posted on Apr, 24 2015 @ 12:43 AM
originally posted by: Pinke
I believe this is one of the many antidotes to the issue. Jurors are often told not to talk about their deliberations, but when they do it is
sometimes a disturbing experience when you take into account their responsibility. Often no transcripts, not allowed to research, and left in a room
with strangers.
I've been called to jury duty many times (I always seem to get the maximum for the area of 3 times per year) but every case I've ever been called to
has been settled out of court before the selection process. I'm something like 0/35 now which tells me that there's a whole bunch of cases not going
to trial.
Personally I would love to sit on a jury, it's the sort of thing I would even want to do professionally if there were such a thing as a professional
juror (but sadly it's not the sort of thing we should have professionals for). I have a fairly technical mind, can extrapolate advanced concepts from
basic explanations, know a little bit about everything, and love to argue. I'm also quite good with numbers and understand things like probabilities
plus... the law doesn't bore me.
From what I've heard of many jurors though on the rare occasions they speak of deliberations it's rarely about justice and more about "what can we all
agree on so we can go back to work tomorrow".
I see the jury portion as one of the big flaws in our system right now, atleast in the cases that even reach trial. Jurors are all too often not
paying attention during a case, and decide things on a completely arbitrary scale rather than on things like logic, reason, and the law. I think a
simple fix that could alleviate this is if jurors got a chance to question the prosecution and defense periodically. Right now the prosecution and
defense make their cases in neat little packages and leave out all the little details they don't think the jury needs to know about. The jury should
atleast retain the right to ask about the parts that have been left out.
Tieing this to the concept of forensics in trials, something I run into a lot in work is that people have this natural bias to assume percentages
above 85% are virtually guaranteed and under 10% are impossible. When you apply this to probability where the degree of certainty is often expressed
as 95% people take it as iron clad proof. I would say part of any briefing for a trial which involves forensics should also include examples we see
every day that have a less than 5% chance of happening yet are all over the place. Someone in the office being sick (1% per person?), a car broken
down on the highway (0.001%), a 3 of a kind in poker (2.11%) and so on... along with the odds of those things coming to pass. 1% and 2% events happen
literally all the time, yet by most peoples understanding should be virtually impossible to occur. Having an understanding of this is key in
interpreting forensic (or any other scientific) results.
edit on 24-4-2015 by Aazadan because: (no reason given)