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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_questionnaire

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?