Supreme Court says criminal convictions require unanimous juries

Re:Supreme Court says criminal convictions require unanimous... by wonderwonder on Tuesday April 21, 2020 @09:59AM (#22935029)

Issue is that we don't have these numbers. People are consistently proven to have been innocent after serving decades in prison for crimes they did not commit but were convicted of. In addition, as only 2 states in the US allowed for a majority conviction, the data set would necessarily be small. Compounding that is that we essentially have no real way to determine who was guilty but found innocent as once you are found innocent that's generally the end of the road. The primary concern in this situation should be increasing the difficulty of convicting an innocent person. The guilty going free should be a secondary matter.

So while I understand your point, as you stated, we have no other information and as such the numbers we would need to validate it simply don't and won't exist.

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Re:Supreme Court says criminal convictions require unanimous... by naasking on Tuesday April 21, 2020 @04:52PM (#22939194)

> In addition, as only 2 states in the US allowed for a majority conviction, the data set would necessarily be small

Small data set does not necessarily entail it's not statistically significant.

> So while I understand your point, as you stated, we have no other information and as such the numbers we would need to validate it simply don't and won't exist.

"Won't exist" is a pretty strong claim. I posited but one example where the original claim was false, but I can probably come up with dozens of other scenarios where simple majority or unanimity are clearly inferior as the only two options.

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Re:Supreme Court says criminal convictions require unanimous... by NikolaeVarius on Tuesday April 21, 2020 @10:16AM (#22935134)

>> we don't have these numbers

>> consistently proven

Your argument does not jive.

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Re:Supreme Court says criminal convictions require unanimous... by zamadatix on Tuesday April 21, 2020 @10:29AM (#22935233)

It's certainly possible to know something happens without having exact numbers e.g. we know people consistently die from COVID but we won't have a truly solid number for the death rate until COVID dies down and we do antibody testing. And that's now! Think of how uncertain we were about the death rate 2 months ago yet we were still certain people were dying from it.

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Re:Supreme Court says criminal convictions require unanimous... by wonderwonder on Tuesday April 21, 2020 @10:26AM (#22935207)

We don't have the numbers showing the number of guilty people found innocent. We also don't have an accurate count of the number of innocent people found guilty, only that it has happened consistently. I explain this in the rest of the post.

My argument does not jive only if you are looking for flaw and determined to find it even if it is only semantics.

Best of luck to you in these trying times.

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