You should try sitting on an eminent domain case that stretches on for two weeks. Unless you are really into aerial maps and geological charts, I wouldn’t call it “incredibly interesting.”
QFT. Man, you drew the short straw!!
Fair. I’ll modify that to a criminal jury.
Respectfully, that sounds more like a problem with the judge than with the jurors. Likewise, if jurors can’t seem to comprehend what kind of point a lawyer is trying to elicit through testimony or evidence, that sounds more like a failure of advocacy than of jurors. Though it is unfortunate that some, particularly indigent criminal defendants, might suffer as a result of such failings in advocacy, it seems like the proper target for reform in such circumstances must be to improve access to quality counsel for indigent or low/moderate-income defendants, not to replace jurors drawn from society with yet more state actors.
I got a jury summons right out of college back in Texas. Having been a scruffy-looking college student, I ramped up the scruffiness for my appearance at the jury pool. At the time, I was desperately searching for a job and did not want to get sidetracked by something like this. It was a civil case, a couple suing a contractor over a botched home-refurbishing job. I was dismissed almost immediately.
Got one here in Hawaii, and I wanted to show up, but this was during Covid, and the hospital I was working at at the time was short of badly needed staff, so my boss insisted on writing them to get me out of it. They said my name would go back in the hopper, or whatever they use, but I’ve not heard back from them.
Oh, I agree. I always appreciated judges who slowed down and read the instructions like it was the first and only time they’d ever done it.
But also bear in mind that the jury instructions as the judge has read them are also sent into the jury room in print, for the jurors to review at their leisure during their deliberations. They’re not expected to keep it all in their heads. It’s like a small book.
I was chosen to be on a jury about six years ago. It was quite the experience.
At the beginning, I filled out a form which included listing your favorite TV show. I wrote Doctor Who. When they DA was questioning me, he said, “This is the first time I’ve seen someone mention Doctor Who on the form. Tell me, who’s your favorite Doctor?” Nonplussed, I answered “Tennant.” So now I said that under oath. 
I figured that since I had that in common with the DA (he said Martha Jones was his favorite companion), I’d be dismissed. But, no. I was put on the jury. (I found out why later. Read on.)
It was an arson case. They were alleging that the mother and son on trial had hired a kid to torch a building they owned. They had purchased fire insurance for one month, and hired the kid the day before it lapsed.
There was plenty of suspicious activity. They avoided the insurance adjuster (which is grounds for denial of the claim). They avoided discussing it with the police. At one point, the cops wanted to talk with the mother. They stopped her in another town and took her to the station. She didn’t want to leave her car there, so the cops volunteered to drive it. There on the passenger seat was her cell phone. Unlocked. And with about 200 pages of text messages once they were printed out. Later in the trial, when asked why all the texts for the day of the fire were missing, the mother said she didn’t text a lot. The DA showed the 200 pages.
The defense tried to prove that another woman masterminded everything to frame the mother. The mastermind was a great witness for the prosecution. Not just her testimony, but it was clear she was not a master criminal.
The kid they hired was also an excellent witness for the prosecution. He wasn’t charged and had been moved to a facility for underprivileged kids and was doing quite well.
The mother testified and her story was not very convincing.
Then came the son. And the Perry Mason moment.
You see, the prosecution showed the jury a video of someone riding a bicycle away from the fire. The son described the kid’s bike. Prosecution said how did you know it was his? The son said he seen it on the video.
No, said the prosecutor. I just showed a kid on the bicycle to the jury. No one said that the kid on the bicycle was the one who set the fire.
As the case was circling down the drain, there was one more thing. You know that there are phones in jail. And they all have big signs that any calls may be monitored?
Yup, you guessed it. The son called his girlfriend from one of those phones and said, “We have a good thing going here. Don’t mess it up.”
Everyone broke for lunch at that point. When we came back, the defendants were gone. They had taken a plea.
As sort of apology for wasting our time, the Defense attorneys explained what was going on from their end. They thought their clients were indeed guilty, and begged them to plea bargain, but they insisted on a trial. Attorneys are obligated to give them one. They came up with a bizarre story about the other woman being a criminal mastermind who framed the defendants because . . . well, they didn’t have any better ideas. The defendants thought that, since they didn’t actually start the fire, they couldn’t be convicted and, because they were immigrants from Guyana,* the only punishment would be deportation.
As might be obvious, they weren’t the sharpest knives in the knife block.
As for why they let me stay even though I had a fandom in common with the DA, they said that because I was a fan of science fiction, I might be more likely to believe the cockamamie story about how the defendants were framed.
*Schenectady had a moderately sized Guyanan community; one of our mayors made a point to attract them to replace people who had moved out.
I might have been confused on that, too. I can envision a case where, for instance, it might be a really good idea to have an MRI test… if possible. But maybe the big urban hospital has an MRI machine, and the little rural hospital didn’t. Something can’t be the standard of care where it’s not even possible. Clearly, there’s something I’m missing, here, but I’m not sure what.
Whereas, I don’t know what evidence you had, but whatever it was, I wouldn’t have assigned a probability of 0 to anything. I might assign a probability of 0.1%, for instance, which would be close enough if the standard of “reasonable doubt” was “1%”, but it would not be close enough if the standard is “1 in 10,000”.
This is not necessarily a contradiction. The level of language proficiency required for a casual conversation is far below the level needed for detailed, arcane understanding.
Logically, “everyone serving on a criminal jury at least once” would require a number of crimes at least 1/12 of the population. I’d much rather that most people not serve on a jury.
My first jury experience was when I was still in college, in the mid 70’s and the last one was in 2019, maybe 8-10 in all.
The first one I barely remember, but I do remember that most (all?) of the jury pool was called into the courtroom and seated, some in the jury box, the rest in the audience.
After that a series of cases was called in which the lawyers and the defendants were seated, the defense and prosecutors approached the judge and then it was announced that the defense had agreed to a plea. A fellow juror told me that it was the practice in this court to demonstrate to the defendants that they were prepared to go immediately to trial, which almost always resulted in a plea deal being accepted.
There was also a case where I was on a jury that agreed unanimously that all the witnesses in the trial (including the police) were lying, but the defendant was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
The last jury I was on, I Twelve Angry Men’d the jury. It started out with my realization that the consensus seemed to be Guilty, but I wanted to discuss some of the doubts I had. The first vote was 10-2 for Guilty and I managed to wrangle, argue, and speechify it to 8-4, with a couple of the Guilty votes wavering. So we reported back as hung and the judge accepted it. (there were some nuances to this simplistic description, and the other initial Not-Guilty vote turned out to be someone who decided the defendant was not guilty because he never believed anything a woman said about a man, which would have been a problem if we had gone to 10-1)
And that’s the point.
I realize I haven’t given you sufficient detail (intentionally) to draw an informed conclusion. But I think you have nonetheless hit upon the exact reason why the jury did what they did. The plaintiff’s lawyers didn’t make something that was obvious to them obvious to the jury; that is, a standard of care is the same for everyone, irrespective of where they may live in the state. Such a small thing and easy to overlook, but hugely important – at least as it turned out in this case.
Can’t think of everything, but the consequences can be enormous.
I do want to say that in my years of being a paid voyeur of jury trials, I rarely saw gross miscarriages of justice. The system functions remarkably well. People don’t stop to think that when you hear about a bad outcome in a case, you hear about it because it is a bad outcome. You never hear about the thousands of cases that are properly heard and decided every year in this country with nary a hitch.
For example, I’m not surprised that the OJ trial is invoked in this thread. It’s one of the only cases people can think of where it was perceived as a great miscarriage of justice.
How long ago was that case?
Must have been a recent transplant to L.A., because everyone I know knows how to say it. But “down here,” San Pedro or La Jolla are ones that usually trip up newcomers.
I’ve been on jury duty lots of times. The first time I was 19, and I served an entire month at the Santa Monica Courthouse (that was typical of that time). I got acquainted with Ginny Mancini (Henry’s wife) who was a very nice lady. It was also when Sonny and Cher were getting their divorce ,and the court actually took us out to lunch on the first panel I was on. And, yes, I was on two panels – you weren’t dismissed after one. The best part was my service was in June, and I was in college, so it didn’t interfere. Plus, I worked for L.A. County (Public Library) who paid my parttimer salary while I was on jury duty.
My second “real” job was with a company that paid your salary for unlimited jury duty time. I swear they flagged our company’s employees (although they swear they didn’t), but I was called at least once every two years. I was usually called for a panel, but about half the time I got on a jury. I still remember the saddest one. A guy was accused of shoplifting a set of bedding from the Sears in Hollywood. It was almost like a test – he was exchanging a set for a different one, but the clerk messed up and gave him both sets for the price of one. He fell for the temptation and kept the sheets without saying anything, but he was detained as he left the store. There was one of those ceiling spy cams that caught the transaction.
The really sad part? He’d been a drug addict and had supported his habit with petty theft (no robbery), but had two convictions on his record. He’d made a complete turnaround and had been law abiding ever since. He had moved to AZ, but was back visiting friends at the time of his arrest. And, this was his third strike. Which, the lawyers were not allowed to tell us until after the trial, but his lawyer sure chewed us out. Which I really didn’t appreciate. But if I’d been against three strikes before (and I was), it made me even more against it.
My most recent jury duty service was last year when I was in the panel, went through voir dire, and was excused by the defense attorney. It was a personal injury civil suit.
Once we were in the courtroom for voir dire, our names were never used. We were given a numbered placard and if one of the attorneys wanted to ask a question they’d call us out by number.
As a juror, if I made to the jury panel, they always provided us with those steno pads and pens/pencils.
San Pedro even trips up a lot of the locals, especially the ones that live in San Pedro. When I would drive to work down in SoCal and hear traffic reports, it would set my teeth on edge to hear the helicopter guy calling it San Pee-dro. I would always shout out “SAN PEDRO!” in my car, as though the announcer could hear it.
I don’t doubt that many rapists go free because victims don’t want to report the attack or prosecutors won’t bring charges for lack of evidence, but I find it hard to believe that most rape cases that are actually brought to trial end in an acquittal.
Three strikes is a nightmare, IMHO. I’m glad it was modified to give judges more discretion.
The lawyer shouldn’t have chewed you out for any reason. I wish you would have mentioned it to the bailiff. The judge probably would have… sent for that lawyer to meet in chambers. And chewed him out worse than you got it from the lawyer. That’s completely out of bounds.
After thanking them, the judges I worked for always told the jurors to let the bailiff know if anyone harassed them after the trial. The bailiff would make sure to tell the judge.
Heh. One time when I was called for empanelment, the pack of us prospective jurors was brought into the courtroom and seated in the audience chairs while the judge and lawyers did their thing. It was a criminal case, and the defendant was at the defense table. Just before they started processing jury candidates, the lawyers went into a sidebar huddle; after a bit the court officer trooped us back to the jury waiting room; after another while the judge came back to tell us that the defendant had decided to plead guilty (don’t know what sort of plea bargain they struck). I guess we looked like a hanging jury.
I agree, in general juries do remarkably well. In cases I have lost, I can usually see the critical facts that drove the verdict despite our best attempts. The most common exceptions (for civil cases) are usually medical malpractice, where jurors are eager to forgive doctors the benefit of the doubt. “Doctors are good people who want to help people, and he tried his best.” A case has to be particularly egregious to get a jury past that. Fortunately (or unfortunately I suppose) many are.
Back when we had the death penalty, that was what they asked jurors first thing. Potential jurors who would either always or never vote for the death penalty were excluded from the panel.
To be fair to the jury (and critical of the plaintiff’s attorney) I do seem to recall, vaguely, that perhaps a century ago, maybe even into the 1950s, it was not uncommon for jurisdictions to have just such a differentiated set of standards. That is, the standard of care might vary by locality even within the same profession, and so getting some big fancy Doctor from Boston to testify in Podunk, MA, might not fully settle the question.
But then, also IIRC, courts came to realize just how crazy that was, particularly if dealing with a small/insular community with just a small number of doctors all having each other’s backs (or even just the one on trial!), and the standard of care has been uniform with respect to geography, but with allowances for whether (1) the defendant Doctor happened to be a specialist or (2) if they had access to certain facilities or not.
So, in @Chronos’s hypothetical about having access to an MRI (or not), a general practitioner operating in a rural area would be expected to meet the same duty of care as a GP in a major city in the same state, but would not be faulted for failing to detect maladies that they could not possibly have detected with the equipment in use (although I suppose there might then be a question about whether they should have advised to patient to go elsewhere for a more thorough examination) and/or would not have been expected to detect as a non-specialist.
All that to say, sounds to me like something the Plaintiff’s attorney should have sought to have included in the jury instructions (because it seems to me that the question of whether the standard of care might vary by locality would be at least as much a legal one to be decided on by the court according to the law, as a medical one about professional custom).