Hacker News Reader

Comment by privatedan | Hacker News Reader

Was on a jury for a murder trial dec 2021. The trial gave me a new found respect for how trials are conducted, what evidence is allowed in, how defendants are protected, and the general thought and reasoning behind it all. Then, the jury deliberated and I lost a ton of respect for the ability of a jury of my peers to logically reason and responsibly decide. It was an absolute shit show in false pretenses, irrational conclusions, biases, logical fallacies. We ended up as a hung jury. I was in the minority opinion and we let the offending party ( again in my opinion ) walk.

View on HN

Counterpoint, I was on a murder jury several years ago where every part of the justice system was pretty abysmal. Whether the police who were near incompetent in their investigation, the forensics people who could barely maintain chain of evidence or both sets of attorneys who couldn’t make logical arguments on either side.

The only people who came out looking good was the judge who was able to keep this circus from blowing up and my fellow jury members who despite the system all ended up reasonable and serious in their deliberations.

> "police who were near incompetent in their investigation, the forensics people who could barely maintain chain of evidence"

Are you sure they were all bad at their jobs? It's certainly possible. But it's also possible that you simply had unrealistic expectations for what the process looks like, exemplifying the "CSI Effect".

This is why I find these sort of pseudo-anonymous anecdotes very difficult to judge; I know neither the details of the case, nor you personally. It's like trying to get reviews for headphones online... suppose I read a review from somebody who says the headphones sound worse than a skinned cat. Is that review from a typical headphone user with reasonable expectations for sound quality? Or is it from an audiophile with very high, perhaps fanciful, standards? I have no point of reference for determining where that person is coming from.

Let’s put it this way, even though they had a full video confession it made it to trial…

If the accused wants to plead innocent even after confessing, isn't that their right? They're entitled to a trial.

Potentially. Confessing to a 5-0 during an interrogation is different from entering a plea of guilty or not guilty.

But given that you just confessed guilt, a not guilty plea is going to raise eyebrows and potentially end badly.

Police often manipulate or coerce people into making false confessions. 29% of DNA exonerations in the US involved a false confession.

https://innocenceproject.org/dna-exonerations-in-the-united-...

Hence being bad at their jobs

This!

A friend, A former police officer, said the most astonishing thing he learned as a rookie was how easily some people would confess to crimes they could not possibly have committed. Such persons were usually not very bright and, after hours of interrogation, could be convinced that they had indeed done a bad deed.

It seems like you might have very unrealistic expectations for the criminal justice system.

Defendants are constitutionally entitled to a jury trial. Even if they were caught on 4k video, with their face fully identifiable, their fingerprints all over the blood scene, and they walk straight into a police station afterwards to confess.

A defense lawyer with a client who confessed on video has an extremely difficult job; they must try to present a credible case while also not suborning perjury or violating ethical rules. Very frequently, they're not going to have a "logical" case; they're simply trying to poke whatever holes they can in the prosecution's case...because the Defense is not constitutionally required to prove anything (unless they're attempting to prove an affirmative defense, and if they were you'd know because the judge would explicitly tell you).

On the other hand, if the prosecutor and the police and the forensics guys were all as incompetent as you claim, the defense might have gone to trial despite the taped confession because there was a chance they could prevail with a jury if the prosecution messed up presenting the case. I won most of my jury trials because the prosecution messed up.

Your last paragraph was my point. The incompetence of the investigation left a chance at trial even though there was a taped confession.

If the investigation had been just workmanlike or followed basic protocols I cant imagine any defense attorney would have wanted to take it to trial. Though perhaps they still didn’t want that but their client demanded it. I of course couldn’t know that.

Or is it coming from someone who thinks the original airpods are cream of the crop?

This sounds more like the Dunning-Kruger effect than a true reflection of the justice system.

Different trial (attempted murder), but I too was on a Jury.

At the start of deliberation, it was an even split. Towards the end of deliberation it was 11/12 in favor of returning a verdict of guilty.

However... One juror opened up some bizarre Pandora's box arguing against the fundamental knowability of the universe. How could any fact truly be "known"?

At times, I love conversations like that. But not when a man has been stabbed twelve times and directly pointed to the defendant.

Our jury was hung.

That seems like something to tell the Judge. I don't know how it works, but were there any replacement Jurors? I think the Judge should be able to disqualify that person from being a Juror.

11/12 should be enough to convict for this very reason: there’s quite possibly one holdout who is totally inane. States have tried allowing non-unanimous juries but the Supreme Court has said it is unconstitutional. The process should be revisited. I actually think it might make more sense to have pods of 3 jurors discuss independently (to avoid groupthink) then require like 11/12 or something along those lines.

I can see the headline: "Juror Dies Mysteriously in Chambers: Body Bears 11 Distinct Stab Wounds."

"Et tu, Brute?"

- lit. "You too, Brutus?" - from Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare, Act 3 Scene 1. The phrase is spoken by the Roman dictator Julius Caesar during his assassination to his friend Marcus Junius Brutus when Caesar realizes Brutus is also one of the assassins.

Your anecdote sounds like an example of the system working to me.

I'm absolutely sure your assessment is correct:

   I lost a ton of respect for the ability of a jury of my peers to logically reason and responsibly decide

People as a rule are horrible at logical thinking.

But that's absolutely the right side to err on. Much better for twelve people to have to be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt.

Put another way, it's way more important for the justice system to minimize false positives (wrongful convictions) than false negatives, so I'm happy to hear anecdotes where it's seemingly biased this way.

People "not being logical" renders their decisions random. Or biased in case, some common cause for such biased thinking is present. Like prejudice towards skin colors, poverty or whatever.

The former case results in GP's tie, the latter in the absurdly skewed prison population the US is known for.

People are horrible at logical thinking.

Not necessarily. People "not being logical" might simply mean that their decisions are emotional. Emotions are not logical, but that does not make them random or wrong. There are still reasons for emotions, and frequently there's a large degree of truth to them as well. They often do exemplify bias, but that's why there's more than 1 person on the jury, and why attorneys are allowed to disqualify jurors, and why a good attorney will try to get a jury panel that is at least representative of the population if not favorably inclined to her client.

> the latter [results] in the absurdly skewed prison population the US is known for.

This is not supported at all. I assume you're talking about racial demographics of prison population. It's a complex historical and socioeconomic problem, biased juries may have some role but it wouldn't be on the top 10 factors.

> the latter in the absurdly skewed prison population the US is known for.

Are you sure? Since most homicides are intra-racial [1] (despite the impression one gets from those the media choose to focus on), we can use victim race as proxy for offender race (I'd use offender race directly, but then you'd just blame it on police racism). Since it's hard to manufacture a corpse, or fake its race, we can further assume that data is largely free of police bias.

So white+Hispanic are 50% of homicide victims [2] (which we use as proxy for perpetrators), and 58% of the prison population [3]. For blacks, its 44% and 37%, respectively. Doesn't look particularly skewed to me. There is some anti-white+Hispanic bias, but since we're looking only at homicide to avoid police bias, we're not seeing the whole picture, which may explain the disparity.

[1] In approximately ninety percent of all murders committed in the U.S. over the years, the victim and perpetrator are of the same race - https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/wicked-deeds/201602/...

[2] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-... (for some reason the FBI groups whites with Hispanics)

[3] https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/incarceration-rates-by-r... (white and Hispanic are again grouped)

> for some reason the FBI groups whites with Hispanics Because race != ethnicity, they even do the split on the right, on the ethnicity column.

How will that continue to work in the future as society becomes more polarized and culture wars grow in importance?

Every trial will be a hung one, you will have one blue/red juror which will refuse to find guilty a blue/red defendant.

That's still a better outcome than people getting convicted just for being on the wrong side of the culture wars.

Failing in the right direction (not locking someone up) is one of the most important characteristics of a justice system.

If the justice system becomes too ineffective, then people will create their own justice "system" (i.e., vigilantism) to replace it. The entire reason for the justice system to exist is to prevent this.

In principle I agree, but it also works the other way round: people get convicted for crimes they did not commit due to unreasonable and unsound reasoning. The fact that things like the Innocence Project exist is by itself already a huge red flag.

On balance, I'm not sure if it's biased towards letting people go free. It might be interesting to compare e.g. the UK with some European countries (in the US the justice system is too bananas on several levels).

Scotland has three verdicts for trails:

* Guilty

* Not Guilty

* Not Proven - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_proven

The latter lets you off, but has the connotation the defendant probably did it, but it couldn't be quite proven.

I like that system, but it seems there is a legal review going on at the moment which might abolish it.

> it's way more important for the justice system to minimize false positives (wrongful convictions) than false negatives

True, but only up to a limit. The only way to avoid all false positives is to have no justice system at all, but in that case the criminal gangs essentially become the government and justice system.

> I'm happy to hear anecdotes where it's seemingly biased this way.

Except that it's not.

For most jurors, being in the defendants chair means guilty. Consequently, it's rare to find people on the jury who will make the prosecution actually do their job.

A friend of mine was on a federal jury for a conspiracy charge. He came into the jury room figuring it would be a slam dunk verdict--the defendant was documented to be out of the country by the prosecution when the supposed in person conspiracy planning was happening. He didn't even understand why this was allowed to come to trial.

But, no, half the jury was basically "He's done bad things and should be in jail." It wound up a hung jury in spite of the fact that there was physical evidence presented by the prosecution that contradicted the whole case.

> Then, the jury deliberated and I lost a ton of respect for the ability of a jury of my peers to logically reason and responsibly decide.

Isn't this a consequence of jury vetting on the part of the attorneys? i.e. the defense does not want logical/rational thinkers on the jury if they have a bad case (know the defendant committed the crime, lots of evidence against defendant, etc). In those cases they want people who think with emotions and who can be emotionally swayed. So really both sides (prosecution and defense) will play games to try to bias the jury in their favor, whether that means adding or subtracting STEM types from the jury.

This is not a defense only phenomenon.

Love that bias lol. "We do science therefore we are incapable of logical fallacies".

There are plenty of people they screen for and/or boot off of juries. When I went to jury duty the questionnaire asked about if you are / were / related to a cop or lawyer, if you had ever worked for a police dept or court system as a civilian, if you had experience with regulatory or GRC roles, or if you were a PI. They also asked about level of education and if you had experience in management or HR.

Keep in mind that this is not the court asking these questions, it's the lawyers.

I was on the jury for a simple drunk driving case where the cop, the only witness testifying, with no other evidence presented, was caught lying about being "run off the road." Lost a lot of faith in mankind that day.

Hah. That happened to my brother in law.

He was driving home in twilight (after regular work day, no drinking involved) and a mad guy jumped in front of him on the road. My brother in law swerved and avoided the crazy dude and kept driving.

A kilometer later he was chased down by a angry violent police officer in police cruiser who arrested him, put him in cuffs, slammed him into the cruiser with no discussion. Turns out the crazy guy was a police officer running a hidden speed trap, but of course it was hidden so there was no police cruiser in sight, no lights, and the officer was wearing a plain dark vest and armor which just looked like regular clothes.

The complaint has been stalled for three years now of course. The officer still claims my brother in law was deliberately trying to run the officer down. Meanwhile my brother in law (like, THE most kind and easy going and peaceful person I know) is basically permanently scarred.

As a kid I thought police officers were like angel saints. Now I know enough of them to understand they're just people, doing a job. Some are good at it some are bad at it some are ass holes. But the job gives simply incredible amount of unchecked power,while they deal with worst in human kind.

Oddly, I have not been called to jury duty since.

It's so common that police have a special term for it: testilying

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/18/nyregion/testilying-polic...

Closely related: “alternative reconstruction”

I thought we already had a word for it: "perjury"

See but that refers to something illegal and nothing that cops do is illegal

Honestly never understood the rationale behind jury-based trials. You're having a group of people who aren't trained in law, forcing them to rely only on the bits of evidence presented in the court, and asking them to make an unbiased decision, when they clearly have not been given any training of the sort?

I mean, vesting all the power in the jury is just as bad as vesting all power in a single person/group of persons (judges). Perhaps a rational middle ground would be to give jury duty to only members of the bar?

FWIW, in France, a few years ago, there was an academic study on the impact of TV on jury decisions [1]. This study concluded that the content of yesterday's TV news had a measurable impact on the duration of sentences inflicted by a jury.

I seem to remember that this led to a reform which removed the popular jury (and replaced it with a jury of law professionals) for some cases. I don't know if the effect of that reform has been studied.

[1] https://www.ipp.eu/actualites/impact-medias-sur-decisions-de...

The point of juries is to decide whether or not disputed facts are true. They don't need to know anything about the law because the jury instructions given to them by the court will deal with that.

The jury instructions essentially break the law down to essentially a flowchart, with the decision points being questions of whether or not some specific fact is true or not.

Both the prosecution and the defense will have geared the arguments and evidence they offered toward convincing the jury as to whether or not those specific facts or true.

The point is that, regardless of how logical you want the jury to act, they will still act inherently with some bias because they are not trained in the law. While lawyers and members of the bar are also inherently prone to bias, they at least have some degree of knowledge on what evidence is admissible and what evidence should not be taken under consideration.

> Honestly never understood the rationale behind jury-based trials. You're having a group of people who aren't trained in law, forcing them to rely only on the bits of evidence presented in the court, and asking them to make an unbiased decision, when they clearly have not been given any training of the sort?

this is a democracy, and the power of a democracy is ultimately on people; these people can vote, and they get to vote on your guilt.

That’s why there are 12 or so juries not one

Reply on news.ycombinator.com