One problem is that 73.2 percent of all statistics that are quoted are made up on the spot. 25.8 percent of people know that.
Sage Rat, you are not the first person to think of this. People have tried to argue that Courts should proceed upon the basis of Bayes’s theorem before, and courts have happily rejected the proposal.
In addition to the other difficukties with your idea outlined above, part of the reason is that not all trials are about “Did the accused carry out the acts reus?”. Many (my guesstimate is most) have as a substantial component for consideration questions of reasonableness. Is it reasonable for me, acting in self defence, to shoot a man coming at me with a knife and saying he is going to kill me? Maybe. A little old lady trying to hit me with her handbag? Not so much. Trying to attach a number to these sorts of judgments about reasonableness is illusory. They are simply of a different quality to judgments about the identity of the offender where there is no doubt that an offence has occurred.
So problems with the OP’s idea…
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It’s preposterously complicated.
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It’s still just as subjective as the current system. What “80% guilty” means is going to vary between jurors just as much as (actually, almost certainly much more than) terms like “beyond a reasonable doubt” or “preponderance of the evidence.”
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It makes ignorant and incorrect assumptions about how the legal system works in the United States. There’s several of these, but the first one that popped out at me was: if there is a hung jury, what typically happens is that the state simply retries the case with a new jury.
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The OP is trying to solve a problem that doesn’t really exist. A lot of people get away with crimes, but that’s typically because there’s little to no evidence of who committed the crime. The majority of criminal cases that make it to trial result in guilty verdicts, and that’s not counting all the people who plead guilty.
In my neck of the woods jurors tend to be from the lowest intellectual tier because the rest of us just cant be bothered. This limits any plan requiring basic computational skills. I am inclined to think the most persuasive attorney and juror carry the day and that the persuasion is based on interpersonal skillsets more than technical analysis of any kind.
I would prefer a system where any accused is required to tell an uninterrupted story in court followed by direct juror questioning. This would happen at the end of the attorney presentation of the case and would require a removal of the protection that we not be required to testify. For what it is worth if I am your juror and you don’t testify I am going to make an inference you are guilty. Not to worry though. I am probably too busy to be a juror.
Besides everything else, for me, this is a fatal flaw, because each piece of evidence doesn’t stand alone. When the prosecutors roll out their witnesses, while the defense can cross examine them, the real damage only comes out when the defense can bring out its witnesses.
Say there’s an expert witness for the prosecution. He sounds like he knows what he’s talking about and isn’t particularly shaken by the defense’s questions. Let’s give him a 90%.
Then when the defense’s turn comes around, it produces an expert who gives a better explanation. I’d want to go back and re-vote on the prosecutor’s expert witness.
Each bit of evident would then require a mini-trial. Simply unworkable.
Or you have a very credible witness say that the suspect was wearing a green jacket which matched the one seized from the suspect’s house. OK, 80%? 70%? 99%? Whatever?
But then the defense produces the sister who says she was wearing the jacket in question and has a photo of her uploaded to Facebook with a time
stamp which matches.
Except all of this doesn’t matter, because they have the DNA of the victim matching blood spots in the car, but it really does matter, because maybe the sister took the car and there are conflicting witnesses on that. You seriously expect the defense and prosecution to agree on the weight of the respective witnesses?
The judge cannot assign percentages of importance. This is for the jury as the deciders of fact while the judge is the decider of law. The introduction of the jury system was to separate these roles.
That’s pretty much the exact opposite of how trials work in the United States. The state has to prove you’re guilty, you don’t have to prove your innocence. Making accused people prove they’re innocent opens the door to all sorts of possible abuses by the government.
Honestly, people seem to have pretty wacky and inaccurate ideas as to what goes on in criminal trials. Almost all criminal trials are open to the public, maybe people should go down to their local courthouse and observe a couple before they start calling for radical changes to the system. Just because slick talking lawyers get obviously guilty defendants off on Law & Order and other TV shows doesn’t mean that’s how it works in real life.
In a nation of 300 million people there will be the occasional trial that goes awry. But some people in this thread are trying to fix something that isn’t broken. There are several changes that could benefit the American justice system, but I think they are mostly legislative and enforcement issues, not problems with the jury process.