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My Disappointing Experience with [Jury Duty]
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But we know that's bullshit. Juries are usually composed on 11 people not smart or motivated enough to get out of it. To the jury, the fact that you're there sitting next to a defense attorney is strike 1. This gets even worse when you've got a minority sitting there, possibly covered in tattoo's or maybe some gold plated dental work, or maybe fulfills some ethnic stereotype - that's even worse. You can even put the guy in a suit and have'em sit up straight, but that makes it strike 2, and the trial hasn't even really begun yet.
Christ, I'm having Clay Davis flashbacks from The Wire.
This is totally bullshit and I really wish people would stop repeating it like its some kind of serious fact. There are plenty of people who serve on jury duty who are normal functioning adults.
Rigorous Scholarship
There was a ridiculously high showing of retirees. Like 4 or 5 of our 12 I think.
We had to be unanimous on all counts before we could turn in any decision.
Exactly. The DA knew he had a good case on most of the charges, and so he threw this unsubstantiated one in for good measure, because he knew a jury isn't likely to hold out on one among many.
When my summons arrived, I was watching footage of Marines in Vietnam while on the couch with my FiL, an Army vet of Vietnam. I figured my selective service wasn't nearly so bad as it could have been. Truly, the least I could do.
Not really... I mean, the defendant and his attorney are already there for jury selection, where you are required to state your name, details about spouse and children, occupation, general area where you live, etc. Juror intimidation is frequent, but it's also the sort of thing that gets the book thrown at you worse than cop-killing does. I think a video camera in there would have helped me stand up for the right a little better.
I thought the same. I expected I might have at least one or two who agreed with me, and even if I didn't, that the rest would cave since it wouldn't matter. The judge sentences on the whole, and almost certainly gave the exact same sentence he would have had we gone NG on that one count. I think everyone just thought I was crazy. The case was, on the whole, very one-sided. The defense attorney, I later found out, had been arguing with the defendant the whole time, telling him that he had to plea and that there was no way we'd let him off without any felony convictions.
I think that was the biggest thing working against me. The Defense literally had no case and presented none. But if the DA fails to prove a charge, and the Defense doesn't bother to challenge it, the defendant shouldn't be the one to suffer for it. The burden is to prove, not to defend.
I'm scared shitless of being called for duty because I'm the sole earner in my home and serving jury time could fuck us because hey, my girlfriend could need to go to the hospital as she can't drive and really doesn't have ambulance service (they charge us caboodles if we need to use it for non-emergency issues... like organ rejection). Apparently this isn't good enough to get out of jury duty.
What happens to double jeopardy if you had deadlocked on the 7th count?Nvm, finished reading your post.
Edit: I find jury duty a ridiculous idea simply because I do not believe it could be executed as intended and I support judge panels all the way.
Any number of those factors can get you out of jury in washington state? Is New York that backwards?
I got the sense that everyone thought I was being that guy. But, I mean, seriously, you're telling me that a forwarded email that appears to be a invitation to join a social network, without any evidence whatsoever about the original invite itself or who sent it, is sufficient for a guilty verdict on felony aggravated stalking?
We asked the judge, and he said we would have left us in there until we fell asleep, and then would have told us to be back at 9am Saturday morning. Judges don't like hung juries, especially not in a case as one-sided as this one.
Wait, so you can't deadlock on a single charge, but convict on the rest? This seems absurd, and if so it needs to be fixed.
I can see downsides and upsides to this.
Rigorous Scholarship
Apparently. Because I'm not the one with the issue, I can't get out of it. If she was completely handicapped and I was her caregiver, that would be different. But because we're poor and just not wealthy enough to afford a 2nd car, nope, not good enough.
If the mob boss on trial wants to target the jurors, he won't do it by watching them on video and then trying to figure out their identities by looking at their faces. He'll just bribe the court clerk to hand over a copy of the juror roll, complete with name, address, phone number - the works. The court bureaucracy already knows the specific identities of the jurors, and is much easier for the mob to penetrate.
Matching a person's identity based only on their face is tough even when it's the FBI doing it, working off mug shots and known photos of the person. Discovering the identity of a random person from a picture of their face is much tougher. Especially for the mob, it's not like they can put up photos of the person they're looking for at the post office, or on the side of a milk carton.
Plus the mob boss has already seen the jurors' faces, in the courtroom during the trial. And if the verdict is guilty he knows that each and every juror, whose faces he's already seen, has voted to convict.
I'm not seeing how taping the jury deliberations puts the jury in added danger at all. It's not providing the mob boss with any info he doesn't already have. If you're in the unusual situation where an anonymous jury has been seated, you can put black dots over their faces in the video, the way they censor boobs on TV.
edit: bah, it seems everyone else already covered this. i should read whole threads more.
That's how it works. The State lumps charges together based on what they believe they can try and convict together as a whole. As I told the DA directly afterwards, he shouldn't have included that charge, or he should have made sure to strike someone like me from the jury.
Although it wasn't allowed as evidence, we were basically able to deduce that this guy had a lot of other things he was being accused of and tried on, in different trials.
A guy on my jury asked why it isn't done this way. My answer was that it would defeat the purpose. Instead of a jury of your peers, it would be a jury of government employees, employed by the very Court trying you, and with career agendas that would likely interfere with a fair trial.
Convict the defendant on those 6, and handle the 7th just like you do any other hung jury situation.
Rigorous Scholarship
Except that as we've seen here, it...doesn't work? As a society, we seem to lump people (erroneously) into "good people" and "criminals," and once you're a criminal we don't really feel too bad tossing a couple extra years your way if you were guilty of most of that shit.
Well, the more charges you tack on the greater the risk that any individual charge results in a hung jury for the lot.
But in reality, it sound here like what happens is whoever is holding out on that charge will likely eventually roll and go with the majority.
Hence the "in theory" part.
It's a balance. You're supposed to group those things together which can reasonably be tried and proven together, as a single "case." If this 7th felony count (actually it was the 6th of 7) had been tried separately, it is very unlikely it would have gone guilty. Or, at the least, the DA would have to submit all the same evidence that was submitted on the other 6 charges in order to convince a jury to convict on the very weak evidence that was realted to the 7th.
However, like I said, we got a sense that this guy also had charges against him for burglary, obstruction of justice, and other stuff not in this case. Had all of that been lumped in, there is an even greater chance of a jury getting hung, or getting lost and voting NG on charges.
Just to be clear, we can decide guilty on some charges and not guilty on others. In fact, the spec tree on our decision also included additional charges that we would need to deliberate on in any case where NG was determined on one of the main charges. It's just that we must have a unanimous G or NG on each item before we can turn any of them into the clerk and the judge can begin sentencing.
Also depressing.
Some arcane procedural things would have go happen, but long story short, the judge can ignore the jury's verdict and enter a not guilty verdict. That being said, if a judge allows a case to go to a jury in the first place, such a decision would basically be the result of him changing his mind mid-trial. It's pretty rare.
Nothing at all would happen unless one of the jurors told the judge about it, or one of the attorneys polled the jurors and discovered it somehow.
Yup, this has been more or less my experience as well (never been on actual jury duty; was called as a witness to a murder, and used to find the time on weekends to just sit in on court sessions). Jurors just want to get in and get out, most don't understand what strong evidence is or is not, most aren't skeptics - so we get half-assed verdicts that are made for the wrong reason, even if they lead to the right end conclusion.
I have no idea how to even 'fix' this issue, other than to try and raise the floor on public education & encourage critical thinking. And, well, try to make people more aware of what they're doing to other people when they send them to jail.
I'm glad to hear you stuck it out for as long as you did, though. Arguing against 11 peers is quite the task.
Encouraging a strong social responsibility is the only way I can think to help that.
My Band "The Wicked Girls" http://soundcloud.com/the-wicked-girls/sets
Eventually she caved, which really sucked for the guy, because his original crime had happened long enough ago, that his sex offender status was going to expire in a couple months. But now it got renewed and is for life.
probably very particular
Without going into too much detail, the plaintiff in the case had been in an auto accident and was pursuing the employer of the delivery driver who hit her (fault was not in dispute) for costs incurred in her ongoing injury treatment. Issue in the case was to what extent plaintiff's injuries were the result of the accident and to what extent they were pre-existing (she had some pre-existing medical issues.)
After four days of testimony from various experts on both sides, they kicked us to the jury room. I was inclined to side with the plaintiff for the most part because their witnesses seemed more credible, but not out of any deep understanding of the issues at hand. In the jury room were two people who wanted to hand her the keys to the kingdom, one guy who thought she was a huckster and shouldn't get anything, and everyone else fell somewhere in between or had no idea what to think. We were given access to years of billing and medical records, none of which were referenced against each other and none of which we really had the ability to evaluate.
We actually had a half an hour or so of pretty good discussion of the case, until it became obvious that nobody really had a good rationale we could use to arrive at a number. In the end, we just worked backwards from the plaintiff's claim, removing individual charges until we had an amount that the required majority could agree upon. Justice, by some measure.
What I found out later was that (don't read if you are on a personal injury jury)
which I suppose should've been intuitive, but oh well.
Anyway. On the whole I thought our group of 12 (actually 11; one juror was excused mid-trial) laypeople did about as well as could be expected. On the other hand, our ultimate decision wasn't based on any kind of actual, serious evaluation of the claim and the medical evidence. It makes me think that the system ought to have some kind of allowance for expert juries (or at least for juries to have some kind of officer/ombudsman who is empowered to assist them in deliberation on factual/research matters.)
I sympathize with OP's situation, because this jury had a similar dynamic going by hour two of deliberation. Although if the woman's husband was literally on his deathbed, that seems like somebody who ought to be reasonably excused from jury duty.
dappled sunlight / strikes your butt
girl you got a / real sweet butt
I have a relative who was a fairly high-level judge, and as a consequence have gotten to casually question a couple about issues like this.
They know. Oh god, do they ever know.
But they also know that allowances for that kind of thing are built into the system. There are appeals, there are hung juries, there is the unanimous requirement (in criminal trials anyway.)
dappled sunlight / strikes your butt
girl you got a / real sweet butt
I don't think I want any body in either of those age groups deciding my fate.
They already do! Especially old people.
I would love this.
I'm opposed to the draft because I refuse to participate in my country's military endeavours, but if we implemented it along with this alternative, I'd be all in favour.
stupid juries cut both ways
hard