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HUGE SPACEKABLOOIE posted:I'm on a jury right now. I sure as gently caress wouldn't want any of these fuckers making decisions that affect me like that, myself included. I can't ignore the average statistics of any given district attorney's office. I can't ignore the very nice clothing on the two defense lawyers on a misdemeanor case. I can't ignore that the defendant looks like a loving creep. I was on a jury for a serious crime that may have resulted in the defendant going to jail for a very long time (attempted first degree murder + possession of firearm as a convicted felon + something else; I was actually recused in a hotel for a week with the other jurors). At least half of my fellow jurors were also dumb as poo poo and obviously thought the defendant was guilty from the very beginning (he was black and had been convicted of crime in the past). Ultimately I was chosen as the alternate immediately before deliberations and wasn't able to contribute to the verdict, so I don't know what ended up happening.* However, our current system at least takes this into account to some extent. It only takes one juror to offset all the rest of the jurors being dumb and wanting to wrongly convict someone. And the idea of wrongly convicting innocent people bothers me more than letting guilty people go free, so I'm okay with this bias (and it seems that in practice people still get convicted too often, so the latter isn't really a concern). *For the record, the guy probably was actually guilty. But it was super obvious that a bunch of my fellow jurors were 1. super sure that he was guilty from the very beginning and 2. wanted to convict him of a more serious crime than the evidence actually supported - attempted first degree murder instead of second degree. There was zero evidence of premeditation or motive and it seemed very likely that the defendant was drunk or something when he committed the crime. It was actually kind of funny in a scary way how the prosecutor didn't' even attempt to prove the conditions for first degree attempted murder were met; she just kind of asserted that it was the case because the defendant/victim knew each others' names (there was literally no other evidence of a connection between them aside from them knowing each others' nick/"street" names). blowfish posted:The average citizen is also unqualified to evaluate much of the evidence used in court. See e.g.: CSI effect. To be fair, prosecutors/defense lawyers seem to be aware of this. In my trial they repeated countless times how real life was not like CSI and seemed to really hate the existence of the show. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 21:04 on Oct 31, 2015 |
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Oct 31, 2015 21:02
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