Landsburg: Why are juries trusted to judge some things, but not others?

[Bearflag70]

@Apos

These objections are not particularly useful. For instance, to avoid that problem, the judge can simply set a fixed budget and give it to the lawyers in equal amount, who then pay it back to the state. Or any other number of incentive systems. The point is to care about getting the incentives right, and so you work out some system that tries to do so.

There is an incentive system no matter WHAT you do: it just tends to be a fairly arbitrary and often fairly biased one.

You are saying the court could make the attorneys pay for court time (which we all know will be passed on to the clients). This means the parties are likely paying attorney time PLUS court time. Poor people can’t afford legal help as it is without piling on additional costs. Under your proposal, the court now has an extra hand in pushing justice away from the poor. You could make an exception for indigent people by waiving costs upon proof of income, but does this mean the indigent now get more time because they don’t have to pay for it?

Your proposed solution to that problem is to have the court set a fixed budget, equal to both parties. What if one party has 2 witnesses and the other party has 15 witnesses? How does the court know ahead of time what a reasonable allotment of time is for the entire trial? What if witness blabbers on because they don’t understand the question causing a party to run out of time before they run out of witnesses to call? Does the court just say, “Sorry, you may not present any more evidence because you’re out of time.”?

An arbitrary allotment of time and requiring payment for that time sounds far more damaging that withholding irrelevant and prejudicial evidence from a jury.

[pravnik]

@Apos

Why not? Why not that, and then admit DNA evidence which works on essentially the SAME principle of statistical likelihood?

DNA evidence doesn’t work on the same principle at all. DNA evidence serves to identify an individual and single him out of the population. My statistics hypo is the exact opposite. Saying that an individual is statistically likely to be the person who committed a crime based on race, education, socioeconomic strata, or prior criminal history, says that one individual definitively fits the pattern of a very broad and general trend when that may not be the case at all. You’re basically allowing the jury to be misled into committing the fallacy of division; young, uneducated, lower-income black males are more likely on the whole to commit than higher income whites, therefore this young, uneducated, lower income black male defendant is more likely to have committed this crime than that higher income white suspect.

The reason we don’t allow that or prior criminal history in is because the law allows us to convict specific people of committing specific crimes, and doesn’t allow us to convict a person for being a criminal in general. If you have a burglary, you can’t just go round up the guy with a history of burglaries and say, this is probably the guy because he’s done it before. We don’t allow it to come before a jury because any probative value it may have is far outweighed by it’s unduly predjudicial nature as a matter of law. If only evidence that ties a particular defendant to a particular crime should be considered, why allow evidence that shouldn’t be considered to even be presented at all?

@Apos

Doesn’t that factor into the probability of various witness claims and how likely the jury is to actually convict an innocent person and or release a guilty one?

No, not at all, for the reasons stated above. The witnesses are there to testify as to the specific evidence that ties the defendant to the specific crime. Evidence of the defendant’s general criminal nature, or those criminal nature of those similarly situated to the defendant, is counterproductive to that purpose.

@Apos

Or take it another way: we have pretty good reason to think that you don’t NEED to present that statistical evidence. The jury ALREADY internalizes it and that, in fact, explains why juries seem far more willing to convict African Americans for the same crimes as they are whites? Isn’t that a pretty darn big strike against juries, by your own logic?

That would be taking a private predjucice of the individual which by law they are not entitled to make, and telling the jury as a whole that it’s a perfectably accptable inference that they are not only entitled to make, but to convict on that basis alone.

[pravnik]

@Apos

Again, lets put me on a jury. I come in and find that the defense attorney is Alan Dersowitz, who is renowned for defending what are generally obviously guilty clients. Why is THIS information essentially part of the trial, while other information is not?

Are you saying that you would consider the fact that Dershowitz is reknowned for defending guilty clients in evalutaing the guilt of the defendant? That’s not part of the trial at all, and it’s not evidence. If that’s the case, you are legally ineligible to sit on that particular jury. That information should come out in voir dire and you would be struck for cause.

@Apos

You keep raising examples in which you imagine some prejudicial information being allowed in without addressing the complete picture: that this one piece is not the ONLY piece allowed in.

The point is that it might as well be, because once it’s in the jury is entitled to treat it as if it were. The jury is the sole finder of fact, and are entitled to believe or disbelieve whatever evidence comes before them. They can ignore the complete picture and convict on that one piece of prejudical and fallacious infromation, and the prosecutor can even encourage them to do so.

@Apos

My point is that there is a lot of prejudicial information allowed in no matter what, but that by and large its going to be arbitrarily biased one way or another. So you are getting the worst of both worlds anyway.

What’s being let in that’s unduly prejudicial? How will throwing out the rules of evidence improve that?