I think we’d have more uniform decisions with a panel of judges. And probably better decisions, too.
G.K. Chesterton disagreed:
Link to the full article: The Twelve Men
I konw exactly what he means about police and lawyers and judges when he says: “They do not see the awful court of judgment; they only see their own workshop.” When we are working on a case, it is often a routine matter for us, but it’s not routine for the individiaul who is charged with a crime, nor the person who has gone to the police and laid the criminal complaint. For them, it may well be the most important thing in their lives. It is far from routine. I always try to keep that in mind.
I was having a discussion once with a couple of other lawyers about the functions of Justices of the Peace in our system, and one of them commented about how JPs handle a lot of the routine things in our criminal system.
I interrupted and said, “Getting a search warrant or an arrest warrant may seem “routine” to the police officer or the Crown. But the JP is deciding if a dwelling place is searched, or if the accused is taken to jail. From the position of the individual, those are far from routine things.”
Since getting… most of the way through law school, I have come down firmly on the side of juries. The law is complex. But I think distilling the law down to its elements such that ordinary people can understand and render a verdict on the facts is an important check upon an otherwise opaque and Byzantine system. If you can’t distill down the law so that an ordinary person can understand it, then the problem is with the law, not with the ordinary person.
I am also increasingly convinced that juries historically were and should be considered an important check against abuses of state power, and that judges by themselves, being state actors (and of the most counter-majoritarian branch of government, at that), have time and again shown themselves to be manifestly incapable of filling such a role absent an additional safeguard.
I’ve been called multiple times. Phila has a one day one trial thing. Most of those times I was let go after lunch, didn’t get on a panel. Three times I was on a panel, did not get picked. Then it happened, even though i knew an officer on the case I got on the jury. The jury deadlocked and I figured I wouldn’t sit on a jury ever again.
Nope!
The next time I got called in I was on a civil trial and that didn’t need to be unanimous.
I’m sure I’ll get another notice. They are going through a huge Covid backlog.
Never been summoned for Jury duty, various friends and colleagues have and they’ve reported various degrees of boredom and horror. I’d still like to give it a crack though.
In the UK there is no such thing as “jury selection” though. Unless you have one of a very few exemptions you have to be involved and the prosecution/defence have no say in the matter (again, there are very limited circumstances when it can be requested)
Likewise, for the one time I got called for jury duty in Toronto.
It was a murder trial, but I didn’t get beyond the “Do you have a good reason to be excused?” phase. I was in one of the later 20-person groups so they managed to select a jury well before getting to us.
- One police officer was excused because he knew some of the officers involved in the case.
- Several people asked to be excused due to poor English comprehension; the judge said they could leave, but they would be called back to serve in 3(?) years.
- One or two people asked to be excused due to poor hearing. The judge asked “Can you hear me?” and upon an affirmative answer, he denied the request(s).
- When they were doing roll call (for 200 people!), they asked if there was a Mr. Wang who worked as a batcher. After several minutes of silence and confusion, it turned out that there was a butcher with poor handwriting named Mr. Wang.
- One guy in my 20-person group had a toothbrush mustache, à la Charlie Chaplin and another person I could mention. I thought that was an interesting choice of facial hair.
All well and good. But juries of common people can be uneven - with the average IQ around, what, 95. While attorneys may need to work hard to distill the law down to a level the average person can understand, the average person may still make their decision bases on personal bias or just based on how the defendant looks, rather than evidence. At least a panel of judges can be held accountable for a track record of poor decisions - a jury not so much. You may get some smart, attentive people on a jury, but that balances out by the possibility of also getting a few dolts.
This is what I posted in the P&E thread:
For decades I’ve made my living proofreading transcripts for court reporters, mostly pretrial depositions.
Been called for jury duty a few times, under the Massachusetts one day/one trial system. Closest I ever came to being on a jury was a case where I listened to the judge recite the name of the case, the attorneys (I thought “Hey, I know how to spell that odd name”), the parties, the likely witnesses, and ask if anyone knew any of them.
i raised my hand, got called to the stand, and told the judge and the lawyers huddled around me, “I believe I proofread some of the depositions in this case. I don’t recall them right now, but I suspect as the evidence comes in, I’ll remember it.”
The lawyers looked at each other, looked at the judge; they all thanked me and sent me on my way back to the juror-collecting room to wait out the rest of the day. I heard later from another prospective juror who wasn’t chosen that the judge told the venire it was likely to be a three-week trial.
The point of this anecdote for this thread? That even in a run-of-the-mill civil litigation, the court and counsel don’t want jurors whose prior knowledge of the litigants and case materials may taint the evidence that will be presented during the trial or influence a juror’s assessment of it because of preconceived bias toward or against any witness. In my proofreading for federal district court reporters I’ve read several transcripts of jury selection, and can confirm that all involved take jury selection very seriously and carefully.
There’s a thing now called WhisperTech that’s designed to make sidebar conferences inauduble to the jury.
I get called every three years like clockwork. So does my wife. About half the time we have been told the night before not to come in. The other times we’ve had to sit in the courthouse for at least one day. So in total we’ve been physically at the courthouse four or five times each for jury duty in the 27-30 years since we became US citizens. This is in three states.
Both of us have been selected to sit on juries, but neither case went to a verdict or even deliberation. Mine was settled somehow after opening statements. My wife’s was settled after the cases were presented but before summaries. Both were criminal cases.
I have also been dismissed after voir dire (sp?) in a case involving a slip and fall claim in a shopping center. I worked for a retailer not connected to that case at all, but that was enough to disqualify me and another juror who worked for a property management firm.
One thing really surprised me. In the same state sometimes voir dire is in the open (you go to a podium and they ask you questions that everyone can hear) and in some cases it’s up by the judge where only the juror, the judge and the lawyers are involved.
First time picked to be a juror, we where told that we need to pick a Foreman.
Everyone, but me, decided that it would be a good time to ‘wool gather’ and look at the lint on their jacket.
“OK” I said. “Lets make this fair. Let’s draw straws.”
They spoke unanimously that since I had such a brilliant idea that I should be the foreman. :sigh:
“Fine, lets get on with this”
The bailiff came in shortly later and laid an SKS rifle on the table (it was evidence) and it was pointed at someone’s chest. Idiot. I picked it up and leaned it in a corner. Every gun is to be considered loaded you moron.
Stupid cop that handled the weapon during the trial painted the room with it a number of times.
Santa Barbara is a small town in many ways. I’ve been in the room a few times and usually 10% or more of the room is immediately dismissed because they know one of the lawyers or witnesses or the defendant or the business involved. The jury I was on involved a battery at a very popular nightclub that had been open for many years. It would have been nearly impossible to find someone who had never been there. So a regular patron was exempt but people like me who had been there once or twice were allowed to sit.
It’s easy enough to get out of it here. All you have to do is ignore the summons. We get enough people to show up that they don’t bother with no shows and you can’t definitely prove that you actually did get the summons. The people who did show up and got dismissed via questioning said things like “I was treated unjustly by the system once and I don’t trust it” or “I think by the time someone is arrested and here they are probably guilty”. I wouldn’t suggest being a smartass and bring up jury nullification. One of my friends was called and one guy who thought he was being clever said “I can’t serve because I hate Mexicans”. This was in the morning. The judge had the bailiff take him to a room somewhere and said “I’ll talk to you about this at the end of the day.”
Serving on a jury was incredibly interesting and I think everyone should do it once. I was the foreman (they call it the gender neutral “presiding juror” here) because I said, “if no one else wants to do it, I will”. We had the normal twelve jurors and two alternates. We kept teasing the alternates by saying “I think I have a cold coming on”. Both alternates took someone’s phone number to find out what happened.
I was incredibly impressed by the process and my fellow jurors. Everyone was very thoughtful and mindful of the rules. On occasion the conversation would stray to an inappropriate area and we’d quickly move on once that was realized. We really all bonded. It was pretty cut and dried and a couple of us wanted to just convict and go home. One woman wanted to be extra sure of every little detail before she’d convict so we had to come back the next day. What finally convinced her was a different woman who had barely talked until then bringing up a brilliant point and that settled it.
Having done it once, I don’t need to do it again but I got a summons last week and have to start calling in a week from a Monday (the 10th). I have a long weekend vacation starting on Wednesday the 19th which is golden timing. I bet that lets me go.
I just served on one on a trial lasting nearly 2 weeks. Years prior I was called to assembly but never chosen. Being this was my first time being a juror, I was surprised the selection process takes place with the defendant present. Later comparing notes with my fellow jurors, I wasn’t alone in my surprise. I wasn’t completely comfortable with the defendant being able to hear our names and where we lived and worked, but whatever.
Anyway, it took two and a half days of selection and about 35-38 people to get our pool of 12, plus 2 alternates. It was mind-numbingly dull. Ass numbingly too, as the gallery benches were as hard as concrete. At least, after being accepted as a juror, I got to sit in a cushioned, simulated leather seat. Some prospective jurors could get academy awards for their deftness of being able to concoct reasons or scenarios for being excused, without going too over-the-top. Some people though had very legit reasons. Reflecting back, I have to concur with what another poster said about being “chatty” during the interview process.
I must say, everybody I met was great. we were quite a disparate group of different races, backgrounds, and personae. During breaks and lunch, casual conversation ( no discussion of the case ) ensued and everybody was wonderful. During deliberations, we took our task very seriously and even during times of disagreement, all were very very polite and respectful.
Ours was a rape case too, but a cold case, and reading your experience matched ours almost word for word. When we were released, it was very relieving and we all noted how mentally draining the it all was. Thinking about things inside all the time, lying awake at night, thinking thinking thinking. In the end, though we were hung, I believe justice was done. The jury could not convict because we were just not sure, and everybody deliberated in good faith. I was very impressed with our group. Solid citizens all.
I’ve served on two juries: a regular trial jury and a grand jury.
The trial jury was interesting. A man had been served an eviction notice by a local county sheriff’s deputy. The deputy knocked on the door of the guy’s house, got no answer, tried again several times, still received no answer, so he tried the door knob only to find the door was unlocked. He opened the door and found himself face-to-face with a guy pointing a revolver at him. The deputy retreated and the guy barricaded himself in the house. A standoff ensued, finally ending when some tear gas was thrown into the house and the man was dragged out.
His defense was that he was very hard of hearing and had just laid down on the couch for a nap when suddenly his front door opened. He thought it was an intruder so he grabbed his piece thinking he’d have to defend himself. By the time it registered that it was a cop the cop had backed out the door. During the trial he was wearing one of those headset microphone things that look like an OG Walkman, with a little box microphone hooked up to a pair of headphones. Even with this he was constantly asking his lawyer to ask people to repeat themselves because even with the hearing assistance apparatus he was having trouble catching what was being said.
His defense… actually seemed quite reasonable. The guy was in his 50’s, worked full-time, seemed pretty clean-cut and ordinary for whatever that was worth, and had no past criminal history. There was the whole standoff, which was weird – if was just a case of mistaken identity, why didn’t he just give up and apologize as soon it registered what the real situation was? – but both he and the cops gave the same version of events so it was our job to determine if he had acted with malice (I think that’s the way it was framed, it’s been 10 years or so).
But there was one thing that did him in. He gave testimony in his own defense. He was called up to witness stand, sat down, gave his oath to tell the truth, and then judge, who was very soft spoken, pointed out that he had forgotten his hearing apparatus back at his table and asked if he wanted it before he gave his testimony.
And the defendant heard him.
During our deliberations we brought up that incident and decided that his whole deafness routine was an act. We found him guilty and he was sentenced, I learned later, to 5 years in the pokey.
The grand jury was… well, it was mostly boring. We were required to be at the courthouse every Tuesday for the better part of a summer and the routine quickly became predictable: a lawyer from the DA’s office would come in, give us a sheet or two of paper that had the legal definition of a particular crime, and then they would basically present a narrative: “we discovered Guy X engaged in these acts, the evidence is Y (usually police officer testimony, occasionally video or pictures, occasionally witness testimony), here’s the law we think they violated which is listed there on the sheet in front of you.” We returned indictments on almost everything presented to us. However there seemed to always, every day, be some reason the DA could not/did not need to bring a case to us that had been scheduled, so every day there were these long blocks of time where we had nothing to do. After the newness wore off it became simple drudgery. They didn’t even have decent coffee.
There was one case of a young woman – a girl, really – who had been raped. She gave testimony and it was clearly very difficult for her to do so. After she left the room I asked the lawyer to commend her for being brave enough to talk to a room full of strangers about her ordeal. She couldn’t have been older than 12 or 13. I never learned what happened as a result of that indictment but I hope the SOB that hurt her did some serious time.
I also learned that the local county sheriff has literally thousands of game cameras scattered across the county monitoring pretty much every public place that could be used for people to meet up. Make-out spots, places where drug deals go down, even the streets outside of the homes of people they suspect are up to no good. Sometimes monitoring random public places for… reasons?
There was one case where we did not return an indictment and I’m convinced that the DA presented it to us in a way that ensured that we wouldn’t: instead of giving us a linear, clear-cut narrative of events he presented it to us piecemeal over the course of a couple of weeks, beginning with the final events and working backward. We had a hard time keeping track of what supposedly happened and in the end we basically gave up.
The best part of that experience was being able to spend one day a week of a very hot and miserable summer in an air conditioned building.
That’s a feature, not a bug. Juries are immune from the pressures that judges might face and can render judgment against even our largest corporations without fear of hurting their career.
I was 19 and away at college, and they sent me several summonses before finally catching up with me during the summer break. Everybody I knew told me, “No way you’ll serve, Ulf. They don’t like students, they don’t want teenagers. You’ll be stricken before you know it if you even get close to a case.”
How wrong they were. The case was a carjacking/kidnapping/armed robbery, in which a young man with a gun forced his way into a young woman’s car (in broad daylight, mind) and drove off with her from the NW side of Chicago toward Indiana. She flung herself out of the car when he had to slow down and get money out of his pocket for a toll on the Chicago Skyway. (It has struck me since that the tale might have had a different outcome today, in an era of EZ Pass and tolls by mail. Hmm.)
A couple of days later they found the car going the wrong way down a one way street. The driver matched the victim’s description and she picked him out of a lineup immediately. The defense was a curious mix of mistaken identity (he won the car in a street-corner crap game the day before, no really!), police conspiracy (they were too eager to close the case), and mishandling of evidence (there was a discrepancy somewhere, I forget what, but it didn’t rise to any significant level and the case was strong enough without it). It took us very little time to arrive at a verdict. Guilty on all counts.
I remained surprised for a long time that I had been chosen, but in the end I think this was a case of both sides seeing what they wanted to see in me. I was a white kid who lived in the city; the accused was a young black man, the victim a young white woman. I believe the defense said, “College student, lives inside the city limits, likely to be liberal and maybe suspicious of the police, especially where accusing African Americans is concerned, and may very well lean toward acquittal,” and the prosecution said, “White guy, the victim will remind him of his girlfriend, his sister, his female cousins, and he’ll feel protective and may be likely to convict.” No proof, but I expect that’s why I was a juror even when everyone I knew said it would never happen.
I’m pretty sure I have mentioned this multiple times before, but I rather enjoy jury duty. It helps enormously that my job pays me normally for however long I am empaneled 
. However I have found it a fun little break - days are usually shorter than a standard work day an I find it interesting (I did see a guy tossed from a jury I was on because he couldn’t stay awake, but personally I found it held my attention just fine).
I have had about a bazillion notices. Called in to serve three times, empaneled three times. By some standards that should make me not so terribly bright 
. I AM however easy-going in manner, semi-educated, semi-articulate and have a very long-term stable employment record, which always comes up and probably goes some way.
Trial #1, federal. Empaneled in a hefty property dispute/shady investments case, with many juicy hints of affairs and love triangles. The litigants were playing a game of chicken and settled the day after jury selection.
Trial #2, state. Workplace injury case with a worker suing his company in what I surmised was a larger many-sided multiple lawsuit affair. Unfortunately almost entirely he said/she said unverifiable evidence, with a fair bit of expert testimony on equipment and workplace responsibility, which while interesting changed nothing about the facts. Ran a few days.
Trial #3, federal. Seven and half week white-collar crime case involving the bio-pharmaceutical industry. Quite interesting and apparently controversial prosecution and outcome. We ended up convicting on one count, acquitting on another and it go appealed all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court (who declined to hear it) and made its way into a couple of books.
Seems unlikely
It looks like it’s really hard to convict in rape cases. While i recognize the importance of not falsely convicting people, i think it’s really depressing that most rapists get off scott free, even if they are brought to trial.
Such good points and I’m glad you’ve made them. In general, jurors try really hard to do their job as they are instructed to. They take their civic responsibility very seriously.
I also think the impact of difficult cases on jurors is grossly underestimated. I used to often hear people remark how they’d lose no sleep at night to throw the switch if they were convinced someone was guilty in a death penalty case. Having worked on a few of those, it was obvious they’d never served on a death jury. Those people carry that experience for the rest of their lives, and some of them are never the same because of it.
And while it never happened in the cases I worked on, I always wondered how it would feel for a juror who was part of a death verdict, after the death penalty was carried out, it was definitively shown that the person put to death was in fact innocent. How would you live with that? One of many reasons I don’t support the death penalty. It affects far more people than just the defendant.
I’ve long been an advocate for professional jurors. I’m not sure how this could work in practice because it would be quite expensive, but a pool of persons who understood their place and purpose in the proceedings would be an improvement to our system.
I’m open to being convinced otherwise, but I can’t tell you how many times I watched jurors’ faces with expressions of utter confusion over something happening in the courtroom – including and especially during the reading of instructions by the judge at the end of the case and before their deliberations commenced. Some judges have read those instructions aloud so many times that they read them like a machine gun, the words all run together and virtually unintelligible. The jurors’ faces reflect their astonishment and confusion.
Back when I lived there, admittedly now many years ago, the residents were very touchy about it. If you didn’t pronouce it, “San Lew-eees Obispo,” they became quite sniffy. Perhaps that’s changed now. I agree many locals refer to it as “SLO” or “SLO-town.”