I’ve been selected for a jury a couple of times, but I only sat through the trial the first time (back in the '80s). When the defendant’s attorney found out I worked in computers he said something like, ‘You know that the evidence is not binary, like in computers, right?’ I said that I knew evidence had to be evaluated, and he did not excuse me. Nowadays, I’d probably argue with him. Of course it’s binary! The defendant is either guilty or not guilty. The evidence is either true or false. Granted, the jurors have to evaluate the evidence to which it is, but it’s either one or the other. When evidence is contradictory, which is more likely to be true, when combined with other evidence? In my opinion, such reasoning should indicate that I would evaluate the evidence carefully.
Of course I wouldn’t be belligerent, but would disagreeing with the counsel likely get me excluded?
Giving the answer you suggest would not cause me to bump you off. It’s a fair response. However, it always depends who might take your seat if we do bump you. It could be the next guy is our perfect juror and you just have to be sacrificed to open up the spot.
Eh…maybe? I mean, there are only two outcomes to be had (guilty or not guilty…maybe a hung jury).
But there can be a lot of gray areas getting there. Was the person acting in self defense? Was the person driving too fast for conditions (e.g. rain or snow)? What did the defendant know and when did they know it? Those are difficult things to say there is a bright line and the defendant is on one side or the other.
With regard to jury selection, you first have to know how the judge handles selection.
Oftentimes, when it comes to picking the jury, the first group of eligible people are presumed to be the selection. Then, the parties go through their challenges to remove them, having people next in line fill their place.
I tell you that because the reason you may not have been selected is because the lawyers never got to you. There were enough qualified people ahead of you that you weren’t even up for consideration.
Additionally, I’d never ask a juror a snot nosed question like “you know evidence isn’t binary, right?” He sounds like he’s being condescending, as if you don’t understand the nuances of human behavior.
Even if the lawyer intended to kick you off the jury (say, he had some computer stuff that he didn’t want an expert picking apart), it does no good to antagonize anybody in the room. Other jurors are watching and forming opinions.
If he wanted to discuss something like witness credibility, he could use the fact that you work with computers as a launching point, instead.
“Oh you work with computers, right? You’d agree with me that people aren’t as binary as computers, right? It’d be nice if your co-workers were programmable, but I’m guessing that even in computers you have to deal with different personalities, right?”
“Well, if you’re selected as a juror, you may hear different people tell you different versions of the same event. If we’re trying to gauge reliability…”
I don’t think it’s precisely correct to say that “evidence is either true or false”. Suppose, for instance, that there was an eyewitness to the crime, and on them seeing the suspect, they say “That looks like him”. Well, how much does it look like him? And even if it looks exactly like him, it could still be a different person who just happens to look exactly like a criminal.
There does, though, seem to be a bias against some professions in jury selection. In my over a decade in grad school for physics, out of around 50 professors and about the same number of students, not one of us was ever called to actually sit on a jury.
I’d always heard that lawyers don’t like engineers on juries. On my first jury there were three engineers besides me. At the end I spoke to the lawyers and asked about and both of them told me that they loved engineers on juries because they best understood the arguments.
On my most recent jury I made a smartass remark but they kept me. It was a battery trial and the prosecution was asking the jurors what they thought battery was. “Does it matter if it was intentional?” “Does it matter if the person was badly injured?” Then she got to me.
“So what do you think, Mr. Haj?”
“I assume at some point we will get a legal definition of battery and I’ll just use that.”
That got a big smile from her.
She told me, “you missed your calling as a lawyer.”
Me: “Hey, there’s no call for insults”
All of those are binary. The juror’s job is to evaluate them and decide whether the answers are Yes or No.
To be clear, I was selected.
Exactly. Just because someone believes something is true, doesn’t make it true. What if there was another eyewitness who said he saw the defendant at a supermarket 10 miles away from the crime? One eyewitness’s evidence is true, and the other one’s is false.
Dear God, when I first read this I thought the attorney thought you might be some kind of idiot savant who literally could only conceive of things as ones and zeroes, and he was explaining to you that in this courtroom we will be using WORDS and ARGUMENTS and not just megabytes and semiconductors.
I sometimes like engineers. The problem is that they don’t operate professionally with a “more likely than not” standard. They want to be more sure than that when deciding if the bridge will stay up. They tend to require higher level of proof than the law does. So, if I was representing a defendant, I might want one on the jury.
It varies from court to court. Typically, I have a list showing the order they will fill empty seats. Sometimes, when a seat empties, they pick someone at random from the back of the room. In that case, of course, it’s a crapshoot.
They have an order where I served last. There were maybe 100 of us in the room. They said there were going to read 60 names and the rest could go home. My name was 4th and I knew I was sunk. The first twelve went in the box and then the next six were in the front row on the side. All of us answered questions. Those six were used to fill blank spots after some were excused (including some of the six).
I’ve only been called once for jury duty, and at the time I was “the primary caretaker of a child under five.” The child is thirty years old now and I’ve been hoping they’d call again but they never have.
I once sat as an alternate juror for a civil trial in which a lawyer was suing for payment, with the defendant claiming that he had failed to fulfill their contract. The defendant asked jurors if they had experience, through their jobs, with contracts. She did not dismiss anyone for having that experience.
Except in a civil case, both sides are trying to prove their case. If an engineer could decide that a plaintiff’s case wasn’t good enough at only 50.1% and decide for the defendant, couldn’t they just as well decide the same thing for the defendant’s case and decide for the plaintiff?
Rather, I’d much prefer to sit on a civil trial, because the required standard of evidence is clear and unambiguous. On a criminal case, though, you have “beyond a reasonable doubt”, and everyone in the legal industry always steadfastly refuses to precisely define that.
I live in Silicon Valley, and the two trials where I was selected and many others where I wasn’t did not involve any bias towards engineers, one way or another, as far as I could tell.
With one exception. One of the potential jurors had been an expert witness in the area of the civil suit, and when asked he said that he would not be able to throw away his knowledge of the field if the testimony went against it. He was excused.
In all of mine they gave a random ordering to the jury pool, and filled the jury box with the first twelve and went from there, picking the next on the list if one was excused. People far back on the list (you don’t see your number) never get called up since they usually fill the jury after maybe two dozen jurors are called.
The juror also has to assign a weight to each. That’s the tricky part. Plus, there are three options in a juror’s mind for a verdict - guilty, innocent, and not sure. Innocent and not sure enough to convict are both not guilty verdicts, but there is a difference between sure of innocence and not sure enough of guilt.
There is an analog when you simulate digital circuits. Each line can be 1, 0 or X, which means unknown. When a memory element gets powered on, its state is neither 1 nor 0 but X, and when testing you have to initialize it to get a known value. The average programmer never sees this, but it is vitally important for the stuff I worked on.
I’m on the “speaks English” list, so I’ve had to go three times in 5 years as a prospective juror, but I’ve never served. They pile up English cases and select juries for a couple of cases over a couple of days, so two of those were “double”. Being in Quebec, juries are, to my understanding, only used in criminal cases, and all were some sort of murder charge.
I was never called in front of the judge or lawyers, I just waited all day in a large room full of people for most of those days.
Once, I was brought to the room and in line for the selection, but the last juror was selected about 5 people ahead of me. As I recall, it was nothing like what’s being discussed here. I think we only had to state our name and profession (“teacher”, “engineer”, no need to be specific) and that’s it. No personal interview or examination of our social media habits, which seems a little insane to me.
The last time I was called, I asked to be excused as my parents were experiencing serious health issues (one disabled, the other, their caretaker , having an acute illness, but the acute one was in the hospital that day) and I had a young child. I was just too stressed about everything and the judge was very sympathetic and excused me from also needing to return for the second round of selection.
The only time I’ve made it to voir dire I was the first one bounced. Neither attorney thought a debate coach would be a good juror, especially after the judge asked if I was going to be filling out a mental ballot on the attorneys and I answered in the Affirmative.
I have been called to jury duty twice and was bounced both times. The first was a case regarding a car accident. When I was questioned I was asked if I had ever hit an animal with a car, and I had to say yes because I was still broken-hearted over having run over a stray kitten a week earlier. It had run out between two parked cars directly in front of my vehicle. I was dismissed.
The other time was for this murder case. When I was asked if I had formed an opinion I said I had read a lot about the case and thought the defendant was guilty. I was excused but I still remember the guy coldly eyeing me in the courtroom during the jury selection when I answered the questions.