5 ms·
In England, unanimous juries were relaxed in 1967 to allow majority ones (i.e. 10/12). The reason for this was because there was a number of jury intimidation c
by chippy 6y ago
In England, unanimous juries were relaxed in 1967 to allow majority ones (i.e. 10/12). The reason for this was because there was a number of jury intimidation cases. A criminal conspiracy need to get to one juror to make the whole case fall apart.
Was this consideration discussed by the supreme court in the USA?
(edits - no results ctrl-f for "conspiracy", "intimidation", "mafia", "organized" in https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/18-5924_n6io.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/18-5924_n6io.pdf )
- jedimastert 6y agoI believe the legal term would be "juror tampering" but that's also not in the ruling text.
- frostwhale 6y agoYeah its a trade off, as the article mentions, against alienating a minority voting bloc in juries. In the US most relevantly black vs white jurors. Juries will generally be majority white meaning the opinion of the black jurors would be discounted often. Neither solution is ideal, and this topic interests me greatly, it seems very similar to the questions of fairness and bias in statistics / ML.
- papermachete 6y agoWhy is there a racial functional difference between jurors in your mind? Why should black people be judged by black people only?
- frostwhale 6y agoThere's a racial difference between jurors in my mind because there's a racial difference between jurors in reality lol. Pretending otherwise is foolish, lawyers literally pick their juries based on this obvious fact. "Why should black people be judged by black people only?" Is a racist strawman argument. I am saying black people should not be judged by white people exclusively, as can happy if every jury is majority white.
- bluGill 6y agoThere shouldn't be a difference, but in the real world humans are not perfect and we all come with our own biases that we can't always overcome. People should be judged by a fair impartial jury. I have no idea how to ensure this. Race is one known factor. All white or all black juries are somewhat likely to be partial in the same way and thus not give a true result (as if that is possible) so you want a mix that reflects the community, and also has enough that the one other person isn't intimidated. Easy to say, hard to do.
- lol2143651 6y agoSo was trump correct when he said an ethnically Mexican judge was biased against him?
- dd36 6y agoA solution: virtual avatars.
- wonderwonder 6y agoThey should not be, but historically and continuing into this day, there are some areas including entire states where there is a clear bias against minorities. This means the defendant is potentially at a disadvantage before the first prosecutor has spoken. Placing a minority on the jury of a minority defendant does not guarantee an acquittal in anyway but it does help to mitigate any ingrained bias the jury may have. In addition, we are supposed to be judged by a jury of our peers. Considering minorities make up ~40% of the population I don't think its a stretch to say at least 20+% of the jurors should be a minority. The bar to convict should be high and this helps to ensure that. Rather 10 guilty men go free than one innocent man go to jail.
- CivBase 6y ago> Juries will generally be majority white meaning the opinion of the black jurors would be discounted often. How often do jurry opinions actually split purely along racial lines?
- bitcurious 6y agoI don’t know of any present day statistics, but it looks like it was a motivating factor in moving away from unanimous convictions, at least in the case of Louisiana. https://www.wwno.org/post/history-louisianas-non-unanimous-jury-rule https://www.wwno.org/post/history-louisianas-non-unanimous-j...
- bluGill 6y agoThat is one of the reasons not to have professional juries (I don't think England ever had them but I see it come up once in a while). If you have a random jury you don't have enough time to gather dirt on everyone so you don't really know how to intimidate which ever one you happen to get. With a professional jury (or judge but there are other reasons to have professional judges) you know who to look at long before you are caught and so you can figure out what blackmail might work and have it ready when you need it. Juries are often sequestered meaning that by the time you figure out what to try you can't get at them. Of course none of the above is perfect. You can get around them if you put in enough effort. Which is why it is a tradeoff as others have said.
- matthewheath 6y agoTo my knowledge, England has never had "professional juries", no. What would those be? People who had a career serving on a jury? We do, however, have the ability to dispense with a jury entirely and have a single judge decide on the case. I suppose that's not much better: a single professional jury of one versus one of twelve.
- julianlam 6y agoColor me uninformed, but couldn't more jurors be intimidated if needed? It seems like difficulty in intimidating jurors would scale linearly, O(n)
- Eridrus 6y agoNo, because not all jurors are equally easy to intimidate, so you should expect effort to be superlinear depending on the distribution, and intimidation itself is not a risk free crime.
- pc86 6y agoThis sounds like a feature, not a bug. The impact of letting a criminal go free (presumably to commit more crime, and have more chances to put them away) is minuscule compared to the impact of locking an innocent person in prison. Yes, it means that guilty people will go free. But relaxing the constraints of what "convicted" means that by definition there will be innocent people convicted by 7-11/12 juries.
- SquishyPanda23 6y agoThe impact of systematically allowing criminals to go free if they can sufficiently intimidate or blackmail a single juror is also very high. If courts are unable to punish well connected criminals then it's difficult to keep a healthy democracy. I'm not sure what the solution is, but it seems like there should be some redundancy in the system.
- pc86 6y agoI'm not saying the impact is low, only that it's lower than locking up innocent people for crimes they didn't commit, potentially for years or decades.
- Retric 6y agoThe tiny number of people who can intimidate jurors, can simply intimidate multiple ones if you’re changing the rules. Much simpler to simply isolate them so they are unaware of such attempts thus keeping juries and their families safe.
- stared 6y agoIn liberal democracies, we have the line of (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio): "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer." In the language of statistics, it is a trade-off between precision vs recall. In general, we cannot create a system that makes sure no innocent is behind the bars (other than not convicting anyone).
- 6y ago
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y agoIt seems weird to lower the bar for conviction for everybody out of fear of jury tampering.