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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

"In closing arguments this week, prosecutors conceded that their case was based on “all circumstantial evidence,” saying that the jury needed to join together the pieces of “a puzzle” to reach its conclusion."

I hate the whole idea of a jury system. It's insanity. Either the prosecution has proof that she comitted the crime or they don't - the idea that 12 random people can just decide you are guilty based on nothing more than prosecutor telling a nice story is literally insane. Thank god most of the civilized world doesn't use juries like US does.

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This is confusing to me. Jury systems are used across the civilized world, and the requirement for 12 unanimous guilty verdicts is incredibly favored towards defendants.

You have it backwards.

You are only acquitted if it is 12 to 0.

Anything less than that is a mistrial, and the state can try you again (and you sit in jail until they do.)

Didn’t used to be that way originally. It is now in nearly all jurisdictions.

In any case, for this reason and many others, the system is grossly tilted towards the prosecution in the US. The US has more prisoners per capita than any country in earth.

The number of prisoners has much more to do with the number of laws we enforce and how much effort we spend enforcing them. Actual trial procedures are irrelevant. If anything, there is a lack of jury trials - the majority of cases end in pleas.

> In any case, for this reason and many others, the system is grossly tilted towards the prosecution in the US.

The prosecution wins more often than not because of selection bias - the prosecution gets to pick which cases they take to trial and more often than not they pick ones they have a good chance of winning.

I am not sure what your alternative to a unanimous jury would be, but I think I would take my chances with the jury.

So say we all.

And there is a reason why Hong Kong national security law, which has cover the whole earth and possibly the moon and mars etc i.e. including any reader here, does not opt for jury system, but appointed judge.

Good God someone really argued for non-jury. I am all ears, as open as I can. But my heart and mind said no.

> If anything, there is a lack of jury trials - the majority of cases end in pleas.

People take pleas because the jury system is broken and if convicted you’ll get far more time.

As far as alternative? Jury’s are fine. The problem is the Supreme Court’s holding from a century back that a non-unanimous verdict is a mistrial and res judicata (or double jeopardy) is not triggered.

As the other poster pointed out, some jurisdictions allow an aquital with less than 12. But, the problem is this: you are presumed innocent and the State should have one chance to prove you guilty. If the State blows it, it should be over. The US fundamentally changed this.

If the State can’t convince 12 of your peers that you’re guilty, there is obviously a ‘reasonable doubt.’ But that’s all lip-service… doesn’t mean anything any more. You can prosecute a person a dozen times, with 90% of the jurors (collectively) finding not-guilty, and the person could still be convicted if the last set of jurors ruled 12-0 in favor of the state.

It’s a joke.

But mistrials are pretty dang rare - I don't think this is a reasonable concern.

Not a surprise, given 90-95% of cases end in a plea bargain [1]. Most defendants (even innocent ones) would rather give in to the threats of prosecutors and accept a guaranteed lower sentence than risk a much harsher one in trial [2].

So yeah, you have to have a really strong conviction your case will stand in court to reject a plea deal and try your odds in trial.

IMO, the system is made to be fair at the surface level, but it's utterly broken when you consider second-order consequences. The incentives are tilted towards prosecutors being incentivized for putting people in jail no matter what (and jail systems profiting from it).

[1] https://bja.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh186/files/media/docu...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krfcq5pF8u8

Is there a limit as to how many mistrials there can be? Or can trial after trial have 11 jurors vote to acquit, mistrial, wait in jail until new trial, indefinitely?

No.

It’s pretty easy to force a mistrial. I once saw witness do this deliberately.

She testified that the judge was involved in the crime - out of the freaking blue.

The witness was very important, and very opposed to testifying. Bad combination.

In this case, not quite.

> A guilty verdict in the case must be unanimous among the jury. A not-guilty verdict does not need to be unanimous, it only requires 10 jurors to believe she is not guilty.

https://www.koin.com/news/brophy-trial/jury-instructions-nan...

Still makes a mockery of the concept of innocent until proven guilty and double jeopardy. 3/4 of the jury believes you're not guilty and the prosecutor still gets to take another shot at a conviction.

It should be reversed. If the prosecutor can't get at least 10/12 guilty votes on the first try, you should be acquitted.

It may sound crazy to you, but relying on a single judge, no matter how versed in law, to make the call is not much better.

The property of a jury I like is that any decision has to be unanimous.

The thing I dislike more is the entire precedent approach, where laws are made through the court system, instead of strictly through elected officials (though that has drawbacks as well).

> any decision has to be unanimous

non-unanimous results are also decisive, causing a "mistrial"

That's a most unusual definition of decisive.

The standard for any criminal trial in the US is “proof beyond a reasonable doubt”; I’m sure the defense has hammered on this point. If a juror has reasonable doubt, she will not be convicted.

Jury nullification is a good feature: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification

Exactly. Jury nullification, in my opinion, is the ultimate form of democracy.

Well there was evidence to consider, it is not like the entire trial was based on conjecture.

The main evidence seems to be that she was on video driving in the area he was found dead and it didn't match her statements to the detectives.

“Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.” ==H.D. Thoreau

If proof was a binary thing, then you wouldn't need prosecutor and defense either. you could just have some clerk examine the evidence and establish guilt.

Of course, but saying "we saw her driving around the area of the crime, and she bought gun parts months before(and has a good explanation as to why)" is not proof - at least in my opinion it doesn't meet the "beyond any reasonable doubt" requirement for conviction by the American justice system. If the experts could establish that the bullet that killed her husband was fired from said gun then sure, that's proof. Asking the jury to basically "guess" is not justice - it's more like rolling a dice.

The jury has to decide whether the evidence available constitute proof beyond reasonable doubt. Someone has to make that decision, just like you are doing in your comment.

Whats your alternative?

Exactly how it works in other countries - prosecution has to establish that she was definitely the killer, not "maybe" the killer. They do that by summoning experts and witnesses, until it's either clear as a day that she killed the person, or....it's not, and then the entire case falls apart. You can't(shouldn't!) convict someone on such flimsy evidence as presented in this case.

If you ever listened to the podcast "Serial" that's another great example of that - the prosecution had no substantial evidence, yet the guy got senteced for murder because the prosecutor was able to tell a convicing story to the jury. It's a madhouse.

Conviction rates are much lower with a jury than a judge.

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