I suspect I can do an ok job predicting relative conviction rates based on well known location and demographic based stereotypes of authoritarian tendencies and attitudes toward drug use.
The people running the system makes the rules. The general attitude is to treat the law enforcement side more favorably than the defendant, to the point that they are basically assumed guilty from the start.
You still get a jury of citizens from the local community, which is the point.
To be clear I think the selection process is a good one (or at least I think it's better than other options I've heard) it's just not the same thing as the GP was proposing.
The case I watched was a domestic violence case. Both sides were asking potential jurors about their knowledge of bruising and the way bruises change/develop over time. One of the potential jurors was an older Engineer from an aerospace company you've heard of, his answer included explaining that the most interesting problems that he deals with include how one handles the unknowns of a given project/situation. He gave a clear indication of his reasoning and thought process, the prosecution dropped him like a hot rock.
Its not a jury of your peers if its a jury of only the sharpest or most educated people.
I think the ‘jury of your peers’ thing is meant to be in the sense of ‘all men are created equal’. They don’t, I presume, intelligence test the defendant and if they score lowly, screen the jury to admit only dumbasses.
I think a jury should be representative of the community, all of the community.
I think that’s inherent in the adversarial system (where each lawyer is advocating for their client’s interests), but I also think it sucks.
But you are getting a random, not a balanced sample of the community - one person might get a jury of stock brokers, the other might be stuck with 13 guys that are local drunks and never finished school.
In regards to the first disagreement GPs proposal wasn't "a process that optionally allows an attorney to strike some jurors they find have low comprehension" it was "there really ought to be some basic comprehension and reasoning test for jurors." as in a hard requirement to have some level of comprehension regardless if the attorneys wish to strike a juror based on this fact.
In regards to the second disagreement you aren't guaranteed to a jury of your peers in the US you are guaranteed to an impartial jury. Jury of your peers was part of common law and guaranteed e.g. high class people would only have juries of other high class people and is not part of US law. A "special" or "blue ribbon" jury like the GP proposed are allowed to been used as deemed necessary by the court in many states and actually by the Supreme Court itself in it's only jury trial (they drew from a pool of merchants) they are just not mandated for every trial.
Again I do side with your opinion that special juries shouldn't be the default but that's not what is under question.
Jury questionnaires are made to provide a background for the attorneys during voir dire not as an aptitude test, as such they do not have an objective pass/fail score rather subjective information to allow attorneys to try to form the most impartial jury they can out of the pool. While the attorney could try to make an assumption of comprehension level based on the responses in the questionnaire
1) The attorney still has to consider lack of comprehension a negative thing for their chances at the case
2) The attorney has to be willing to use strikes for this reason vs other uses such as removing blatantly biased jurors
3) Even when both of the prior hold true the number of perceived "fails" may be higher than the number of allowed strikes. Therefore the ability to strike some from the pool for comprehension level is not the same as the pool being pre filtered for comprehension level.
To be clear the GP proposal is the universal application an additional comprehension test one has to pass to be part of the pool prior to voir dire, not just that someone with low comprehension is allowed to be struck for that reason.
Think of the proposal being like if your state randomly chose anybody instead of pre-filtering for eligible voters and GP proposed "we should filter out children and etc from the pool" with your response being "voir dire does that". Voir dire in that case may allow for the possibility of some of those people being filtered at the cost of a less filtered qualified jury of adults but it wouldn't be a replacement for pre-filtering. The same is true of the proposal on a minimum comprehension pre-filter, whether you agree with the pre-filter or not it's not the same as having the ability to filter some people in voir dire.
But, I agree - it must first and foremost be a jury of the accused's peers - but that doesn't mean "man on the street style average joe" necessarily.
Can you share any details, even in a very abstract way, on what it was?
I'm curious as to how weak their case was - because if it was something as asinine as thinking that filesystem file modification dates are trustworthy or that any activity in the Windows Event log proves that a human user was physically sat at the machine then I'd like to know why the prosecution didn't have someone on their side to tell them they didn't have a case so they wouldn't waste time with a trial?
Trust the system.
Give her a few more years. The good ol’ US of A will make her a jury-duty dodging, full-blooded American out of her.
Tongue-in-cheek aside I’ve disappointed not to be selected for jury duty thus far.
If you only want smart people you leave it to the judge.
Attorneys do not want thinkers, they want predictable cogs in the court machine.
Jurors get dismissed based on whether or not one side feels they decide in their favor or not. That's it.
I'd believe a juror getting dismissed for knowing statistics and being persuadable by logical arguments, before I'd believe a juror being dismissed for being in a demographic who favors police and emotional arguments.
Maybe they are not idiots, just regular folks who take their civic duty seriously.
Personal feelings decide outcomes. I know this person is not guilty but this guy who loves the free lunches won't ever change his mind and I am worried about my mortgage.
Anecdotal but it really gave me faith that juries do a pretty good job.
Eventually the ADAs caught on that our group asked too many questions, and just carefully ran out the clock on our two week grand jury session. Cases we were halfway through hearing mysteriously disappeared. Apparently the other two juries that met during our two week cycle had to stay late every day, while we got dismissed early.
It's one of those things where the system is designed to be good (23 randos get to decide if the cops are full of shit before you even get indicted, and you don't have to be very smart to see that sometimes the cops are full of shit), but The System turned it into something bad for no good reason. I guess if people aren't committing felonies, we don't need assistant district attorneys, and then the people that already do that job have their career progress reset. So they are forced to play into a broken system and make up very tenuous felonies for their own personal career gain. It's sad. Someone should do something about that.
(I wonder if there should be an after-the-fact non-binding review board. Look at all the cases that were prosecuted over a given year, and just have a group of experts gut-check them. If a lot of cases seem like bullshit, dock the numbers for the DA's office so they suffer at election time.)
The case was that someone said they had seen, from the street, the suspect walking around in his basement with a gun in his hand. They called the police. 47 officers arrived at the house, but the suspect had left earlier. They found him several blocks from the house with no firearm on him and arrested him for Unlawful Use or Possession of a Firearm by a Felon (he had a previous conviction from years prior). The judge took pity on him and offered to let him plead to Attempted Possession of a Firearm to get him to plead guilty, which he did and only had to do 6 months in prison for a crime he didn't actually commit. (It was shown that it was impossible to see into the basement from where the reporting citizen was stood.)
All the grand jury members are ordinary citizens with no special education or training. The state sends you a letter, you show up at the time and place they say, and there is no "jury selection" that excludes jurors. You're truly just a pool of random people from the county.
(This is the New York State system. The federal system is different. And some states don't even have grand juries. It's kind of an unusual thing.)
To more directly answer what you're getting at; yes, I felt like something a little fishy was going on. It is all conjecture from chatting with the other members of the jury while sitting around bored for 8 hours a day. Some of them were very good at collecting information about what goes on behind the scenes. The cases should probably be randomly load-balanced between juries, without the prosecutor knowing that one of them has difficult people on it. I would venture a guess that there are rules around this, and then there are "the rules" on how it's done in real life, and people are generally fine with "the rules". So it goes. Ultimately, the grand jury is the people's power over prosecutorial aggression. You, as one of those people, have to decide what to push for and how the jury should be run. My group had a lot of people in it that very strongly pushed back against the power of the state. Some other groups might not have that. That's the luck of the draw, I suppose.
I'll also say that we were not being difficult for the sake of being difficult. They presented some cases that were very clear-cut, and we easily agreed to indict based on the evidence that was shown.
Breonna Taylor grand jurors say there was an 'uproar' when they realized officers wouldn't be charged with her death
https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/29/us/breonna-taylor-grand-juror...
The transcripts of the actual grand jury session are "secret" but generally available to the defendant's attorney, but not the public.
Information on when a grand jury went home might not be restricted though, and might be available, if it was recorded somewhere.
But we know that they are gullible, they take police as a trustworthy source of information and assume police would not mislead them. Nimerous studies have shown that.
Innocent until proven guilty is a cruel joke.
But in the end, I don’t think judges are doing any better. The only reason the justice system works is because the vast majority of cases aren’t very complicated and have physical evidence. Colombo-style crime mystery is fairly rare.
So, I would always go with a jury trial even if you are horribly guilty as you might as well just roll the dice on the jury verdict.
One example: A guy was thrown down onto the grass in front of his house by the cops during a drug arrest. When they picked him up a gun was lying on the grass under him. He told me it fell out of the waistband of his pants. At trial his lawyer argued that the gun was already randomly lying on the ground when the police threw him down. The jury acquitted him of the gun possession charge.
Blackstone's ratio is the commonly accepted benchmark: "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer"
It's job of the prosecution to make sure their proof is "beyond reasonable doubt", which is obviously in the eye of the beholder.
Dogs are friendly and make good pets and all but people need to draw a line.
"My dog is a good dog at heart, but she's a rescue so you have to make allowances."
"My dog is only growling because you are showing fear."
"If you got bit, you must have done something to the dog. No dog bites without good reason."
People "trust" dogs to a ludicrous degree, even dogs that clearly can't be trusted.
You don’t have to ever consider the behavior acceptable and it’s never your job in particular to deal with it or be around them but that doesn’t mean that the owner’s empathy is invalid. And it sucks when owners are unwilling or incapable of helping their dog. But they’re also right — dogs really don’t bite for no reason.
Actually it's the exact opposite. We reduce these complex living beings to a "all dogs are good, only people are bad".
> But they’re also right — dogs really don’t bite for no reason.
People don't assault and kill for no reason either, doesn't mean their victims, or the person bitten by the dog is at fault.
DDG "dog kills child" and come back to this thread.
Back in Russia a neighbour's pibull would regularly attack and bite small children playing on the playground, drew blood, left scars. They refused to believe there was anything wrong with the dog's behaviour. Only when the dog attacked their own kid at home, they finally accepted the fact and, sadly, put down the dog.
Some people are crazy, some dogs are too. Indeed, nothing happens for no reason, but the reason might be screwed up chemistry in the brain. Or it might be traumatic upbringing, or something else totally unrelated to the person that suffered.
But even with that in mind, I remember the one time my dog was playing with another dog, and suddenly the play turned to aggression on a dime, and I had to pull those dogs apart, and one ended up with a piece of it's ear gone. Neither dog had a history of aggression, neither has done anything like that ever again. There was no warning, it just happened.
Why? I have no clue, and I never will, because dogs aren't people. I can't even know what another human is thinking when a violent outburst happens, much less another species.
So are drug-sniffing dogs reliable? I bet they are, but just like people sometimes they can be wrong, or they can have a bad day, or they can give the answer they thought the trainer wanted. Who knows? We don't know how they experience the world enough to even make a guess.
> "My dog would never bite. He just snarls and snaps like that when he's nervous."
A dog who is snarling and snapping is doing the canine equivalent of screaming ‘GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME RIGHT NOW’. Actually trusting that dog would have to mean believing it when it tells you it is uncomfortable and feeling threatened. If you trust someone and they tell you they need to be removed from a situation, you do it.
> "If you got bit, you must have done something to the dog. No dog bites without good reason."
Honestly, this is the other side of people ‘trusting’ dogs too much. Most people who get bit by dogs are doing something extremely stupid, and most people who get bit by other people's dogs are doing something extremely presumptuous and invasive.
If what you're interested in is whether a dog is vicious (i.e., how easily it can be rehabilitated or accommodated so that it never bites anyone again for the rest of its long, happy life), the secondhand judgment of someone who got bit by the dog is generally unreliable unless it's accompanied by a detailed account. Unfortunately, being a ‘dog person’ or someone who ‘loves dogs’ or ‘has had dogs their whole life’ doesn't at all assure that a person can read basic canine body language, either.
Then, when I met it again three years later, tried to do the same thing but by that point they'd wised up and anchored its leash to something. Although, you know, maybe there existed a more constructive solution.
And my cousin was bit three times (required stitches) by a dog she never approached, and backed away from carefully after it became obvious that it was unfriendly, running away after it bit her the first time. She did accidentally enter the owner's property, though, while jogging. The property boundary wasn't marked.
I don't think you can generalize this stuff, unless you've made a detailed survey of the conditions concerning situations where dogs have bit people.
Anyway my point is not to deny someone that they've had unpleasant or even traumatic experiences with dogs, but to point out that moderately detailed stories, like the one you just shared, are much more informative than judgments given without context.
> "My dog would never bite. He just snarls and snaps like that when he's nervous."
If you ever hear this, the dog is being socialized in a bad, counterproductive way before your very eyes. The owner is ignoring manifestly severe distress, as well as generally unacceptable behavior in public.
> "My dog is a good dog at heart, but she's a rescue so you have to make allowances."
The word ‘allowances’ here is kinda strong, in that it sounds like you're not only giving up on eliminating certain negative behaviors/feelings in your dog, but also in managing them.
But it's really close to something that I think is fair to say, which is that you can't expect your dog to instantly recover from trauma, and that you will have to make gradual progress on teaching your dog that the world is safe for them and how you expect them to behave in it. At the same time, it's your job to manage those behaviors along the way, so I'm not sure that counts as ‘making allowances’ in the sense of simply permitting otherwise unacceptable behavior. So it might be fair to give that one to the GGP, too.
> "My dog is only growling because you are showing fear."
This is useless information even if it's true, and it pushes responsibility for the dog's behavior and comfort onto others (probably including random strangers, given the character of the examples). This is poor socialization in action again.
(Aside: growling is good. It is good for dogs to give warning. You probably want to address the thing they're growling about (food possessiveness, fear, anxiety, mistrust of strangers), which may not be good. But you probably don't want to suppress growling per se or treat growling as bad behavior. That's a good way to get a less predictable dog.)
> "If you got bit, you must have done something to the dog. No dog bites without good reason."
If someone says this about their own dog, they're showing a stunning level of disinterest in their own dog's behavior, comfort, and impact on others. If someone tells you your dog bit them, you need to be very interested in all of the details so you can figure out what was going on and what you need to do about it.
A dog who doesn't like to be touched by random strangers is not a bad dog, and strangers are not entitled to touch her! I'm 100% with you on this one. Many people seem to think that all dogs should actively enjoy all kinds of invasions to their personal space (that they themselves would never tolerate), and it's ridiculous.
You're also not, in my opinion based on this description, ‘making allowances’ for any unacceptable behavior. You're just keeping your dog (and people around her) safe and comfortable, despite the misplaced sense of entitlement of some strangers.
That is a reasonable thing to do. Dogs like people get allowances within reason for having unique failure modes. We all have them.
Telling people they're not welcome to pet the dog isn't an allowance, it's management.
Making allowances, to me, would mean simply permitting a behavior you otherwise wouldn't, and actually allowing the dog to practice the behavior instead of managing the environment to prevent the behavior. People who simply do nothing about a small dog who snaps, growls, bites because 'he's harmless, he couldn't hurt anyone if he wanted to', for example, I would say are 'making allowances'.
My point is the owner is not in control of whether someone suddenly pets the dog, and it bites them.
So the warning before, is also the allowance after. Depending on circumstances the owner can only partially control.
If the warning were not also a reasonable allowance after a bad incident of the kind the owner imagines is possible, then instead of a warning the owner should be avoiding any possibility of the situation.
I don't take her to dog parks or places with lots of people. Avoiding any possibility of the situation would mean not taking her for daily walks around the neighborhood; this is just the reaction when somebody who is not familiar in the neighborhood sees her for the first time (often people just walking down their driveways toward me). I don't think that fully isolating her from ever seeing a person she doesn't know is necessarily the best choice for her either.
For somebody to suddenly pet her, there would have to be a person who is hiding behind a hedge or car waiting to jump out and pet a strange dog, which would be a bad idea regardless of the dog's disposition to strangers.
I understand your point, but I think you're making the assumption that I'm putting her into avoidable situations that are higher risk, rather than the bare minimum necessary proximity to people in order for her to get her exercise and the psychological necessity for anxious dogs to scope out their surroundings regularly.
All my unpleasant dog encounters have been with people who can't take their dog to the off leash park ...
There is a real problem right there. Looks like you could get a conviction based on a fortune teller.