3 ms·

The 78% agreement rate between judges and juries suggests a shared interpretation of evidence, which indirectly indicates both are following the same 'reasonabl

by lhnz 3y ago

The 78% agreement rate between judges and juries suggests a shared interpretation of evidence, which indirectly indicates both are following the same 'reasonable doubt' standard. The 3% disagreement where judges would have convicted doesn't prove juries 'ignore' reasonable doubt; it reflects normal variance in human judgment. Legal decisions aren't coin tosses—such a high agreement is unlikely if both parties weren't generally applying the same legal standard.

Retric 3y ago
Again, Juries that don’t know what is meant by this term will use some standard, but reasonable doubt is supposed to have a specific meaning. I am not suggesting legal results are actually a coin toss, just that this level of agreement doesn’t require shared logic let alone using the same standard. If you have two people roll a dice with 90% yes and 10% no then they will agree 0.9 * 0.9 + 0.1 * 0.1 = 82% of the time with absolutely zero logic involved. A much lower standard say ‘the preponderance of the evidence’ is easily enough to hit 78% agreement which is really quite low.
- lhnz 3y ago
  Nobody other than yourself is arguing that reasonable doubt is being generally ignored by juries. You either misunderstood the Kalven-Zeisel study that you brought to the argument or you failed to read it. The study showed that juries had a higher threshold for conviction than judges, which is a direct repudiation of your point that "reasonable doubt is generally ignored by juries. Interviews of post conviction juries show they often convict people who they have serious doubts actually committed the crime." It also explained that similar results to this had been reproduced many times over. It's not even conclusive that it is purely due to juries having a different interpretation of reasonable doubt as it is explained that "Much more research is needed to map experimentally the differences and similarities between the judgments of judges and juries before concluding that judges are better than juries at specific tasks (e.g., assessing risk) or that deliberations enable juries to outperform judges on other tasks (e.g., assessing conflicting testimony)." To be clear, your claim that juries are more likely to convict was disproven by your own data and your claim that they ignore "reasonable doubt" is unlikely given that they err on the side of reasonable doubt. The later article you posted doesn't really have anything to say about either of these things, but instead presents better ways to articulate the idea of reasonable doubt to a jury. I don't find your latest argument about dice rolling persuasive either as (1) it's not an empirical argument, and (2) this oversimplifies the complex dynamics of legal decision-making and doesn't effectively challenge the implications drawn from the Kalven-Zeisel study -- unlike the randomness of dice, legal decisions are derived from a deliberative process grounded in law, evidence, and rational argumentation.
  - Kim_Bruning 3y ago
    Summarizing the 2 statements (without commenting on their accuracy or veracity): (1) A statistical smell test: A random dice roll (under reasonable[?] assumptions) achieves an agreement rate of 82%. (2) unlike the randomness of dice, legal decisions are derived from a deliberative process grounded in law, evidence, and rational argumentation. Retrics argument appears to be: For (2) to empirically pass (1), the agreement rate between judges and juries must thus be >>82%. The Kalvin-Zeisel study found a rate of 78%.
    - lhnz 3y ago
      I'm out-of-steam with this argument but making a probability-derived argument based on a cherry-picked agreement rate of 90% instead of an empirical argument that considers the legal deliberation process and culture that produced this agreement rate isn't persuasive to me. Kalven-Zeisel specifically argues "Disagreement rates were no higher when the judge characterized the evidence as difficult than when the judge characterized it as easy, suggesting that the disagreements were not produced by the jury’s inability to understand the evidence." It seems impossible to mathematically tease out how much of the agreement comes from a shared understanding of the reasonable doubt standard vs other facts from the case -- either way, the idea that juries generally ignore reasonable doubt and err towards convicting people is not evidenced.

by lhnz 3y ago

Retric 3y ago

Again, Juries that don’t know what is meant by this term will use some standard, but reasonable doubt is supposed to have a specific meaning. I am not suggesting legal results are actually a coin toss, just that this level of agreement doesn’t require shared logic let alone using the same standard. If you have two people roll a dice with 90% yes and 10% no then they will agree 0.9 * 0.9 + 0.1 * 0.1 = 82% of the time with absolutely zero logic involved. A much lower standard say ‘the preponderance of the evidence’ is easily enough to hit 78% agreement which is really quite low.

lhnz 3y ago
Nobody other than yourself is arguing that reasonable doubt is being generally ignored by juries. You either misunderstood the Kalven-Zeisel study that you brought to the argument or you failed to read it. The study showed that juries had a higher threshold for conviction than judges, which is a direct repudiation of your point that "reasonable doubt is generally ignored by juries. Interviews of post conviction juries show they often convict people who they have serious doubts actually committed the crime." It also explained that similar results to this had been reproduced many times over. It's not even conclusive that it is purely due to juries having a different interpretation of reasonable doubt as it is explained that "Much more research is needed to map experimentally the differences and similarities between the judgments of judges and juries before concluding that judges are better than juries at specific tasks (e.g., assessing risk) or that deliberations enable juries to outperform judges on other tasks (e.g., assessing conflicting testimony)." To be clear, your claim that juries are more likely to convict was disproven by your own data and your claim that they ignore "reasonable doubt" is unlikely given that they err on the side of reasonable doubt. The later article you posted doesn't really have anything to say about either of these things, but instead presents better ways to articulate the idea of reasonable doubt to a jury. I don't find your latest argument about dice rolling persuasive either as (1) it's not an empirical argument, and (2) this oversimplifies the complex dynamics of legal decision-making and doesn't effectively challenge the implications drawn from the Kalven-Zeisel study -- unlike the randomness of dice, legal decisions are derived from a deliberative process grounded in law, evidence, and rational argumentation.
- Kim_Bruning 3y ago
  Summarizing the 2 statements (without commenting on their accuracy or veracity): (1) A statistical smell test: A random dice roll (under reasonable[?] assumptions) achieves an agreement rate of 82%. (2) unlike the randomness of dice, legal decisions are derived from a deliberative process grounded in law, evidence, and rational argumentation. Retrics argument appears to be: For (2) to empirically pass (1), the agreement rate between judges and juries must thus be >>82%. The Kalvin-Zeisel study found a rate of 78%.
  - lhnz 3y ago
    I'm out-of-steam with this argument but making a probability-derived argument based on a cherry-picked agreement rate of 90% instead of an empirical argument that considers the legal deliberation process and culture that produced this agreement rate isn't persuasive to me. Kalven-Zeisel specifically argues "Disagreement rates were no higher when the judge characterized the evidence as difficult than when the judge characterized it as easy, suggesting that the disagreements were not produced by the jury’s inability to understand the evidence." It seems impossible to mathematically tease out how much of the agreement comes from a shared understanding of the reasonable doubt standard vs other facts from the case -- either way, the idea that juries generally ignore reasonable doubt and err towards convicting people is not evidenced.