I'm sorry, but if you cannot recognize the fact that (as is human nature) you're bringing in a bundle of unconscious motivations, but make a conscious effort to look past your emotions and evaluate the facts, then you are "simple minded."

I'm not saying you're stupid unless you're robot tier 100% impartial, but if you're just letting your gut feeling take you all the way, then yes, you are.

You do have a point if, as stated, it was proven that the driver was indeed driving drunk, but just couldn't be proven to be over the limit, in which case the juror abused her position to enforce what she thought the law should be rather than what it actually was (but rationally so).

You know, though, we train and incentivize people to be this way. For getting a job, we privilege interviews over, say, a written test. We conduct trials live, instead of collecting a series of documents related to a case and letting all the stakeholders consider them asynchronously. We've decided that timeliness is more important in many, if not most, interactions than critical thought. Personally, I'm slow. I've noticed that if asked to answer a question, I give a worse answer than average immediately, an above average answer in 5 minutes, and a much better answer than average in 15. This is reflected in my relative lack of success socially and professionally. The ones who do well are generally able to give an above average answer instantly, even if their answer quality does not improve when they're given more time to produce it. Any reasonably intelligent person will see that developing critical thinking skills is only critical after one's developed their intuition, and behaves as such.

Obviously this isn't the best situation.

Yes, "zero tolerance" is a simple-minded ethic, but I think we all have ZT topics, whether it's Jeffrey Lebowski and The Eagles, me and olives, or police and sass. They go by other names, such as "red flags," "dealbreakers," and so on.

It sucks that in the gun/murder example it would ruin someone's life, and I would advise them to be more thoughtful if I could, but there's no accounting for taste.