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Comment by alphabettsy | Hacker News Reader

Slightly unrelated, but don’t avoid jury service. It’s your civic duty.

I was selected for jury duty once and got out of it as quickly as I could. I was working a nothing minimum wage job to get by and they would've given me $15 dollars a day for jury duty.

You want people to stop trying to get out of jury duty? Then make sure their job has to pay them while they are serving on a jury.

People (understandably) often lament how hard it is to make an impact in the world. Being a juror can have far more impact than every vote you’ll ever cast.

The problem is magic doesn't happen when people put jury duty on their CV

I consider the ease of getting out of jury duty one of the foremost parts of jury selection - Anyone who does not see it as their civic duty is worth dispensing with.

A lot of people view it with the opposite effect: you’re being judged by a set of people not smart enough to get out of jury duty.

I have been called to jury duty 3 times in my life and never been selected as a juror. I consider it an important part of citizenship and community engagement.

Fun fact: if you don’t register to vote you’ll very likely never be called, ever. Most cities/states use voter rolls for prospective jurors.

I once got as close as the first alternate before I was bounced by one of the lawyers as a “free kick” - can’t even remember if it was defense or not.

> A lot of people view it with the opposite effect: you’re being judged by a set of people not smart enough to get out of jury duty.

Having only recently served on a jury, I realize now that most people who hold this opinion probably have never been on a jury. I was never so cynical, but serving on a jury still raised my confidence in and respect for my fellow citizens.

That said, my case was a relatively minor misdemeanor battery case and it become apparent to me that the right to a jury trial for such misdemeanors is a ridiculous waste of resources. It incentivizes piling on felony charges, or conversely failing to prosecute misdemeanor cases at all if the defendant pushes back. Some of the pathologies in our criminal justice system are much easier to understand and appreciate in light of how extensive is the right to a jury trial in practice. (All 12 of us on the jury agreed that the only reason the case was even being prosecuted despite the rigmarole of a jury trial was for political reasons, though we deliberated seriously nonetheless. It took us 2 days to agree to acquit, but I don't think anyone would have considered it unjust if it had been a bench trial and the judge convicted.)

I had always dismissed criticisms of jury trials as unpersuasive, especially in the American context where we're so concerned with the risk of government oppression. But I always implicitly assumed that the right didn't apply to minor misdemeanors. Turns out that even though under Common Law and under U.S. Supreme Court precedent the right isn't provided for minor misdemeanors (definition varies but still includes risk of jail time), in practice most states guarantee a jury trial for all misdemeanors. Reasons vary--19th century constitutional reform, seemingly simple 20th century statutory changes, creeping judicial minimization of the definitions of "minor" or "petty"--but the end result has been the same. Though, reverting this would be easier in some states than others.

Your jury decided that the prosecution was because of politics, that you'd agree that the defendant was guilty, and voted to acquit, anyway?

It sounds like you learned a lot of the arguments that our founding fathers had for why the right to jury trial is so important.

Ah, yes, jury nullification.

Knowing about it is your civic duty, but if you let on that you've heard of it, they'll kick you off the jury

Our decision ultimately came down to the facts, not the politics. The choice by the D.A. to take this particular case to trial seemed clearly politically motivated, but our only concern (as far as I could tell) was balancing justice for the defendant and the victim as it related to the incident.

in india, the judiciary is all advocates and judges only. every case is decided by a judge/2 judges/N judges.

the reasoning is, a common person does not have the knowledge or skills to decide the case.

the lawyers here have to convince a judge for their arguments and facts, not a jury...

imo how can a common person decide a matter of facts or matter of law when they do not possess the skills ?

In the US the he jury is not tasked with interpreting what the requirements of the law are or tasked with producing/deciding allowed evidence on the case. In these matters the judge will run the court proceedings to produce allowed evidence + arguments and separately instruct the jury on matters of the law pertaining to the case. The role of the jury is just to weigh whether the evidence presented to them seems strong enough to meet the balance of probabilities or be beyond a reasonable doubt (depending on the type of case). I.e. the jury is tasked with answering questions like "based on the evidence presented is it reasonable to doubt the attack was committed by this person" but not tasked with answering/coming up with questions like "what laws would this attack break and how" or "is that question/evidence allowable in the case". Once the jury reaches a verdict it goes back to the judge to decide the sentencing.

Things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification do exist though, not by procedure but just because the rules can't prevent it, but it's more restricted than many realize and also extremely rare.

It's also true that the Jury isn't flying blind. The judge provides instructions as to how the law applies. It's of note a lot of appeals center around the judges instructions. And fundamental a jury places a hard limit on the states power. Which is to say a judge can and sometimes does limit it even further. Jury can say guilty on charge 4. Judge can say not guilty on charge 4.

Why bring in people with no experience to judge that sort of thing? Whether evidence is convincing is not so easy to decide.

Invent a class of legally informed people who can be paid to think about such things and gather experience in it over time.

Sure, make them separate from the judges so it's not all one guy deciding.

>Invent a class of legally informed people who can be paid to think about such things and gather experience in it over time.

lawyers are legally informed people who are taught how to convince a judge about how the facts explain a certain fact. the judge has to accept the reasoning of one lawyer or the other so the judge needs to be equal to both.

It doesn't necessarily help to be legally informed or not unless you change the role of the jury completely. The law is already set and interpreted by other parties, the only question is about if the jury feels an open ended threshold of doubt has been reached. One could argue to have a class of people that try to rigorously decide what is reasonable doubt based on additions to law that try to quantify doubt but one could just as easily argue finding what society finds to be reasonable doubt is something better answered by normal people instead of a special class and trying to codify what doubt is for every situation in every law unreasonable to do accurately and keep up to date.

I don't think one is inherently right or wrong, it's more a match to ideals. The important thing to note with the current jury system in the US is it's actually preferred they aren't specially informed in law (beyond their given role on the jury) as anything related to legal interpretation is supposed to be done by the rest of the court anyways.

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