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Comment by __MatrixMan__ | Hacker News Reader

Some of us report for jury duty just itching to nullify something. Don't you? Checks and balances...

Nullify if necessary, more likely duty to justice as best as I can come to understand it.

We should all know it though!:

  It has been commonly used to oppose what jurors perceive as unjust laws, such as those that once penalized runaway slaves under the Fugitive Slave Act, prohibited alcohol during Prohibition, or criminalized draft evasion during the Vietnam War.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification

I got selected as juror once just hoping to laugh at anything the cops said on the witness stand and let some poor soul go free but it turns out the defendant was just a violent scumbag who stabbed random people in public, and there was a video of it. After we decided he was guilty, they listed other things he had been convicted of and asked if he was a repeat offender... Let's see, shot somebody in the back, robbed liquor stores at gun point (dressed as a clown IIRC) and some other weird shit. That decision didn't take very long.

Honestly we didn't even throw the book at him, prosecutors were charging him with a bunch of offenses and we decided guilty on only two, but the repeat offender bit probably locked him up for a few decades.

The funny thing was that all the jurors thought the victim was a complete douchebag and thought both parties deserved time. As it turns, somebody I knew at the time knew the victim from childhood and he apparently molested his 8 year old cousin.

That is horrible but robbing a liquor store dressed as a clown is pretty funny (in my head probably not irl)

Imagine picking the suspect out of the line-up, or drawing up a photo-fit.

I just served on a jury and in our case, the cop was a lying scumbag, the prosecutor's expert witnesses were people milking the taxpayers to provide the evaluations that the state wanted to hear for thousands of dollars per hour, the defense's expert witnesses copy-and-pasted an evaluation from another client but didn't bother to proofread before the prosecutor brought up that they had the wrong name in the text, and the defendant raped and molested multiple kids below the age of 8, some still in diapers.

I feel like many court cases are textbook instances of Everyone Sucks Here. I needed therapy after the case because it had so shaken my faith in both the justice system and humanity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Grigson

Forensic sciences and experts hired by prosecutors is a big problem.

"I feel like many court cases are textbook instances of Everyone Sucks Here. I needed therapy after the case because it had so shaken my faith in both the justice system and humanity."

I really don't think most of the people posting here understand what the professionals working in criminal justice/law see on the average day. They see the worst of the worst on one side, and then the public who they are trying to get a paycheck to defend on the other attacking them.

This in no way excuses bad behavior, but we're all human and these people aren't robots.

I don't understand the jury system. If your server is down you don't grab randos from the street to fix it.

Hell Americans know this too which is why you have a professional judge and lawyers. And you guys don't have a night watch with pitch forks and muskets to police the village anymore.

A jury system is an anachronistic relic.

If your server is down you might ask for advice in an IRC channel, receiving help from whoever is there.

The random selection of juries was supposed to ensure they aren't any special class of people. For instance judges are usually from upper middle class backgrounds and it used to be that your innocence or guilt was decided entirely by the aristocratic nobility. By using random selection, that sort of thing is avoided.

In a jury system, the judge provides instructions to the jury about how they are supposed to weigh the evidence presented against the requirements of the law. They don't need to be technical experts. The theoretical idea of "a jury of one's peers" (while not perfect) is making a fresh decision based on the merits of the singular case, rather than a judge deciding based on prejudices they've built up over hundreds of previous cases.

The fundamental idea of a jury, when it comes down to it, is that you're asking 12 random people "was this person's actions reasonable?" given conflicting accounts of what those actions were. The process by which you get there is more convoluted than that (and generally assumes a higher competence by the jury than probably exists), but juries seem to do a very good job of upholding the basic idea of evaluating the reasonableness of actions.

Some people suck. Some of the people who suck are poor and physically violent, some are rich and politically and economically violent.

There's a kind of fog of incomprehension over indirect crimes which makes them much easier to get away with.

People still die though.

I went itching to nullify injustices - I left wanting to reintroduce the death penalty for petty crimes.

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