This is pretty much how the jury system works for every trial (not just this one). The jury are not experts on interpreting evidence which will always require some degree of scientific knowledge. They just have to count on expert witness testimony (which both sides may have). Anyone called up for jury duty who has expertise in the area is unlikely to be selected to sit on the jury.

> Anyone called up for jury duty who has expertise in the area is unlikely to be selected to sit on the jury.

Interesting. I had never considered this. I would've considered this to be a plus, but I suppose it IS more of a double-edged sword.

Consider a vim vs emacs trial. Assuming there is something like an objective truth, would you believe a jury of HN readers would be more or less likely to find it compared to random people given competing presentations trying to convince them?

(I’m actually not completely sure of the right answer)

There’s also a reasoning from democracy: you want the general public to be involved to represent something closer to prevalent moral views than what a caste of specialists may come up within their isolated community.

There may even be something of trade off where you’re sometimes ok with arriving at a verdict that is objectively wrong according to experts, but feels intuitively right to the public. This is dicey, and probably shouldn’t apply to criminal trials. But trust in the justice system is a value in and of itself.

I imagine the problem is that the other jurors would probably listen to the expert juror and trust and believe them more than they should. In effect, you end up with a one-person jury. Whatever the expert juror's opinion is, the rest will follow and endorse.

Who's opinion would you accept as being the definitive authority on the matter?

I agree that a jury doesn't seem well equipped to handle these questions, but I don't know what I would propose that would inspire more confidence.

You could have both sides present expert witnesses that are assessed by a specialized court, with no jury and with judges who have relevant training. This isn't possible at the Federal level and in most states since they constitutionally require jury trials for civil cases above a certain dollar amount, but you could do it in states that do not, and the other states could amend their constitutions.

Specialized courts for things like patent law are used in lots of places outside the US precisely because juries are often unsuitable for evaluating technical questions (among other reasons).

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

You're seriously citing patent court as a better example?

Patent law I think is one of the most laughably dysfunctional things courts have tried to understand.

The other major problem is bribes. It'd be so risky to bribe an entire jury that I imagine most companies wouldn't dare. But in my gut I imagine most judges could be influenced for much less than 2 billion.

Are you talking about patent law in the United States? As I explained, the US does not use the specialized court system I described, relying on juries of laymen to assess patent cases, which has been argued by eminent people to be the primary source the dysfunctions of US patent legal system: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3270000

If you are talking about patent legal systems outside the US, you'd have to argue those systems are worse to use it as evidence against my claims. (If all patent systems are bad worldwide, this doesn't tell us much about the value of specialized courts other than that they can't solve unsolved problems.) Could you point to such an argument?

If you think that increasing the number of necessary people to bribe is an effective way to prevent bribery, then you can just increase the number of judges, which could be indexed to the amount being claimed.

I'm talking about in the US. You're right on the first point - 95% of patent cases do have a jury. The part I felt was dysfunctional was that often times judges seem LESS aware of many modern topics (e.g. tech) than a cross-section of laypeople. Plus a huge number of patent cases happen in some rando district of East Texas which is problematic, but that's really beside your point.

I'd be okay with a "jury of judges" approach (provided it was at least 6, like a normal jury) to reduce undue influence, if legal system could hypothetically arrange that.

> I'm not happy that some random jury's opinion on medicine or science is being touted as any sort of authority on the matter.

Well you never sat on the jury so you dont know what information was presented to them. Obviously enough data was presented to them to form a conclusion though.

You're talking about juries from the same nation, even same state, as the jury who was utterly impressed by "if it does not fit, you must acquit!", right? Juries, that suffer from the CSI Effect[1]. Juries that not only are made up of scientific laypersons but judicial laypersons. Juries, that have been shown to fuck up every 1 in 8 criminal cases[2], where the burden of proof is supposed to be a lot higher than in a civil case, such as this one.

So, I am not convinced about your use of "obviously".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSI_effect

[2] https://www.ipr.northwestern.edu/publications/docs/workingpa...

If the only thing that happened during a trial was the counsel standing up and saying ‘Dear people of the jury, this man is GUILTY!’ that would be enough data for a jury to form a conclusion. That doesn’t mean the data was any good.

You're grossly overestimating the ability of an innumerate body with insufficient understanding of statistical concepts to be able to interpret data.

It isn't the jury's place to use their expertise to rule in a case. Similarly, you wouldn't want a jury of homeopaths using their expertise to decide in a case involving evidence-based medical treatment.