The law has a schizophrenic view of the role of jurors. The whole purpose of having a jury is for them to bring in their various life experiences… and they’re then told that they’re supposed to leave all experience at the door. We’re told repeatedly that the jurors are the finders of fact… except that they’re supposed to only choose among the facts that the lawyers have found for them. A jury cannot function properly in a vacuum, and a judge or lawyer who says that they should is, quite simply, wrong.
And in my experience in academia, in a physics department of approximately 100 people, over a span of time of 13 years, the number who were ever called to serve on a jury was exactly zero. Clearly, there was someone in the courtroom who really didn’t want physicists.
No one has been called?r no one has actually served on a jury? The discussion here is not at all about who is called which is supposedly random. Though, in Physics Departments I’m familiar with of those 100 people easily half or more of them might not be U.S. citizens and not be eligible.
Every jury I’ve ever seen deliberate has been instructed on exactly that point, in exactly the way it seems you’re calling for. From a randomly selected jury instruction (for Illinois, which just happened to be the first to pop up in a search):
It’s been more than 40 years since I was sworn in as a deputy sheriff. I will never be picked to serve on a jury as a result. But that doesn’t stop them from calling me up every couple of years and wasting my time. I wish I could get them to take my name off the rolls, but that ain’t gonna happen.
So it is correct then to assume that due to the cross-examination process, and whatever objective vetting done by the judge, witnesses, even biased ones, on the stand are seen as more fair for the legal system to allow rather than a juror whose expertise cannot be cross-examined even though the stated objective for voir dire is to get 12 average, random people which presumably equal tendencies for bias on either side?
Mr. Plant’s Attorney: “Mrs. Plant acquired so much debt that when Mr. Plant’s Mother died, he mortgaged her home and rented it out to pay the mortgage, while the Plants lived in a mobile home.”
Mrs. Plant’s Attorney: “While Mr. and Mrs. Plant were enjoying their two homes.”
High-profile trials, the ones where juror interviews happen in the first place, and then get made public, are the kinds of trials where it becomes difficult to find people who haven’t read a lot about the case. The last jury I served on was for a case that had not had any press coverage. The OJ Simpson case had had tons of coverage, for example. One juror was someone who had just returned to the country from Japan; many of the others were people who avoided newspapers and anything to do with the news, so they knew very little about the case.
So, the more likely you are to have heard about the case, and to see an interview with a juror, the more likely it is to be a case where the jurors are going to be people who live under rocks.
Then, people who are not generally in the public eye tend to come across badly in interviews, so a lot of jurors who are interviewed after trials don’t sound like mental giants, because they are nervous; and further, more circumspect (and brighter) people are going to refuse to do interviews, because they know they won’t come across well. So, you get the less bright jurors giving interviews, and when they do, they seem even dumber than they actually are.
Supreme court Justice Scolia said that was here favorite film AND is the film she shows potential jurors of things to NOT do.
If your unfamiliar with the movie the hero is on a jury where he is the odd man out and over a day he influences the other jurors to change their minds. How? He does his own detective work, going out on the street to find evidence and bring it to the jury.
Truth is on a jury you can only use the evidence presented and nothing more.
