Re:Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely...
by IIAOPSW on Tuesday April 12, 2022 @03:07AM
(#30999557)
I'll snipe you a bit harder. In the event of a hung jury, the case can be retried (aka the distribution resampled). Practically though, no prosecutor wants to redo the same case over and over. So its safe to assume that 2 hung juries is as good as charges dropped.
I'm glad you enjoyed this problem, both as a riddle and as a neat demonstration of how a societal system can be better (more fair, just) than the underlying society that builds it.
It becomes more interesting when we consider juries. Juries, as far as I know (not being American), require unanimous agreement to convict. A jury consists of 6-12 people. To find out if a jury will convict, we have to find the probability of every single person in that jury wrongfully convicting. The formula now is y = ((2/3)^(1/{6|12}) - x)/(1 - x). At this point, either x or y have to be very high for 2/3 of wrongful convictions to be black. Even when x = 66%, y still has to be above 80% for the 6-member jury to convict wrongfully that many times. This is, of course, assuming this is a perfectly mathematical scenario and we aren't dealing with real humans who will vote to convict because everyone else is doing so.
The error, then, is probably more due to humans being likely to fold their convictions under peer pressure than merely a high percentage of them being rabidly racist. If people adamantly voted their conscience in juries, and refused to be swayed by the deliberation of their fellow jurors, we would have many more hung juries and many fewer convictions.