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Disclaimer: I've only read the 'Key takeaways' in the article. Should we consider a system where the judge and jury do not see the defendant (and suer if appli
by BbzzbB 6y ago
Disclaimer: I've only read the 'Key takeaways' in the article.
Should we consider a system where the judge and jury do not see the defendant (and suer if applicable) in the pursuit of objectivity? I think the bias towards attractive people is quite obvious in so many spheres of life. For employment, for the way people treat you as a customer, colleague or day-to-day, for housing, etc. We are actively fighting many -ism in (rational) societies, but "unattractivism" is more taboo. I am not sure what the solution would be at societal level. My feeling is that a societal movement for this inclusion is more unlikely than the other ones, but that would require to acknowledge an implicit scale of attractiveness which is divisive in the first place (as opposed to gender, sexual orientation, ethicity, religion, etc which are either obvious or self-decided). But I could be misreading the situation obviously.
The judicial system is different, and with radically impactful consequences, you do not have to eliminate human bias (which probably isn't even possible), you just have to make the decision-maker blind just like peer-reviewed papers. While we can't really hide identity for employment or housing, but a judge and juree do not need to know the name or see the person. To go further, please could be read by impartial narrator which would also take care of emotional bias (should a good actor have a more lenient sentence?). In a way, the justice system should seek ultimate objectivity for the sake of fairness. On the flipside however, it would have a dehumanizing effect on the deciders to have zero connection with the convicted and perhaps lead to an increase in sentencing lengths, which I'm not particularly in favor of.
- joncrane 6y agoI think lawyers are subject to the biases, as well. Defense lawyers probably work harder for attractive people, prosecutors are probably less cutthroat. It's an intractable problem.
- BbzzbB 6y agoBut judge and juree make the final decisions, and the lawyer issues run much deeper in terms of inequalities. I don't think lawyer perception of client attractiveness is the core issue in this case, they'll (naturally) mostly care about their compensation. Prosecutors having a bias plays into the other -isms as well, perhaps a blinding system could be helpful as well, although harder to enforce.
- joncrane 6y agoAren't the vast majority of people in the US represented by public defenders? Public defenders who make salary, and are extremely overworked and often default to some subconscious rubic for how to allocate their efforts....
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- wtvanhest 6y agoAt a minimum, there should be a blind test jury in cases with over a 1 year penalty. Would give us useful data, and valid reason to appeal the case.
- elicash 6y agoI believe I once heard that people are better able to detect lies by reading transcripts compared to watching people. They think they're getting additional information they can use to detect the lies but it ends up being misleading. Having trouble finding a source for it, however. Anyone? Also, plenty in the legal system is already done on the basis of transcripts. This isn't an all-or-nothing prospect.
- sukilot 6y agoInterestingly someone on this thread has boldly made the opposite claim, based solely on their own preconceived notions.
- elicash 6y agoI'm pretty sure it was shared on podcast, but unfortunately that's making it impossible for me to search and find it because they don't provide transcripts. Obviously I don't expect anybody to take my word for it, just was hoping somebody else recalled it.
- chmod775 6y agoThis. It is much easier for deceitful people to sell you a lie face to face - because you are more focused on the person than their message.
- totetsu 6y agodehumanizing to not see them in person, and perhaps just see a photo of them somewhere outside the court.
- bacheaul 6y agoI actually just finished a stint of jury duty last week and got picked for 2 trials. A couple of observations: 1. One of the trials was an underage rape case and there was essentially no physical evidence. Mainly all we had to go on was 3 police interviews (2 from the alledged victim, one from the accused). As a jury, we relied on those videos to determine who we felt was telling the truth and the trust worthiness of what they were saying. I'm not saying this was a good thing necessarily, just an observation that this is what we did. I'd like to see the results with a parallel jury that relied only on written transcripts etc. 2. The judge actually gave us guidance at the beginning of both trials that in addition to what witnesses said, how they appeared to us (their demeanour) was also evidence that we could use in assessing the trust-worthiness of what they said. My understanding was that we should use our general life experience that we had acquired in our day to day living to assess the evidence of the witness. I guess there are good sides (eg. intuition based on non-verbal communication/body language) and bad sides (eg. biases) to using this approach.
- tomp 6y agoThis might be a silly question, but how come there was no evidence? I thought that the hard part with persecuting (adult) rape is that the physical act is the same as sex - so there’s no “obvious” proof that the crime even happened (like a dead body), only different interpretations of why sex happened. That goes away if it’s statutory rape, where even just sex is evidence of crime.
- bacheaul 6y agoSo she claimed she had been raped while sleeping over at a friend's house by the father of the friend. He claimed it never happened. She only told her mother and step-father around 2-3 weeks afterwards about it. She was forced (she was not able to choose) to take pregnancy rejection medication but refused/declined to have a physical examination/rape kit done (she had a choice in this). So essentially there was no physical evidence (in the trial at least) that sex had ever occurred. Also, the trial was taking place around 6 years after the alledged incident. What we did have was a very detailed, consistent, plausible, and compelling recount of events leading up to, during, and after the rape from the 13 year old victim in a police interview about a month after it occured and also another interview around 2 years later. Watching the interviews, and based on the type emotion she showed at particular points, the language (including body language) she used to describe the events etc it was difficult to not believe her, it was in fact heart breaking to watch and listen to. I guess my point is that all that "soft" information that we received from the video recorded interview was indeed information that we used to assess whether we thought she was telling the truth or not or whether she was coached or was making it up, for whatever reason. We were in fact instructed by the judge to use that information to make our assessment whether there was reasonable doubt or not. I'm not sure how you separate this type of information from other information we also receive eg. the physical attractiveness of the accused and defendant and how the legal system can remove this type of bias. Based on other comments here, I'm also no longer sure about whether we, as a jury, should be using that soft information, and I'd love to see results from studies about how juries assess evidence when it is presented in different ways as suggested here.
- dirtyid 6y agoSee or hear. Everyone, in the process from judge to representation to jurors in their own isolated rooms with proceedings transcribed and read via the same text to speech. Eliminate the theatrics. Though it would be interesting to have a double blind of a normal case + transcript case and see the role of bias or even intuition.
- therealdrag0 6y agoI’ve occasionally thought about something similar for political debates/speeches since we k le how much presentation swings impressions. When really we should care about reasoning.