The juror who found herself guilty
texasmonthly.com
texasmonthly.com
It's scary to think how this could happen to anyone.
Anyway, this case didn't really involve DNA that could be collected. A creep flashed a girl and then sped off, she later recognized the car and followed it, it stopped at an address the accused had lived at several years ago, but cops just figured it was him. There's also a rape mentioned, which happened in 1987, so similar issue.
Maybe, although I wonder if the guy having the surname "Jaile" contributed to unconscious bias. People do like the idea of nominative determinism...
Quote:
I asked Carlos who he thought bore the brunt of the blame for DNA evidence not showing up in his trial: the police, the DA, or his own attorney, Gibson. “Straight-up crooked cops,” he said. “That’s all it was. Plain and simple.”
A key reason identified was that juries don’t have written statements giving the reasoning for their judgment.
The jury system ended several years ago and nobody miss it. A panel of judges professional and selected among citizens akin to jury duty determines guilt.
Mock a murder or other crime and let the law and justice handle it as normal. At the end, reveal the true mock and see how close the law got and how close the court got.
I'm not saying it would be practical and maybe impossible but I would find the results interesting.
Where did you get this statistic? There are only 1.2 million people total in prison (still too many but...)
https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/prisoners-2021-stat...
I found one site that claimed the total population of people incarcerated is 1.7 million but still, for either number, black Americans, while possibly over represented, could never = 2 million given those numbers
You could run those experiments by constructing cases, or re-constructing known cases.
Even for people who are wrongfully convicted, we can't always say the jury made the wrong call. In many of those cases, the conviction is overturned due to new evidence being discovered, or because the police or prosecution wrongly hid exculpatory evidence from the jury, or because the defendant's lawyer was grossly incompetent – in those cases, it is entirely possible the jury made the right call given the evidence actually presented to them, even if it turned out ultimately to be the wrong one.
Yes, in the general case you can't know that. That's why you need to construct artificial cases where you do know.
Very similar to getting labelled training data for your machine learning.
I wonder whether you could get the benefits of weighing the evidence collectively but reduce the influence that 1 or 2 dominant jurors might have.
If 2 or 3 independent groups reached the same conclusion, does that increase the chances of them being correct?
You can always find 1 person who will disagree about anything? If you have 1000 jurors that each vote independently I would find it hard to imagine that anyone can get convicted, even people you are basically certain are guilty. After some N, the probability of a conviction becomes indistinguishable from 0, which is not a good system either.
Rather, "juror" should be someone's job.
People pulled off the street are not going to have the critical thinking skills, and will be broadsided by pressure tactics and manipulation.
Also, some people who are inconvenienced by jury duty will be resentful and just focus on their personal exit strategy (get it over with ASAP).
I went to school at the University of Virginia, which offered something like this for honor trials. (UVA Honor violations were specifically: lying, cheating, or stealing.)
For a trial, you could choose between a random student jury, a jury of Honor Society members, or a mix.
Statistics showed that non-random juries were way more likely to convict students, and I have no doubt permanent jurors would do the same over time.
I understand your criticisms for sure, but the alternatives are worse.
Elsewhere in the thread, there are comments about how some countries have eliminated random juries; so a good start would be to study how things work elsewhere.
> non-random juries were way more likely to convict students
All that matters is whether they were more or less likely to correctly convict or acquit.
If it so happens that all the accused liars, thieves or cheaters are actually guilty, then the higher the conviction rate, the more accurate it is.
Honor Society members are not professional jurors; they are just a set of people from which a jury is less randomized than from a broader set.
Which you have no way of knowing, because if we had a process to determine that, we wouldn't need juries to begin with.
What you can tell, by comparing the outcomes between decisionmakers, is which way their bias leans relative to the alternative. And "biased towards convicting more innocent people" is bad.
How can you write that following a sentence which admits we "have no way of knowing".
We can't even say that more convictions is no fewer innocent convictions, let alone more.
Say that 1% of the accused in some jurisdiction are innocent. In that situation, the ideal conviction rate is 99%. It's possible to have a 2% conviction rate where the convictions are wrong half the time (and the acquittals are all wrong), and a 1% conviction rate where the decisions are all backwards in relation to guilt.
In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, the assumption should not be that either of them is inherently better at the job, and then a higher total conviction rate implies a higher false conviction rate.
Say, would it be aristocratic/elitist to refuse to fly in an airliner staffed by people pulled off the street for pilot duty?
It's quite the opposite. You should have to convince all of them, and so the jury should include everyone. The aristocrats and the finger painters.
> Say, would it be aristocratic/elitist to refuse to fly in an airliner staffed by people pulled off the street for pilot duty?
What if the staff are overseen by a pilot and in order to crash the plane you need to convince all 12 randos and the pilot to crash the plane?
Would've prevented 9/11.
Are you asking if I would get in a plane piloted by someone with zero experience or training?
Britain famously use juries. That is where the US gets it system from. In. All Nordic countries have had them. In Norway we phased it out years ago, but it isn’t one judge but several. Some are picked by citizens others are professionals. They determine guilt together.
And it's a mistake there as well, but fortunately Brits keep juries only for the worst of the worst cases, jury trials are relatively rare.
>>Juries have also been widely used in Europe.
And now they are not. I can't speak for every reason behind this in every country that decided to do so, but I'm sure if you looked into it it would be "because it isn's working out".
>>but it isn’t one judge but several.
and this is how it should be done - you still get judged by a panel of people who can vote, but they are actually trained in the law.
Juries don't decide the law, they decide the facts.
Why would someone who spends their life in a courtroom have a better understanding of the facts of an ordinary person's life than someone who actually lives an ordinary life rather than being insulated from it by the legal system?
You can't decide the fact - if you could, it wouldn't be a fact. Or do you mean something else here?
>>Why would someone who spends their life in a courtroom have a better understanding of the facts of an ordinary person's life than someone who actually lives an ordinary life rather than being insulated from it by the legal system?
I mean, that should be really obvious in a case like this, no?
It's a distinction between facts and the law.
The judge decides what the law is, e.g. the statute says "knowingly" and someone sent a letter to the company informing them, but the person who read the letter isn't the person who performed the act, so does that mean the company acted knowingly?
The jury decides what the facts are, e.g. the company claims the letter didn't inform them but the sender claims that it did. Both admit the letter existed but neither of them kept a copy of it. The jury decides whose version of the facts is the truth.
> I mean, that should be really obvious in a case like this, no?
Kind of the opposite.
This is one of the problems with "professional" fact finders -- prosecutors get a pretty good idea of what kind of cases they can win and don't bring the ones that they can't. So then any kind of a repeat player keeps seeing people they're likely to find guilty because they're disproportionately more likely to be the ones who come before them, and start to assume guilt, and then carry that into the determination even when someone is innocent. To mitigate that you need fresh eyes.
In most european countries in complicated cases like the one here you'd just get a panel of judges - so you're still getting a vote and a balanced(in theory) opinion, except it's not coming from randoms citizens but people actually educated in the law who should know better than this.
For example, jury service being unpaid will obviously skew the jury pool away from being properly evenly distributed.
People like to point out that this applies to trials for violent crimes etc. too, but it was really the war on drugs that did this, because it required the government to prosecute crimes with no victim -- the drug buyer and the drug seller have no reason to turn each other in, as opposed to the mugging victim who can be generally expected to go straight to the police.
Because convicting people when there is no cooperating victim is so much harder, they went and corrupted the system in order to make it easier, and here we are.
It's part of the system of checks and balances. If there isn't at least a plausible case for conviction, the case shouldn't even make it to a jury. The judge is permitted to throw it out for insufficient evidence.
In principle what's supposed to happen is that it prevents a conviction if the prosecution can't convince 12 random people that there should be one. The problem is prosecutors have the full time job of trying to convict people, and one of the ways they do it is by trying to change the system to make that easier. So then convicts get excluded from juries along with anyone else the prosecution thinks might be sympathetic to the defense -- even though having to convince someone initially sympathetic to the defense is supposed to be the point.
Talking about what happened isn't enough. Carlos Jaile lost his entire adult life because of systemic failures in the justice system. This needs to be fixed not only for Carlos but for everyone.
What needs to be changed and how?
The government is just an evolution of the strongest gang winning in an anarchy. That's what we live in, an anarchy where the strongest group has already taken power. They only consider our desires and needs as much as they have to to preserve their power. The truth is that collectively we are stronger than them, but if they can convince us that they are equivalent to our collective will they can pick on us in small groups or individually, because if we identify that they are not our collective will then we might enact our true will, and they can't stand to that.
So what to do about this? Acknowledge that the machine doesn't represent you, that it's not your fault, and take legitimacy from a system that abuses you by withdrawing your faith in it.
Great movie about what it entails to be the only voice calling for reasonable doubt.
For one, I just don't think we are very rational. And I am including myself in that.
And, like this case, the personalities reflect exactly what happens when you gether a dozen individuals. One or two are loud-mouth bravados, a few don't speak, and some are just apathetic. It's nice to think that I would be that disagreeable person who would stand my ground, but I am not sure.
Sometimes I wonder what we would do if the courts were designed today. I am pretty sure we would not come up with a system where we gather 12 random people. I don't know what we would decide on, but almost certainly not this. But like many things, it varies on because no one has an obviously better way.
Also you can keep a right to trial by jury for the defendant. If the defendant decides they'd rather by judged by their peers they can choose a trial by jury. It's their constitutional right in the US after all.
It seems extremely expensive, inefficient and broken system overall.
I can't help but feel for the victims who believed they were getting justice who now have to deal with the reality they they weren't safe all these years. that their attacker was still out there the whole time. Finding this out is almost another attack. If they do find the real culprit what reason do they have to believe this time.
Considering how the system works, I don’t think it is acceptable for people to have to prove their innocence in that context. The state harmed them, it is the state that should make its case. And ideally impeach or sue officials for gross misconduct and breach of ethics.
"Although estimates vary, forensic DNA analysis is roughly 95% accurate."
I remember however an article I can't find now from about 20 years ago so probably things have improved since then that found only about 2/3rds accuracy - and that accuracy could be affected by stating the result you wanted. It was in Time, or New Republic or some major news magazine.
My thoughts could be colored by this, but given history of forensic abuse in the U.S I would tend to undervalue evidence that found someone guilty. I am however a cynic.
I would also think that this 95% accurate claim seems weird, since it is effected by all sorts of things, basically if DNA evidence gets admitted it is treated as bulletproof but it may still have a lower than 95% chance of being correct at that point - but when admitted the battle is pretty much lost.
As if her forgetting about her negligence, then finally going back to do the right thing was heroic.
It was better than nothing, but a lot worse than what she should have done to begin with.
I try to reward what I want to see more of. And there's sufficient suffering and shame from knowing you put someone innocent away that I think I'm fine with promoting anyone who fights that.
It really sucks that she fucked it up the first time, going along with other more strident people. But good on her for what she did.
It’s the author of the article I’m more bothered by. I’ve seen less heaped on praise and weepiness for people who died stopping mass shooters.
Each to their own, but she was under no obligation to vote guilty. I'm not sure why the article purports that "two white men" (I'm not white) were the "problem" here, and not that the problem was her inability to stand by her convictions.
I often disagree with what I consider dramatised recounts of history, as if it's always some good vs bad, David vs Goliath tale.
This was the 1970's in America, if she knew something that others didn't she should have had held her ground. As most people would have given that you are holding someones life in your hands. You can blame external factors all you want, but it is your still your reckoning.
And great, that this person eventually helped them rectify this injustice.
But what a silly way to tell the story.
Maybe they existed as outlined, but the focus on it felt like a way of alleviating her(and others) of their wrongdoing.
That's not to say any of this entirely excuses what she did, but it helps put it in perspective. It was also the fault of other members of the jury, who were more concerned with obtaining superficial agreement than convinced agreement.
I'm not at all surprised by this recount and wouldn't even be surprised if this happened today.
It's nice she eventually did, but it doesn't make her an admirable person for only doing it after the victim lost a third of his life.
Yeah I should be more angry at the police and prosecutors, but I think 30 years of a man's life is more than enough blame to go around.
But “I sat with the knowledge I had given the wrong verdict while a man rotted in jail for 30 years” doesn’t come across as the heroic or even mildly positive story the journalist seemed to be going for in the article either. It’s good she did something about it eventually but it’s good in a “So I finally stopped punching my dog in the face” kinda way. Poor fucking guy had his life stolen and she’s part of the reason why.
Is she worse than the other actors in this shameful play? No of course not. But I’m not sure there are any heroes here.
But she didn't ... She just viewed the same facts differently.
> As most people would have given that you are holding someones life in your hands.
Lol, to say this in response to an article where multiple juror were swayed ...
She didn’t stand by her convictions because she had a history of being told to defer to white men.
There was a whole section about her background to go into why she felt this way.
The story is more about the woman, her situation and her desire for justice after decades so I can see why they left her reasoning in.
Otherwise we would be clueless as to why she decided to vote guilty after feeling the guy wasn’t guilty then immediately change her mind again once the trial was over.
> She knew how hard it was to take a stand. She knew how hard it was to do the right thing. And now she was going to do it.
> She called the El Paso Police Department and told the woman on the line that she had been a juror on a 1990 case, and that even after all these years she didn’t think the guy was guilty. The woman told her it was too late to do anything and hung up.
> Estella called back and talked to someone else. She explained everything again, recalling details from the trial. This time the person told her to dial the office of Jaime Esparza, the district attorney. Estella called and explained again what was on her mind. She was transferred to Tom Darnold, the head of the appellate division.
> DA’s offices get unusual calls all the time, including from jurors having doubts about cases, but usually these come immediately after a trial. Estella was calling about a case from when Bill Clements was governor. She told Darnold what she’d told the others: she didn’t feel right about the verdict. Something she said convinced Darnold to take her seriously, and he promised her he’d look into it. He read the appellate opinion and didn’t see any obvious red flags. He told his boss Esparza about the unusual call from the juror and about his research, and Esparza told him to keep digging. Darnold read the trial transcripts and saw that the case wasn’t the strongest the office had ever prosecuted. He noted the discrepancies with the car and clothes, and also that Carlos had a strong alibi. He went back to Esparza, who decided it was time to take the whole thing to the next level. “We decided,” said Darnold, “just to be on the safe side: let’s look further.”
Yeesh. Talk about a real role model.
Thanks. These articles where the author is clearly paid by the word, so do their utmost to include everything they can think of, are ridiculous. :)
That writer didn't just sit in a room dream this all up. Unbelievably many hours went into the making of this piece, including flying back and forth across the country to dig up information, speak to people, connect the dots, finding all the background information, staying persistent.
That's hard work. You may not like the style, but it's quite offensive to just brush it off as "nah, paid by the word, ridiculous"
Pretty sure text generators / AI will be used for this sort of thing by some authors too, though I have no idea if it's the case in this instance.
The author of the article was deliberate with their words. A lot of what you might see as "useless filler" served to humanize all the characters, and give us much greater insight than we would get from a summary.
I teared up when I read about Jaile's situation: how his wife left him during his proceedings, and then died of cancer before his name was cleared.
And I was inspired by his optimistic attitude in the face of so much injustice.
If you want a summary, you're free to copy-paste and ask ChatGPT for one. ChatGPT can't expand a summary into a moving work of investigative journalism while maintaining authenticity.
It’s like everyone failed him.
Only his brother believed him.