One thing that is worth remembering is that, although you have the right to a trial by jury, you also have the right to waive that right and be tried directly by a judge. The article below argues that it is more advantageous to the accused to have a trial by jury, but in certain parts of the country, I’m not so sure…
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Having spent my adult life in Europe, I have wondered about this. Germany’s system is interesting, because it is one that evolved out of the abuses of various monarchial courts and of course the sham courts of the Nazi era also doing their damage, so the system set up when the Federal Republic was founded tried to address those issues.
In the end, the whole thing comes down to the question of whom one trusts: a judge in modern Germany is a profession that requires the appropriate training, you cannot just be elected into office. That is one thing that I found lacking in the US court system, the requirement that the arbiter of the law actually knows the laws – even school sports require that referees know the rules of the game.
But the idea of “a trial by peers” does exist in other countries to a whole bunch of degrees, I just think the US system needs a bunch of tweaks, legal incentives for jurors to be fair and not avoid duty, things like that. And yes, as a citizen you should be prepared to realise your decision could condemn an innocent person, or let the wrong person go free. That is life.
Back to this particular case, at first it seems unfair, but the details do have me going “well, okay, if you look at it that way the decision was correct, even if it doesn’t seem fair. Letter of the law versus spirit, and all that.” I am going to go with the assumption that the juror was fined because it was proven that he knew it was wrong, and still did it.
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Again, look at how the lawyers control the process to their advantage, especially the prosecutor.
The system is broken. 
When do we stop propping it up?
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They are often weeded out.
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Why? That’s the jury’s job - to determine the facts of the case. In this case the question was a request for more detail on presented evidence.
I think you may be confused. Who is supposed to determine the facts of the case? It’s not the lawyers, it’s not the judge, who is only supposed to be there to rule on what is the law. The only party left to determine facts is the jury.
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That is 100% valid under the current system. Jurors aren’t supposed to walk in and forget all knowledge the have. It’s up to jurors to decide what to believe of what they are told from the court room. If something strikes them as false or unbelievable, they rule accordingly. If they jury looks at the prosecution and thinks, “Nah, that prosecutor is lying” then they acquit, no matter what, and that’s the normal functioning of the court.
So when I was writing that post I tried to think of some simple scientific fact. The boiling point of water jumped into my head. Of course, I thought to myself, water can boil at different temperatures depending on the surrounding air pressure. So maybe that’s a bad example. But then I asked myself, is that fact relevant at all to what I am saying? Does this actually reveal some flaw in the point I am making?
My point was that I think the basic adversarial idea of the American justice system is unjust. The jury is asked to adjudicate a contest between two opposing sides in a courtroom, not to arrive at the truth or at justice.
So let’s imagine, again, an Agatha-Christie-esque case where the murder depends on the boiling point of water. One person in the jury says, “Water boils at 100 degree Celsius” and another says, “No, the boiling point of water varies based on air pressure.” Then someone asks, “but were they high enough for the boiling point to actually dip to 75? Is that plausible? What is the boiling point that high up?” “No, it’s 100 degrees, that’s a fact” says another person.
So now the outcome of the case doesn’t depend on the boiling point of water, it depends on the charisma of the various jurors who disagree.
Our collective method of determining what is a fact has evolved a lot in the last 100 years. The basic method for determining facts in the trial system hasn’t changed much in 300 years or more. The trial system, which was supposed to determine truth and justice, has gotten further and further away from the systems we have that determine truth.
Everyone knows that, the fact-in-law of whether you committed a crime is different from the fact-in-reality of whether you committed a crime. That’s corruption of the trial system. But the trial system stubbornly holds to its form instead of its function.
There are reasons jurors should not do outside research. The main one is that prejudice in jurors is a big problem. If you can look up the defendant on the internet and find out that they are a convicted murderer, you probably hold that against them in a murder trial, when the rules say you can’t hold that against them. Since those rules are hard to know and parse for non-lawyers, we say not to do any research at all. But that rule creates it’s own reliance on prejudice.
If one lawyer says hot snow falls up and another says it does not, the jury shouldn’t be forced to determine between those two things based purely on whose face they find more trustworthy. That is the current system.
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But that is not what happened here at all. It wasn’t two lawyers saying opposite things. It was a lawyer and a juror saying opposite things. The difference is that when a lawyer says it in open court, the opposing counsel can offer an opposing view. When a juror does that in closed deliberations, opposing counsel cannot do that, which is even more unfair than what you are suggesting and arguing against. That is the problem here.
Also, you seem to have very little respect for jurors if you think that they will judge solely based on whose face is more trustworthy. I mean, sure, some might, but normal people are capable of evaluating evidence and arguments based on more than that.
The important thing, and my point, is that both the prosecution and the defense must have an opportunity to look at and challenge (if necessary) information provided to a jury. If fairness is important to you (in addition to truth and justice), it has to be that way.
But they only get to see what the judge and lawyers show them. So while the jury may be the deciders of fact, it’s still garbage and garbage out.
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Honestly dealing with stuff like this is tiring. You could assume I was a reasonable person and read “whose face they find more trustworthy” as a sort of poetic expression of the fact that at some point the subject matter will exceed the knowledge of the jury and they will be left with nothing but instincts about trustworthiness, but instead you think I’m unreasonably suggesting that it is never the case that the jury can make any kind of rational determinations.
My point here is that truth-seeking and winning aren’t aligned with one another, so I’m going to stop trying to win against these tactics.
ETA: The word “tactics” is wrong an ascribes a certain intent that I don’t mean, but I leave it there with this explanatory note.
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This is honestly kind of horrifying to hear. Not only should fines be based on impact to the individual held responsible and not the price tag of the offense, the idea that people should be held liable to material costs for criminal offenses is fundamentally wrong.
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The limits on admissible material in trials help keep the trial focused on a particular crime-especially information about past actions by the defendant. It also keeps the defense from making every trial into an attempt to change the law because it is unfair to their client. The courts don’t (or aren’t really supposed to) create laws. Presumably the defense had access to the photo in question. It was their job to find out what the patch meant and present that information at the trial.
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The only thing a judge and lawyer cares about is getting a result, and causing a mistrial is the ethical thing to do in most cases which is something within the power of literally every individual juror. If you want to take radical civil action, the jury box is literally one of the most power levers any individual has period.
Take this case, the judge is purposely inflating the fine to prevent hung juries because they cost money, time, and don’t get convictions. You can get the mistrial without the fine by just refusing to convict. Because of what this guy did, the retrial will have to address the patch directly and not be brushed off directly by the prosecution. Instead of the standard case of someone getting additional punishment because ICE busted their hand punching them the trial gets re-litigated and international news exposure. For one individual acting for several hours that’s a massive impact against the system.
It’s why I can never agree with people shitting on jury duty.
EDIT also everyone knows there is bias in jury selection, but there’s the exact same bias in the types of white people frothing at the mouth to convict on a jury too. The system rewards polite white people, and white nationalists are mostly polite white people.
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If you have a different idea for how to do things, one where everyone acts in good faith to try to find the truth rather than winning, I would love to hear about it. All I am suggesting is that, between truth seeking and winning, there has to be fairness.
As for assuming poetic expression, everything that you have said so far has been an argument against the very worst possible, reductio ad absurdum scenarios. First, you have a prosecutor who is either lying or terribly misinformed about thermodynamics. Then, you have a lawyer who is too incompetent to challenge the prosecutor’s lies/misunderstandings, leaving the jury at the mercy of the one juror who paid attention in high school physics class. Then, you talk about how what matters is the charisma of the people making the arguments rather than the actual truth…which I mean, sure, charisma influences perceptions, but is a pretty pessimistic view of what is happening.
Would it not be more productive to look at more realistic scenarios, like the one described in the article here? I just don’t see any prosecutor ever saying something like, “The sky was blue in this picture, so obviously it was taken at night,” and that going unchallenged. That is certainly a far cry from what happened in this case.
My point is that two people can agree on a desired end while disagreeing sincerely on the right actions to achieve that end.
Apropos of that, what specific actions do you have in mind that amount to “stop propping it up”? In particular, what would you do the next time you receive a jury duty notice?
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It can also prevent juries from learning that the defendant was, for example, growing medical marijuana strictly for their own need and use and not, as the Feds allege, for distribution. Or all sorts of other information that may make the jury sympathize with the defendant.
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The system depends on the idea that few juries would acquit someone because the jurors did not think that murder, or rape, or arson are really crimes. And I doubt that anyone thinks they are not crimes, other than a few sociopaths.
But if our legislatures criminalize conduct that a sizable portion of the population thinks is not criminal, then we need to accept that juries have a right to exercise their judgment in such cases, even if that means coloring outside the lines of what was and was not presented as evidence.
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The scenario described in the article here is that they were shown a photo with a patch on it. The prosecutors were asked what it was and they told the jury it was a union logo. A juror thought that was false, looked it up and found it was a white supremacist logo.
That is, for all we know this could be exactly a case of prosecutors lying to the jury about a verifiable fact, betting that the jurors would not know it was a lie. In that case, if the jurors do know it’s a lie then an acquittal is probably coming. If they don’t, it’s illegal for them to find out. It could also be a case of a prosecutor telling the truth and a juror getting incorrect information the internet and believing it. Again, if the juror walked in with that incorrect information then it’s okay for them to apply it and if they didn’t then it’s illegal.
And this is where this discussion has felt bizarre to me. My precise point is that jurors use their own knowledge to make determinations and to evaluate evidence, and somehow you’ve read what I wrote and thought I was saying they are incapable of doing that.
This is the crux of what I’m saying and something I feel I’ve just been repeating over and over: If jurors know facts walking in then those facts can be applied, if they don’t then it is illegal for them to find out the facts. You’ve argued it’s critical that both sides get to scrutinize the facts presented to the jury, but that cannot happen because the jurors walk in knowing facts.
My example of “hot snow falls up” was a too-clever-by-half way to illustrate both these points together:
- If lawyers in the court simply disagree on whether something is true or not, the jury just has to make up their mind who to believe unless they have some kind of expertise already
- The idea that jurors aren’t supposed to bring in external facts would mean that it would be just as illegal for them to use their knowledge that hot snow doesn’t fall up as it would be to use their knowledge that a patch is a white supremacist symbol
The idea that jurors walk in as blank slates to take in the evidence of the case is absurd. Clearly we expect them to use their knowledge (or misunderstanding) of physics, psychology, etc. to make a determination. I know why jurors can’t research the case. Knowing whether or not a patch someone wears is a white supremacist symbol or not is not the case. It’s a fact on par with the weather that day.
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Someone pays. Why not the person who caused the cost? “You break it, you bought it” is fair.
If I willingly drive my car through the side of a building, should society willingly shoulder the cost because fixing the mess I made might inconvenience me or even cause major changes to my life to pay for what I did?
Our society tries far too hard to avoid personal responsibility.
Juror was told not to do this thing and that it can cause a mistrial but he did it anyway.
In jurisdictions where I have had jury service, we could ask questions about things presented during the trial itself via the court clerk.
If one does not get satisfactory answers, one does not vote to convict. Hard to have a better brake on injustice.
I’ll go and will be sent packing because I have an advanced degree and am fairly politically progressive. I would participate and most likely attempt jury nullification if it was warranted. And would probably get kicked off for having principles. It’s never people like me who end up on juries. It’s people who play the game.
Historically, it’s mostly been used to get white people off for killing Black people because white people did not think it was a crime. Given that white people are STILL more likely to be picked for jury duty, we begin to understand how cops get off after straight up murdering people.
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Reply count is a metric! But the quality of the discussion is more important. This one is interesting and informative, to me at least.
As for propping up broken systems, they’re all broken to some extent. I’ve been asked for jury duty 3 or 4 times since we moved to California in 2005, and sat through one trial as a backup juror, which was kind of the worst of all worlds – all the time sitting in the trial, but no responsibility in the actual deliberation. I think it’s a good idea for everyone to be a part of at least one trial to get an up close and personal sense of how our justice system works.
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