Because it’s in the news, man.
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Could have just stopped at the skull and made their assumptions from there.
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If any of you have a few minutes to spare, please click on the link below and listen to the story of a NYC immigrant punk rocker who had an impactful jury duty experience. I got choked-up hearing her talk about how it changed her.
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Decent people avoiding jury duty does nothing to improve the fairness of our justice system, it just hands the reins to other people.
If you were accused of a crime and were picking they jury, would you think your chances of a fair verdict were improved by a jury pool stripped of thoughtful, decent people?
@Grey_Devil, to your point, jurors can submit questions to the judge in a lot of places, but there is very little that the court will give them in response. In a lot of places the judge will share the question with the lawyers, and if it’s a question about facts they might be given a transcript or an exhibit that was used at trial, but almost never will the judge allow any questions that weren’t addressed at trial to be addressed.
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Really, being tried by a ‘jury of our peers’ if one of our constitutional rights. Not all countries have this. It is an important right that already gets trampled on enough as it is! We all should serve when asked, it’s not like they ask you to all that often.
I have yet to work for a company that did not pay me for the time off, though I know I have been blessed in the job category (as well as most others)
-joe
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Courts and lawyers have so much practice at manipulating juries to get the results they want, that it doesn’t matter if “a few good people” try to change a case or two’s outcomes.
Juries are just a way for judges and prosecutors to blame systemic racism in the government agencies on the community.
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For capital cases jurors who are morally opposed to the death penalty are not allowed to serve. So if you’re an individual who believes in the barbaric practice of putting people to death, then you should absolutely take responsibility for that belief and be willing to serve on a jury for capital cases if called to do so. If later on you end up being haunted by the prospect that you may have contributed to the execution of an innocent person that’s (at least partially) on you.
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Indeed, the motivation for having a jury system is the notion that the state-appointed judge couldn’t be trusted to be impartial and would be inclined to favor the position of the state against the defendant. And it is true that a jury doesn’t guarantee fairness, but no jury almost certainly guarantees unfairness.
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I mean, they can ask the judge, perhaps, and only after the prosecution and defense have concluded, and only about how to interpret the law that affects the plantiff. but any sort of real interaction, and the judge will shut that down real quick. in general, juries do not “ask questions.”
This was a US court? This goes way, way beyond anything I could conceive of: not just asking the judge for clarification about the ongoing case, but intervening in the flow of the determination of fact.
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I narrowly avoided being on a jury on an eight-week gang-leader-called-a-hit-from-inside-prison trial. It was about five days of jury selection and it was tedious. But one of my fellow would-be jurors was a former astronaut, so I got to shoot the shit over coffee with him for a couple of days.
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You could say the same about any civic duty. There are many things one can do to improve the fairness of the system other than (or in addition to) accepting such duties.
If you want to be a juror, by all means, improve the system. If you smell of “wants to improve the system” during selection and still get to be on the jury, you already improved the system.
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With all due respect, to the extent that’s true (and it’s not really an accurate way to describe what goes on in criminal courtrooms), that’s an argument for people to INSIST on serving on juries, not to avoid it and wash their hands of responsibility. Every day in thousands of courtrooms across the country, there are countless trials that don’t make the newspaper but nevertheless can involve life-changing consequences for everyone involved.
The question I asked the author above isn’t rhetorical: if you were accused of a crime, do you think that your chances of a fair verdict are improved if thoughtful, decent people refuse to be a part of the jury pool? Or, imagine you had a loved one accused of a crime, doesn’t matter whether they did it or not. Would you be happy to see the jury parking lot filled with Blue Lives Matter and MAGA bumper stickers, or would you feel better if there were at least some Bernie stickers sprinkled in the mix?
And, @beschizza, I DO say that about lots of other civic duties. These things are in no way mutually exclusive. The bad folks in our country are more than happy if the good folks decide that stay home and not vote, not show up for jury duty, don’t pay attention to local government & law enforcement, the list goes on. If one CAN participate in these things, I am a fervent believer that one has a moral duty TO participate in these things.
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Mm, no. Consider some of the crap that turns up in Google searches. It would be best if a juror doesn’t sneak “something he found on Google” in as something he knows.
He could have truthfully said “I’ve been a pipefitter for n years, member of the union local, and that’s no pipefitter patch.” “What is it then?” “I don’t know, but we don’t use skulls.”
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Yikes.
I’m trying to interpret this in a way that gets some daylight between it and things a militia member holed up in an agrarian compound might say, but it’s tough.
States can be good or bad, but if you prefer the stateless alternative, I’m not sure what to tell you. “Coercion” is a scary word, but in this case it’s the same kind of coerciveness that prevents you from doing 90 in a school zone or keeps you from diverting half the water in the Colorado River for your private waterpark. We have a million obligations to one another that are discharged through the state.
And as for the injustice, I mean, setting aside the fact that in almost every state a single juror is enough to prevent an unjust prosecution, nobody is forced onto a jury who can articulate their feelings about the justice system. “Your Honor, I refuse on principle to participate in a system that has led to unjust mass incarcera—” “Juror #107 is dismissed for cause, NEXT!”
I really hope (and half-suspect) you’re just saying this for the “engagement,” as the Web 3.0 kids say, but if not… yikes.
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Those reins are already out of the hands of jurors. Over 90% of people in prison were not convicted by a jury, and in cases that do go to trial the jury is usually not given the information needed to really judge the situation.
A reasonable argument could be made that the system is completely broken, and jury participation is giving tacit approval, perpetuating that broken system. The “fix things from the inside” mentality doesn’t work if the person is in a position without any power over the system (and jurors have no power to assure a fair trial)
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I think that he got into trouble more for telling the other jurors than for doing the research itself. There are very specific rules and procedures for how evidence is introduced to a jury, and “one of the jurors happened to have inside information about XXX” is not one of them, regardless of where the juror got that information. There is a big problem when a juror introduces evidence that a) is not being verified and b) the prosecution/defense do not have a chance to challenge or cross-examine.
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Asking for more information about the patch in question is not introducing new evidence but a request for clarification on the evidence that was already made available to the jurors. During my jury duty, we were allowed to send written questions regarding evidence to the judge who would decide if more clarification was appropriate.
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The stat you cite is a bit misleading and doesn’t really tell the story. The reasons for choosing a jury trial vs. a bench trial are complicated in a lot of cases, and the reason so many folks convicted chose a bench trial are even more complicated. But, the fact remains that juries acquit in something like 1/5 cases. That’s an extremely rough number and probably isn’t fair to rely on either, though, because the numbers depend so much on the types of charges and the area.
EDIT: looks like I can’t respond any more as a new user, so everybody take care and SHOW UP FOR JURY DUTY AND VOTE. Because the motherfuckers out there don’t want you to do either.
But, weakening one of the only real safeguards against prosecutorial misconduct is not, in my opinion, a persuasive argument. I should be clear: there should be a LOT more safeguards and the ones we have should be much better enforced. I’m not pretending things work as they should all or even most of the time. As the main news story yesterday demonstrated, however, Americans can have a complicated opinion of which civil liberties should be protected when.
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Good news! I can promise you that militia members holed up in agrarian compounds are generally not contemplating these ethical or spiritual quandaries at all.
There is no “engagement” here, Discourse doesn’t generate that kind of metric or attention. If I wanted “engagement” I would say it on Twitter. But I don’t, so I don’t.
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Absolutely not. Pay to stay is far too common in the US and is horrifically unjust. It boggles the mind that such a practice exists in what we call a free country.
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