What percentage probability would be considered "beyond a reasonable doubt?"

Great Debates
81

Reasonable Doubt.
It is not by chance we find ourselves in this forum. In my case it concerns real concerns that injustices are indeed occurring. Proceeding on the premise that I “will” be wrong about some things, I would like to learn what others views are and compare them to my own. By cooperatively combining our reasoning we could make headway? I would be very interested in this forums opinions on “undue influences” that affect the jury’s reasoning, particularly in murder trials.

  1. Juries conducting internet research on the case (should murder trials have sequestered juries)?
  2. Bad character (2003 Criminal Justice Act) this Act led to the jury being allowed to hear previous convictions. (This prejudicial information is forbidden in many countries, so can the inclusion of that information be conducive to a fair trial?

Here are just 2 concerns.
WHATS YOU’RE VIEW?

82

Taken from online article
Just how big is the problem?

After all, trial attorneys will say there have always been instances of jurors doing their own research outside the courtroom, even though they’re instructed not to. And jurors have always been able to communicate their thoughts about trial goings on to friends and family, despite admonishments not to do so.

It’s just that decades ago, if jurors wished to conduct independent research, they had to physically go somewhere to do it - the public library,or the alleged crime scene, etc. Now they just need Google. And up until the common use of smart phones, they at least couldn’t share their comments about the trial with others from the court room itself.

Is use of internet research and social media by jurors mid-trial really a serious problem impacting the furtherance of justice in the court system? Or have these activities just become another issue for counsel to use to appeal a conviction or verdict they aren’t happy with?

What’s the real issue here?

We all know that whether in a civil or criminal trial, jurors are instructed not to consider any facts outside of what they see and hear inside the court room, and not to discuss the trial with friends or family. But why are these things so important?

They are important because our judicial system relies on the premise that a fair trial results from jurors forming their verdict based only and entirely upon what they see and hear inside the courtroom. Each side has an expectation that decisions will be made by jurors based on evidence the parties know about and have themselves presented.

When jurors do independent research, their decisions may be influenced by inaccurate, misleading or incomplete information that hasn’t been vetted by the judge or tested by cross-examination.

When jurors exchange their opinions with others in any fashion, whether in conversation, in email, or on Facebook or Twitter, they risk revealing deliberations before they’re intended to be public. They may give an appearance of bias, which can call their verdict into question.They may begin a conversation with others that can influence their decisions.

When jurors entertain information, comments or opinions they gather outside the courtroom, they deny the parties a fair trial.

83

FYI, if you’re going to just cut and paste from somewhere else online instead of bothering to type your own thoughts, it’s best to link back to the original source. (I Googled and found it here). Also, I don’t know if quoting some random paralegal’s self-published “newsletter” is a very authoritative source.

I think that jurors need to learn what others’ views are and compare them to their own - that’s what they do during jury deliberations. All of the jurors have been in the same courtroom and heard the same testimony and evidence, and they them discuss them together to come to a conclusion.

However, I most definitely do not think that jurors should feel free to “combine their reasoning” with other people from outside the jury. There are many reasons why jurors should avoid “undue influences” - if they discuss the case with others in the community who may not have access to all of the information shared at trial and who may have heard about inadmissible or flat out incorrect information in the media, this might influence the juror in a way that lessens the chance they will reach a correct and fair verdict. And if jurors do their own “independent research” then the information they gather may be correct or incorrect, but there’s no way to know and it won’t be subject to cross examination.

84

Waenara
May I ask your views on bad character being allowed in to influence the jury decision making process?

85

I am restating the question. I’d say I’m restating it (hopefully more clearly now) as a question of binary logic instead of a percentage. Reasonable factors are the things that can be determined as true or false, that are relevant to the matter. DNA for instance can determine whether or not a person may have committed a crime. It would be unreasonable to rule out a suspect with 98.7% probability of being the person indicated by the DNA. It would unreasonable to rule in a suspect only because he was in the area at the time. But combining those things, with other sufficient evidence to show the person was at the scene of the crime, had a motive for committing, and the means to carry out the crime, it is possible to arrive at a conclusion beyond a reasonable doubt.

86

In general, I think that “bad character” should not be used in a trial to determine guilt. However, if found guilty I have no problem with using character as part of the sentencing process.

The reason I think that, generally, character should not be used during the trial is that in the trial you’re trying to determine whether the defendant committed a certain criminal act. It’s tempting to think that prior bad acts can help you establish certainty as to whether a present bad act occurred, but I think this is often sloppy/faulty reasoning, and is potentially open to huge amounts of abuse. I think that the trial should be for determining whether the defendant committed the crime for which they are currently accused, period. Whether they are also a “bad person” or have done bad things in the past is usually irrelevant and prejudicial. If you can’t come up with enough evidence to get past reasonable doubt and convict someone without bringing up their prior bad acts, then that’s too bad but they should go free on this particular charge.

However, IMHO character or prior bad acts are very relevant for sentencing. So, for example, if someone is a serial burglar and there’s insufficient evidence to convict them of a new burglary without bringing up their past history, then they should not be convicted on this particular charge. However, if there is enough evidence to convict, then the prior history and bad character should be taken into account at sentencing and they might get a longer/tougher sentence than a first time offender.

87

I find this jaw dropping. You would be willing to convict someone even though in one case out of 25 they might be innocent?

Rarely does evidence stand alone. For example, in the OJ Simpson case you had the fact that did not answer the door when the cab driver arrived, there was blood at his house, blood at the scene matched his with x% probability, the show print, the gloves, etc. At some point, even thought there may be slight doubt on anyone of those pieces of evidence, taken all together there is no reasonable doubt.

88

The secrecy that shrouds the jury process (enshrined in the contempt of court act) has left the public to speculate over the extent of the online research problem.
That situation is simply not acceptable, “ACTION NEEDS TO BE TAKEN”
Studies need to be commissioned as to the effects of the 2003 Criminal Justice Act and its effects on known miscarriages of justice.
This act puts our law at odds with comparable jurisdictions. Witnesses silence in interview can be held against them (although that was often the advice tendered to them by their brief).America is considered by many as the harshest penal regime in the developed world, imprisoning more people the rest of the world combined. Even they hold the former measure (silence in interview) as unconstitutional .Using bad character to prejudice the jury is something formerly unheard of in Britain. Times do change, but right and wrong does not.
There are cases where the jury has asked if they can acquit some, or one of a group who are jointly charged, only to be told, all guilty or all innocent? But the jury are never told of their right to nullify the law, if in good conscience they believe the law has been misapplied?
COMMON SENCE TRUMPS COMMON LAW
These are matters that should not be swept under the carpet.

89

Using a figure metaphorically has led to your presumption. Didn’t I say that you cannot establish reasonable doubt into percentage terms? Did I or Didn’t I? Did I not point out the divisive nature of percentage terms?
But the difference between us is that I strive to balance the rights of the victim as well as the defendant. As I have previously stated the juror at some stage will have to balance his rationale on more than one element, as would I.
If we moved the definition from reasonable doubt to beyond the shadow of a doubt (considered by many as virtually impossible to prove) WHAT DO YOU THINK WOULD HAPPEN?
Anarchy: people would take the law into their own hands to avenge that killing, carnage would result.
I ask for a fair trial not a forgone conclusion of innocence.
That is the division between us.

90

Since there is no definitive answer to this, let’s move it over to Great Debates.

To reiterate what Waenara said, if you are quoting an online article it’s best to link to the original and include only limited excerpts.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

91

There is no justice for the victim if the wrong person is convicted. It just create a new victim. Convicting someone who has a 1 in 25 chance of being innocent is absurd. There is a big gulf between 1 in 25 and “beyond a shadow of a doubt”. I have no sympathy at all for criminals and I’d lock up for life anyone who uses a gun to commit a crime, whether or not they pulled the trigger, but my outrage at criminals and sympathy for victims doesn’t mean it convict the baby with the bathwater.

In Oregon we had a guy locked up for terrorism as the result of a faulty fingerprint match and the fact he was Muslim. Turns out he was absolutely innocent.

If the only evidence in a case were the 96% chance of a DNA match I’d vote not guilty, but if there were a ton of other evidence as well I’d certainly view that test result as damning.

92

Why? If you assume every other juror is voting with similar confidence, the likelihood of a false conviction is vanishingly small. I don’t think its fair to put then upon one person when it’s the SYSTEM that should ensure just results. It attempts to do that by requiring 12 people feel reasonably confident in a guilt in order to convict. One person may get it wrong every now and then, but 12 people get the same thing wrong far fewer times.

93

I don’t think the math works the way you think. First, there is a difference between a juror being 96% confident and a juror being right 96% of the time.

In the first case, if the system were perfect and every juror calculated the odds correctly, then they would all reach the same conclusion and convicting someone with 96% confidence standard means that 1 in 25 people judged guilty by that standard are actually innocent.

If instead you mean that individual jurors independently only reach the correct conclusion 96% of the time, we would expect to see many more hung juries. Imagine someone is objectively innocent. There is a 1 in 25 chance for each juror they they will vote guilty even though the person is innocent. I’m too lazy to do the math, but I imagine that there is about a 30% chance of a hung jury because at least one juror will disagree with the objectively true verdict.

94

Yes, but seeing as we will never know who is right and who is wrong wrt the accuracy of their vote, the math will never be something we can correctly calculate. That said, the math I used was more about explaining why someone who feels 95% confidence should still feel comfortable voting guilty is because the system has 11 backstops to make sure a miscarriage of justice doesn’t happen. That is in addition to several other factors the minimize the likelihood an innocent person is convicted. I believe this would be a textbook example of Condorcet’s jury theorem.

Since p in our case is greater than 1/2 (24/25), more people means a better likelihood of a correct decision. More importantly, since we are opting for unanimous guilt instead of a majority, we had a higher standard, and a lower failure rate. Now in the real world, the lack of complete juror independence, and the presence of strategic voting means the theorem is less applicable, but I think the broad strokes still hold.

We don’t because they don’t act independently in reality. Obviously the truth is somewhere in the middle. But if jurors, when polled, stated they were on average 95% sure the person is guilty, you would still never see 5% innocent inmates for the reasons I mentioned above, in addition to several others. The main idea is two-fold. First, when people say they are 95% sure they usually mean about as sure as they could be without “knowing”. Second, is that 12 people with that level of certainty rarely make collective mistakes except when the evidence is incorrect, or when there are biases involved.

Yes. And I imagine first votes are often “hung”. What happens is that the differences in opinion are reconciled, and individual confidence changes. That reconciliation might lead to more innocent people in jail, but I think the chances are still far lower than 5%.

95

I think that if the standard is 95% confidence in your decision, rather than reliance on evidence that is 95% accurate, then your analysis is correct.

96

Fair distinction, but I am not sure the accuracy of evidence can always be measured in terms of percentages.

97

Bumping an old thread here but to answer this question: for me it would depend on the nature of the doubt and the nature of the crime.

Let’s say the alleged crime is DUI with BAC>.08 being the cutoff level for DUI. Based on expert witness testimony that I believe, as a juror I’m 95% convinced that while driving, the accused had a BAC of .08 or higher. And I’m also 100% totally convinced that the BAC while driving was, at a minimum, .075 or higher.

As a juror I’d be comfortable convicting such a person. Although there is a small chance the person technically wasn’t guilty of DUI, they were at a minimum driving far too close to the legal limit for a responsible person. And if this was truly a one time mistake, a single DUI might set them back a bit but they should be able to recover from the mistake.

OTOH let’s say the alleged crime is rape and I’m 95% percent sure they did it–but I also believe there is a 5% percent chance the person is completely innocent, that they’ve got the wrong person, and that the defendant never even touched the victim. In that case 95% wouldn’t be good enough for me–a 5% risk of ruining the life of a completely innocent person wrongly accused is unacceptably high for me.

But citing yet a third example–let’s say that the alleged crime is rape and I’m 95% sure they did it. But let’s say I know for sure that the person beat the victim badly, committed a serious sexual assault for 100% sure, but there is a 5% chance that the accused is technically not a rapist because penetration wasn’t achieved. In that case, I’d be comfortable convicting him of rape. He’s clearly at the very least a scumbag and I’d be very comfortable having him punished according to the scenario that is by far the most likely: that he is in fact a rapist.

Basically in some situations 95% is enough but not in others.

98

Back when my old girlfriend was in law school, we used to go to the county courthouse to watch trials – for her, it was homework. For me, it was amusement.

In one civil trial (not criminal) I watched the plaintiff’s attorney playing games with numbers, trying (in a very contrived fashion, I thought) to be able to reach the “magic” number one million. Once he had demonstrated (to his own satisfaction, anyway) that the odds against the specific event were one in a million, he then hammered on that, damn near endlessly. “There is only a one in a million chance of this.”

So, apparently, going from this single instance, “one in a million” is sufficient to be “preponderance of the evidence,” at least in that one guy’s mind.

(I was a mathematics student at the time. I was able to slip a note to my girlfriend, reading, “He’s building up to ‘one in a million.’” I could see how his numbers were intended to add up.)

99

This is incorrect, because you don’t know that probabilistic guilt is uniformly distributed (among other flaws). I’d bet a whole lot of cases are slam dunks at 99.99%-100% guilt with far fewer cases in the interval of 95%-99% guilty. A 95% confidence level for guilt could easily result in less than 1% guilty convictions.

100

Your arithmetic is correct. But a boatload of innocent people may still be going to prison.

How would a juror, or even a judge, feel about letting a likely rapist go free because of a small but real chance of innocence? Very badly! And you’d feel almost as bad about condemning someone to a long prison sentence if you thought the chance of innocence was real.

As a result, jurors are IMHO virtually never going to conclude that there is a 5 percent chance of innocence (or the equivalent uncertainty for the majority of people who don’t think in percents). Instead most people are going to either think the accused is definitely guilty, or, less likely, probably innocent. Anything else is too painful.