things to get to the truth, which takes time and patience.

I assume defendants are getting expert advice from attorneys when they make this decision. They should theoretically know way more about this than you or I.

Indeed, the lawyer could, for instance, have a good idea of whether the defendant has a personality and presentation that is likely to be likable to a jury.

A professional Jury opens up avenues for corruption.

Maybe someday we can simulate human brains well enough to run the markovs on governance ideas to see if it's worth it.

> A professional Jury opens up avenues for corruption

Wouldn't the same logic reject professional judges and attorneys?

I don't think so. Checks and balances.

Norway just removed jury duty, and if I remembered correctly the last case that had jury duty the actual judges put the jury verdict aside as they all agreed the jury had misunderstood the law.

Of course judges are not always good as well. In the US they are often elected by a blood thirsty population. If they are not elected that has other issues in that the will of the people is not held by the judges.

Why was the jury required to understand the law? That's not a reasonable expectation for random people off the street.

In the US, juries typically decide questions of _fact_ that are not already agreed upon by both parties (i.e. are in dispute). Judges handle questions of law.

If a fact is known, you don't need the contribution of a random person.

If a fact is not known, how can some random person produce it? Out of what.

E.g. in the situation of a crime: only activities like crime scene investigation, and interviewing of witnesses can produce anything that can be called a fact.

Now so from all that have some collection of real facts from the investigation which do not add up to an absolute proof that some particular defendant "dun it".

The next best thing you could do is use some sort of probabilistic reasoning.

Well, what training in probabilistic reasoning do the these random people off the street have?

Probabilities should be quantified in concrete numbers. Instead of some flaky "shadow of a doubt" nonsense, there should be some 99.99% (or whatever standard level) confidence which is somehow calculated.

Yes, the definition of "fact" in "findings of fact" is "there is a factual answer, but we do not know what it is, so we have to guess".

Yes, it might be better if jurors were all acquainted with Bayesian reasoning and it would definitely be better if things like expert testimony and so forth came with confidence estimates.

And yes, "beyond a reasonable doubt" is pretty qualitative.

My point was that if you are expecting your jurors to have a deep understanding of the law, you are definitely doing it wrong.

If anything it should be more random and less controlled by lawyers. We're all born into a system of laws we didn't consent to. The legal system and the laws we're forced to obey were set up and are maintained by groups of wealthy people looking to protect their own interests and we had no say in the process. Short of revolution, our only means of making changes to this system have also been put in place by wealthy and powerful people looking to protect their own interests and they gave the entrenched powerful every advantage over you.

We can't choose our laws, but we can choose when and how our peers are punished under them. Participating in a jury is the one place in the system where regular citizens have direct influence in the process. It means we can refuse to convict people under laws which are unjust. It means we can hold members of our communities accountable to laws we consent to live under.

I wouldn't be so eager to give that power up.

> If they came back in tears and were removed from the jury, then the system worked.

Not true, since no abusers came back in tears and were removed from the jury.

Or do you consider abusers impartial but abuse victims biased?

I find the very premise of trying to find an "impartial" jury very strange. It makes sense at first pass, but falls apart soon after.

Are these not to be a jury of my "peers". Are not all humans biased in one way or another. If being abused creates bias, why wouldn't NOT being abused also not create bias. We don't have perfect access to information. Sometimes in order to be considered impartial, jurors are basically expected to have no familiarity with basic fundamental news stories. Are people so disconnected from reality really "peers"?

Ultimately, I guess, it's the best we can do.

Impartiality in a jury trial context doesn't refer to the absence of biases (we all have them and truly getting rid of them is an impossible task), but a conscious effect by the jurors to discharge their office without prejudice, i.e., without allowing their biases to manifest as judgments independent of the evidence presented in court.

Put another way: there wouldn't be a point in deliberation if we didn't have biases. Our justice system trusts and (weakly) attempts to enforce the gap between those biases and prejudices that would actually interfere with the court's duty.

And to put it another way, the job of a juror is to convict or exonerate the person on trial, not to convict or exonerate their own abusers by proxy.

Vulcans might not have a problem with this, but humans so obviously do that pretending otherwise is impractical.

I've served on a few juries. From my experience, the average person thinks its much easier to get out of it due to biases than it actually is.

Are not all humans biased in one way or another

This appears to be binary thinking. There are nearly infinite degrees of bias. Strong emotions are one way to ensure that someone is heavily biased. That's what the jury system is trying to avoid.

So someone who has never been abused can still be biased in literally any way. But the presumption is that without having such an emotional personal experience with it means they are less likely to be heavily biased. They'll be more likely to be swayed by the testimony in court rather than their experience outside of the court room.

If you're accused but innocent and provide a good case for your innocence, but a juror provides a crying testimony that no one believed them in the jury room, leading to you being sentenced, you'd probably think differently.

Sure, we can't get a perfectly impartial jury. But someone with a past trauma probably won't be able to judge the case for its merits.

The "peers" part is obsolete. In the old English system, a peasant was tried by other peasants, a noble by other nobles. There's no longer a notion that some people are your peers and others aren't.

Rightly or wrongly its not about disservice to a victim turning up for jury duty its about disservice to the accused. Imagine if you were wrongly prosecuted for for abuse, found guilty and then discovered that three members of the jury had themselves suffered the same abuse you were accused of, you'd immediately look for a re-trial.

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