This one:
I don’t believe so. It was many years ago so I cannot be sure, but I believe all I filled out was the standard California juror’s packet. There’s like 6 or 7 questions, mostly of the sort like: Are you a citizen, have you been convicted of a felony, are you working in law enforcement. The 4 times I’ve been summoned for jury duty in my life, I’ve always filled out that same thing
I think it is unfortunate that the law does not allow jurors to ask questions of the lawyers to clarify that misleading information. Furthermore, neither the defense nor the prosecution is excempt from making misleading or half-truth statements. If they are telling me I should judge a case using my amateurish background with both lawyers trying to trick me, then they have to accept that I will use my own powers of judgement to decide whether the information I google is false or not
Adversarial lawyers make for at least somewhat equal presentation. If there’s bias on one side, there is at least competing bias on the other side, so it all evens out. Therefore I feel that if there’s misleading info on google for one side, there’s probably going to be some for the other side, so I’ll read them all and judge accordingly. If I’m not allowed to use my powers of judgement, then don’t tell jurors to use them in a court of law, just have the judge decide which facts are more true and find the case for that side.
I think I can present a my argument without tipping them off to the fact that I googled. Besides, if I really think he’s innocent, why would it be so wrong if I don’t convict? My job, as I see it, is to arrive at the truth, not this judge of facts nonsense. At the end of the day, I want to be able to say I voted the way I feel, not because one side was woefully inadequate in their case.
You also seem to want to come to a unanimous decision. Why? We’ll have a hung jury in your example and that’s not a miscarriage of justice. If I find information, factual information, that the prosecution has suppressed that casts doubt on the case, I would be remiss in my duties as a human being not to question why I wasn’t given this information. Maybe it’s pointless, irrelevent, or gotten illegally, I don’t know. But the point is, I am the judge of those facts, not the lawyers.
That is not ethical. Your job does not take precedant over the truth. If I were an attorney, and I am convinced of my client’s guilt, I would try to throw the case. Anything to get him in jail.
The guilty should be punished, that is justice. Justice is not saying your job excuses your behavior
The legal system is not a person to be smarter than. Attorneys can and should use the legal system to arrive at the closes approximation of justice and the truth. I know about false confessions. But attorneys should not get them thrown out just because the police was zealous, they should get them thrown out because they are false. That is up to the attorney to decide for himself
I’m talking about cases where lawyers don’t even ask. Am I supposed to believe that every single defense lawyer in every case has asked his client if they were guilty, and his client told him no? If the client’s guilt is not certain, the defense should use everything at their disposal to ascertain that. They should almost always err on the side of more information. For example, a case I read a while ago was thrown out because the search warrant stipulated the house, but the defense protested the police searching an unattached garage. I can’t remember the details of it, but incriminating evidence was found. In that case, as the defense, I would say “Hey, they found evidence of your wrong doing. You did it. I’m not going to move to suppress due to a technicality like the garage is not part of the house”
If it produces evidence of guilt, and it’s already out there, use it. If it does not, sue the police for violating of your rights. It’s all about what the truth is. Sometimes police abuse their power and find nothing, and the person should be justly compensated for the violation. Sometimes the police violate that but crack the case. We all know then that the defendant did it, thus the evidence should be used. The check on police power is the fear that they might be wrong
No one is guilty until he or she has been proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt after being offered due process in a court of law subject to the rule of law.
That defendant at the bar? He’s innocent. And that’s how every jury should approach the case before it.
And what gives your idea of a “fair outcome” more privilege than that of anyone else? If every juror has the opportunity to play Perry Mason and go to the judge with whatever special information he or she has–or if every juror is effectively presenting new evidence in the jury room before the other jurors–you no longer have a trial. What you have is a town-hall meeting, or just the potential for a babel of every juror trying to outdo the others with personal, extraneous knowledge. Or do you expect to be in room full mindless cows that are simply in need of your insight to bring the thing to its “fair outcome.”
But that is the whole point of this thread. If it is guaranteed that whatever research you do will not affect your vote, why do it? If it is just curiosity, you can wait until the trial is over and do all the research you want.
Nice in theory but doesn’t work in real life
Many people who are convicted are innocent. And many who are acquitted are guilty. That is fact
A person is guilty at the moment they committ the crime. The justice system is simply our best way of determining that. It has flaws. I aim to fix what I see as those flaws
That is not a worse outcome than what we currently have, which is two lawyers acting as the arbiters of evidence, presenting a skewed view of what they want to be the truth, not even what the actual truth is.
A town hall is different, there is essentially no moderator of the facts. I want the jurors to be able to ask questions of evidence and such. But the judge and the lawyers get to use their expertise to shoot down those things as irrelevent or explain any misunderstandings. That way, all is more knowledgeable after the fact, rather than an ignorant jury that remains ignorant until after they rendered their verdict. Don’t you think the original OJ jury would maybe like to take some of their votes back?
That’s a fundamental contradiction of the common law system. What you really seem to want is a legal system in which “everyone does what I think they should, regardless of their own interest and regardless of the delicate balancing of rights we have struggled to achieve over a period of centuries.”
Hmm. I’m in California also, and the packets were pretty long. The civil one was shorter by far than the murder case one, but they were all more than six questions - at least in the past few years when I’ve been up for jury duty.
I’m an engineer also, and haven’t found the old saw about lawyers hating to put engineers on juries to be true.
In my case the misleading information would not have been presented. If misleading information is presented, it is the job of the opposing attorney to point this out.
So Mr. X, you testified you didn’t hear the gunshot. Is it true you were listening to an iPod turned up to 11 at the time?
It has been mentioned already that if you find independent information you don’t give the people who have researched the case in depth the opportunity to respond to it. Don’t you think the DA and the defense know how to use Google also? In addition, you get put on the case pretty much right after selection, and many cases don’t last long enough for you to do real research on it. Do you really think you’d do a better job than the experts with more time?
On the other hand, the judge’s instructions will tell you that you can make a decision based on not trusting the argument of one of the sides. If in your best judgment the prosecution is being sneaky, voting to acquit is fine.
That is not necessarily true, and Google hardly holds the entire sum of human knowledge, especially for cases covered by small papers without enough reporting resources to publish all the relevant facts. For a time we had two independent local papers, and their information about criminal cases sometimes was radically different. If both get published that is fine, but often only one set of misleading information does.
Trials are long enough already - do you want to make them go even longer as every proto-Perry Mason has his “facts” shot down? And don’t you think a juror refuted by one side or the other would become biased against that side? It would be a disaster.
Not to mention that attorneys have accountability for this kind of thing, and jurors don’t.
If your position depended on a matter of supposed fact? I don’t think so. And today you can vote based on the way you feel, and on your experience. If you feel that some witness is lying, you get to discount that testimony in making your decision. We’re only talking about bringing in unexamined evidence here.
Practically speaking, your fellow jurors want to get the hell out of there. No one seemed to object when the jury I was on decided quickly and efficiently - no one told me that they wished they had spend a few days chewing over the case for our munificent wages. If there is honest disagreement about the facts so that the jury can’t decide, then the prosecution has to try again. (No pun intended.) That’s different from a juror saying “I know something you don’t know.”
BTW, if the defense discovers that the prosecution is suppressing evidence the verdict can be thrown out, if I understand procedure correctly. And, like I said, the defense can Google also. The actual judge of the facts are the rules of evidence, and the judge, who gets to decide what is admissible and what is not.
Before you were pretty much down on lawyers, here you seem to be saying that they are smarter than the legal system. What if an innocent man hires an attorney who, for whatever reason, maybe bias, decides the guy is guilty on the spot. The way the system works now the attorney should refuse the client, who will go off and perhaps find an attorney who won’t sabotage his case. Or, if the attorney says “I think you are guilty, let’s plea bargain” the client can go find another. In your scenario the attorney will sabotage the client’s case. You seem to be saying that the snap judgment of a lawyer will work better than days or weeks of an adversarial court procedure. I don’t buy it.
How does the attorney know the confession is false again?
The warrant was thrown out by a judge, not by an attorney. But I’m not qualified to got into the details of what is a house, or why a search warrant wouldn’t include the words “and grounds.” I’m not claiming all lawyers are paragons of justice, but I’d be willing to bet the average lawyer is a lot better at this stuff than the average juror - though possibly not as smart as the average juror thinks he is.
What is your possible basis for this claim? The jury in that case clearly ignored any scientific or rational evidence and acquitted Simpson on the basis of being a successful black man persecuted by white bigots, which they were already inclined to do. There was a coherent chain of solid evidence that put together a nearly air-tight circumstantial case that Simpson was at least on the scene of the murder, had handled the weapon, and fled the scene. The jury in that case was just not inclined to evaluate the evidence in a rational manner. There is no reason to believe that additional research or outside data would have resulted in a conviction.
Stranger
I don’t understand how your system would work. Would the person who Googled the new facts present them in the jury room, or does each juror go to the stand to present his set of facts? do the opposing attorneys get to cross-examine? Do they get to ask for a recess in the rare case a juror comes up with something new?
Cross-examination is there to correct this skewed view - or at least counter it with the other skewed view. And some questions should not be asked lest it skew the jury’s view. “Mr. Beck, is it true that you raped a teenage girl in 1990?”
A juror is likely to get committed to his “facts.” A case is also a carefully constructed chain of evidence and reasoning, which gets broken by random facts put in at the end. The defense goes last for a reason - in your plan, the random jury goes last.
The purpose of the jury is to be a relatively unbiased set of observers with few if any preconceptions about the case. You’ve turned them into active advocates for one side or another, and that subverts the whole principle.
In Europe it is often the case that the judge runs the show, doing the investigation also. It is not clear it is a better system than ours, but it is still better than a runaway jury.
What?! You mean I can’t find the single, incontrovertible, absolute objective truth about all things on Google? (You know, that one the lawyers are hiding from me?)
Most of what jurors have to decide is nothing like finding “the truth”–did defendant ABC do it, like an Agatha Christie novel-- but more like deciding if a defendant ABC’s actions constituted XYZ crime.
Even in the OJ Simpson case, what could anyone on the jury have researched, Google or otherwise, that would have informed them any better? What could they have asked that would have forced counsel to spill the beans of the “real” truth?
And in cases where ABC simply denies any connection to a crime at all, what kind of exonerating or incriminating evidence are we imagining here that a juror is going to be able to find, that counsel wouldn’t have found?
These seem to me more like romantic notions of courtroom drama.
Gosh, on one side the force of “information wanting to be free,” on the other the traditional way of doing things. I know which way I am betting.
Yes, because every single thing you see on the Internet is a credible, vetted, and thoroughly substantiated fact. Even the hollow earth nuttery and September 11th conspiracies.
Stranger
This thread? Is why I think jury trials are a crock of steaming horse piddle, and why I’m glad they’re mostly gone. Save for the US, of course.
We have, on the SD (a pretty good group of reasonably intelligent people), people claiming that they ought to be able to consider any and all “relevant” information they want in order to convict or not, and as a primary example of “relevant” information, states that a party was guilty because (and I quote)
WTF? (checks to see if I’m in pit not I’m not drat) Yog, if you’re serious about this, thank Og I never have to be tried by you and 11 of your peers.
That is practically the definition of “irrelevant information”. Prior convictions are also irrelevant. Whether he was black is also irrelevant. Whether he was a meth head and yall knows them druggies need to steal to feed their habit is ALSO IRRELEVANT.
Just… damn.
That was Voyager’s statement. I, too, was curious about this.
Addressing this point only, and no other, I will point out that at no time during law school, did my professors tell me to ask a client if he or she was guilty. Indeed, they said the opposite: never ask. Knowing a client is guilty, and defending him or her as if she wasn’t, creates a host of ethical issues. The best approach is to not know; and the best way to not know, is not to ask. I’ll add that my real-world experience with criminal defendants in a courtroom has borne this out.
So yes; generally speaking, you are supposed to believe that lawyers do not ask their clients if they are guilty. Mind, the prosecution’s evidence may demonstrate that “guilty” is the only conclusion (or it may not), but no lawyer I know ever asks a criminal defendant if he or she is guilty.
That was me, not Yog, and it certainly had no impact on our decision, since, as was correct, we had no idea of it when making our decision.
It was more like voting to convict and then discovering that the defendant was discovered with the smoking gun in his hand, but that evidence was not allowed for some reason.
Hell, the defense attorney was not exactly defending his client afterward either.
It seems like you misunderstood the post in many, many ways.
Let me repeat that this information would not have been appropriate to make a decision on (just like random Google results.) But, since this was my first criminal jury, it was a bit comforting to know that we were right. And this datum was not the only reason I thought so. As foreman, I thought it my duty to talk to the attorneys, plus I was interested in anything they could tell me.
Isn’t this pretty unlikely? My experience with lawyers is that the first thing they ask their client to do is tell them everything. I’m pretty sure that “Well, I did it.” would fall under that.
I guess I wouldn’t have necessarily jumped to the same conclusion. (Yes, I understand this was after the trial.) But I also don’t get it–did you convict him based on the fact he didn’t scream when he supposedly got kicked in the balls? I’ve been nailed in the balls once and I didn’t scream, either. (However, I did go down like a wet rag.) I assume (hope) there was much more in the case pointing at his guilt than that.