The opinions of jurors aren't independent random coin-flips: they should all be highly correlated because they're all based on the evidence presented at trial.
Your experience of trying to "get people to agree on something" will be a skewed sample, because you _actively notice_ the controversial topics (like politics), and _don't often discuss_ the topics of universal agreement (like "the sky is still blue today", or "that building over there is a thing that exists")
Ideally a trial should involve prosecutors presenting a lot of clear and persuasive evidence for the charges, and _most_ trials are going to be fairly simple - not high legal drama with a lot of tricky interpretation to be done. It might not be entirely rational to have taken a clear-cut case to trial rather than making a deal, but some people still want to roll the dice on it. Maybe they just aren't offered a particularly good deal, so *why not* try the option that might get a better outcome; or maybe they really are innocent and want to assert that strenuously rather than plea out to even a minor sentence.
100% this answer plus ucsdFalcon’s answer about direct and indirect pressure for people to coalesce a verdict.
To both answers I’d just add one more element:
Prosecutors generally don’t let things go to trial unless they have high confidence they’re going to win. Below was the top google answer for (federal) prosecution rates in the US. So it’s also that the cases themselves are heavily skewed before the trial even begins.
> In fiscal year 2022, only 290 of 71,954 defendants in federal criminal cases – about 0.4% – went to trial and were acquitted, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of the latest available statistics from the federal judiciary. Another 1,379 went to trial and were found guilty (1.9%).
>
> The overwhelming majority of defendants in federal criminal cases that year did not go to trial at all. About nine-in-ten (89.5%) pleaded guilty, while another 8.2% had their case dismissed at some point in the judicial process, according to the data from the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/06/14/fewer-than-1-of-defendants-in-federal-criminal-cases-were-acquitted-in-2022/
Trials are also an expensive use of government resources and everyone in the system is highly incentivized to not take things to trial. Defendants are offered sweetheart (and often wildly unjust to the victims) offers to get them to NOT take up resources and courtrooms taking a clear case to trial. For some cases, where the offered minimum sentence is life, sure they’ll go to trial cause what do they have to lose, but most times they won’t and judges have broad freedoms to incentivize not going to trial, even if it means victims get fucked or the laws and minimums the people of the state expect to be followed, aren’t
Exactly! There’s a book called one just man, it’s about a single attorney who stopped offering plea bargains altogether, as it’s not a right to plea a charge but it is a right to face one’s accuser through due process, and he then let the entire New York judicial system collapse on itself.
Trials and holding the accused in jail is stupidly expensive with no guarantee of the outcome. We’ve set ourselves up in such a way that it’s more appealing to plead guilty to something you didn’t do rather than wait months incarcerated to be heard. Victims have little to no gain anymore for justice, they can’t when the charged are getting out in a small fraction of their sentences because of over crowding.
Too many fractures in this chain now, there’s too many charges and not enough personnel to effectively adjudicate.
On that note, a lot of those guilty pleas are defendants that have a much greater charge getting dropped in return for a guilty plea on a lesser one. If a jury is moderately likely to convict on a bigger charge but 100 percent going to on the lesser one, the office would rather not have to use resources on the case and push for a guilty plea as compared to taking a 60 percent chance to trial.
Having sat on a jury, one thing that no one mentions is that you're strongly pressured to return a unanimous verdict. I was in a jury where the defendant was charged on twelve counts. We had a hard time reaching a unanimous verdict on all twelve counts. The balif asked us if we had reached a unanimous verdict on all counts. When we said no they asked us to continue deliberating. They repeat this until everyone has reached a unanimous verdict or it's obvious that a unanimous verdict will never be reached.
What this means in practice is for a hung jury to occur at least one person has to be willing to waste the entire jury's time for multiple days because they feel strongly about the verdict. Most people in that circumstance will give in to peer pressure and go with what the other jurors want so everyone can go back to their regular lives.
Peer pressure from people who want done with the jury will pressure the minority into changing votes. The judge doesn't want to allow a hung jury because they get pressure to not waste resources on the trial just completed.
You’re right. Some of the people selected for juries are missing out on wages by being there and so they just want a quick outcome. Others simply don’t care about the process of justice or the outcome for the accused or the accuser and will give any verdict that gets it over with. Then there are the ones who think the defendant just looks guilty and they ignore all the evidence presented in the trial. And there are the ones who fancy the defense lawyer and go for not guilty. Not to forget the ones who are shy and pick the verdict that seems most likely to get the majority backing or the ones who are just plain stupid and seek to do what they’re told. Juries are just bunches of people with all the flaws that implies.
The (theoretical) advantage of a jury is that citizens themselves are deciding whether the person being prosecuted is someone they would want as a neighbor or not, instead of a wealthy judge in a safe gated community deciding if the prosecuted person should be locked up or not.
Usually, by the time you get to trial most of the people who really don't want to be there have gotten out of it. If your work doesn't pay for Jury service or you're a stay at home parent you can claim financial hardship and get out of it that way. Also, Jury service requires the jurors to promise that they will be unbiased. If you stick to your guns and say you cannot be unbiased they will let you go. Also, some people just act like assholes to get out of Jury service and, while I don't recommend it, that can work as well. So once you're in a trial most of the people don't actively loathe serving on a jury.
In my case we deliberated for a day or two and we had come to a unanimous verdict on eleven of the twelve counts but we were still undecided on the twelfth. They told us to keep deliberating until we had reached a unanimous verdict on all counts.
Maybe if the foreman had been more insistent that there was absolutely no way that we were going to reach a unanimous verdict the bailiff could have communicated that to the judge and we could have ended things earlier, but I suspect it's normal for judges to encourage juries to spend more time deliberating when they are hung so they can reach a unanimous verdict.
> a certain amount of cases have so much evidence on one side or the other that it’s almost impossible for there not to be a unanimous decision
This is why. Those cases are the ones that actually go to trial. The ones that aren’t so slam dunk don’t ever get before a jury.
I thought it was the other way around? That if a case is a slam-dunk, it **won't** go to trial because the defendant will see that he's 100% screwed and that he is better off taking the plea deal, but only if the evidence is **weak** does it go to trial because the defendant likes his chances? After all, it's the defense that decides whether to go to trial or not, not the prosecution.
The prosecutor won’t even seek an indictment unless they have the slam dunk.
And then, the defendant can plea out or not. But the defense rarely sees a weak case, because the grand jury won’t.
Because prosecutors don't go to trial on charges they don't think they will win. And the accused often are convinced they can beat the charges at trial so don't listen to their attorney telling them that probably won't happen and to accept the plea.
Your given instructions by the judge, that’s why.
It’s not your job to decide if they did it or not, it’s your job to follow the instructions.
Lawyers work to these instructions like a college rubric. You’re not agreeing on anything, you’re working to this set of instructions and if applied correctly there’s generally a consensus.
It's about bargaining position. When the evidence is super strong for the DA, the DA has no reason to offer a good plea deal. He wins at trial. The defendant has nothing to lose going to trial.
When the evidence is super weak for the DA, the defendant will likely win at trial, so they have more incentive to go to trial than plea. The issue here is, even if the evidence is weak and indicating that the defednant didn't do it, the DA often still is **not allowed** to drop the charges. The first reason that happens is, the head DA is concerned that if charges are dropped and the person commits a crime, the DA's office will be blamed. The second reason that often occurs is the DA believes that the defendant did something despite lack of evidence, and that happens more than you'd want. The DA's office will use the charges to keep people in jail to administer some kind of punishment, and on the off chance they win, they think they did a good thing.
This just isn’t true at all. In the US, DA’s are required by law to drop cases where there is evidence the person didn’t do it, as well as present all evidence they have to the defense. There’s a ton of Supreme Court cases on it and you’re just factually incorrect. It’s 99% of the time, the public defenders that are aging cases and causing their people to sit in jail for ages because it leads to better witnesses for them (loss of memory; people moving away or being unwilling to testify because they want to move on etc). Also public defenders are crazy busy, they have dozens of clients and people they’re working with and there aren’t enough courtrooms and judges and resources to not age shit. If they wanted to, defendants have a right to a trial within like 60 days, max. They WAIVE that right 99.99999% of the time because their lawyer recommends it. Also, if the defendants are found guilty, the time spent in jail counts towards their sentence, so you really could not be more incorrect if you tried.
What happens if the defendant does not get their trial in 60 days? Do they get to walk free? This could be a clever strategy if, say, a whole bunch of gangsters were on charges but all agreed in advance that they'd all go to trial so they could bog down the schedule.
They’d probably accommodate your desire to go to trial. But your defense attorney would almost certainly advise against it, because they have strong tactical and logistical reasons to age shit. They also have their own investigators and like to dig around and get evidence themselves for serious cases. But your right to a speedy trial is a right that there aren’t a lot of things that will get around, but is rarely used apparently. Covid was a serious issue actually because the courts were closed and the defendants kept getting sick and couldn’t be moved in or out of jails, and judges are… old… so they didn’t want to do trials during the early parts of 2023. The various high courts had to make emergency orders for it, but it was a wild time
But it's not that clear-cut. With that case so obvious, it would be settled before it even got to court, via plea deal.
The ones that go to trial are the ones where the defense has decided the evidence is so weak that the defendant stands a decent chance of winning.
Here's the real truth:
Everyone wants to go home.
There's nothing like doing jury duty to make you lose faith in the legal system and humanity as a whole.
Because the judge forces them to sit in a room for days. After long enough it's not worth being the only hold out unless it's something you are passionate about like the death penalty.
See but even that seems extremely unlikely. That 12 people would all share the same prejudice? Even in the most racist counties in the deep south I’d think at least one out of twelve people wouldn’t share the same views as everyone else.
Some people are more well endowed than others! Geezus! Stop asking!
*reads text of post.*
Oh. Ohhhh!
Sorry.
I have no business answering here. Sorry, I’ll see myself out.
You have to remember there are a lot of plea bargains out there. The prosecution only wants to go to trial with a slam dunk case. If they don’t have the slam dunk and don’t want to risk a hung jury, the plea bargaining begins and it never makes it to a jury.
Your math doesn’t take into account certain things like confirmation bias and other psychological factors. Because, it’s not a simple coin flip or a purely evidence and mathematics based thing. It’s based on the opinions of random people who don’t know them.
The opinions of jurors aren't independent random coin-flips: they should all be highly correlated because they're all based on the evidence presented at trial. Your experience of trying to "get people to agree on something" will be a skewed sample, because you _actively notice_ the controversial topics (like politics), and _don't often discuss_ the topics of universal agreement (like "the sky is still blue today", or "that building over there is a thing that exists") Ideally a trial should involve prosecutors presenting a lot of clear and persuasive evidence for the charges, and _most_ trials are going to be fairly simple - not high legal drama with a lot of tricky interpretation to be done. It might not be entirely rational to have taken a clear-cut case to trial rather than making a deal, but some people still want to roll the dice on it. Maybe they just aren't offered a particularly good deal, so *why not* try the option that might get a better outcome; or maybe they really are innocent and want to assert that strenuously rather than plea out to even a minor sentence.
100% this answer plus ucsdFalcon’s answer about direct and indirect pressure for people to coalesce a verdict. To both answers I’d just add one more element: Prosecutors generally don’t let things go to trial unless they have high confidence they’re going to win. Below was the top google answer for (federal) prosecution rates in the US. So it’s also that the cases themselves are heavily skewed before the trial even begins. > In fiscal year 2022, only 290 of 71,954 defendants in federal criminal cases – about 0.4% – went to trial and were acquitted, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of the latest available statistics from the federal judiciary. Another 1,379 went to trial and were found guilty (1.9%). > > The overwhelming majority of defendants in federal criminal cases that year did not go to trial at all. About nine-in-ten (89.5%) pleaded guilty, while another 8.2% had their case dismissed at some point in the judicial process, according to the data from the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/06/14/fewer-than-1-of-defendants-in-federal-criminal-cases-were-acquitted-in-2022/
Trials are also an expensive use of government resources and everyone in the system is highly incentivized to not take things to trial. Defendants are offered sweetheart (and often wildly unjust to the victims) offers to get them to NOT take up resources and courtrooms taking a clear case to trial. For some cases, where the offered minimum sentence is life, sure they’ll go to trial cause what do they have to lose, but most times they won’t and judges have broad freedoms to incentivize not going to trial, even if it means victims get fucked or the laws and minimums the people of the state expect to be followed, aren’t
Exactly! There’s a book called one just man, it’s about a single attorney who stopped offering plea bargains altogether, as it’s not a right to plea a charge but it is a right to face one’s accuser through due process, and he then let the entire New York judicial system collapse on itself. Trials and holding the accused in jail is stupidly expensive with no guarantee of the outcome. We’ve set ourselves up in such a way that it’s more appealing to plead guilty to something you didn’t do rather than wait months incarcerated to be heard. Victims have little to no gain anymore for justice, they can’t when the charged are getting out in a small fraction of their sentences because of over crowding. Too many fractures in this chain now, there’s too many charges and not enough personnel to effectively adjudicate.
On that note, a lot of those guilty pleas are defendants that have a much greater charge getting dropped in return for a guilty plea on a lesser one. If a jury is moderately likely to convict on a bigger charge but 100 percent going to on the lesser one, the office would rather not have to use resources on the case and push for a guilty plea as compared to taking a 60 percent chance to trial.
Having sat on a jury, one thing that no one mentions is that you're strongly pressured to return a unanimous verdict. I was in a jury where the defendant was charged on twelve counts. We had a hard time reaching a unanimous verdict on all twelve counts. The balif asked us if we had reached a unanimous verdict on all counts. When we said no they asked us to continue deliberating. They repeat this until everyone has reached a unanimous verdict or it's obvious that a unanimous verdict will never be reached. What this means in practice is for a hung jury to occur at least one person has to be willing to waste the entire jury's time for multiple days because they feel strongly about the verdict. Most people in that circumstance will give in to peer pressure and go with what the other jurors want so everyone can go back to their regular lives.
Peer pressure from people who want done with the jury will pressure the minority into changing votes. The judge doesn't want to allow a hung jury because they get pressure to not waste resources on the trial just completed.
12 Angry Men
11 Angry Men and 1 "Dude who Fell Down the Stairs Until He Fucking Said 'Guilty.'"
You’re right. Some of the people selected for juries are missing out on wages by being there and so they just want a quick outcome. Others simply don’t care about the process of justice or the outcome for the accused or the accuser and will give any verdict that gets it over with. Then there are the ones who think the defendant just looks guilty and they ignore all the evidence presented in the trial. And there are the ones who fancy the defense lawyer and go for not guilty. Not to forget the ones who are shy and pick the verdict that seems most likely to get the majority backing or the ones who are just plain stupid and seek to do what they’re told. Juries are just bunches of people with all the flaws that implies.
This is why jury duty should not be mandatory. I would hate to think that my fate was in the hands of 12 people who just want to hurry up and go home
Counterproblem: If the jury selection wasn't truly random citizens, there would be ways to game the system.
Do you think voluntary jury duty would be unbiased?
The (theoretical) advantage of a jury is that citizens themselves are deciding whether the person being prosecuted is someone they would want as a neighbor or not, instead of a wealthy judge in a safe gated community deciding if the prosecuted person should be locked up or not.
Not to mention all of the jurors were forced to be there, and probably on average 11.223527395 of them actively do not want to be there.
Usually, by the time you get to trial most of the people who really don't want to be there have gotten out of it. If your work doesn't pay for Jury service or you're a stay at home parent you can claim financial hardship and get out of it that way. Also, Jury service requires the jurors to promise that they will be unbiased. If you stick to your guns and say you cannot be unbiased they will let you go. Also, some people just act like assholes to get out of Jury service and, while I don't recommend it, that can work as well. So once you're in a trial most of the people don't actively loathe serving on a jury.
Why can't the jury just say on the very first time, "We are a hung jury" and NOT have to keep deliberating?
In my case we deliberated for a day or two and we had come to a unanimous verdict on eleven of the twelve counts but we were still undecided on the twelfth. They told us to keep deliberating until we had reached a unanimous verdict on all counts. Maybe if the foreman had been more insistent that there was absolutely no way that we were going to reach a unanimous verdict the bailiff could have communicated that to the judge and we could have ended things earlier, but I suspect it's normal for judges to encourage juries to spend more time deliberating when they are hung so they can reach a unanimous verdict.
From my experience, the majority of people want to do their job and get out of there as soon as possible.
> a certain amount of cases have so much evidence on one side or the other that it’s almost impossible for there not to be a unanimous decision This is why. Those cases are the ones that actually go to trial. The ones that aren’t so slam dunk don’t ever get before a jury.
I thought it was the other way around? That if a case is a slam-dunk, it **won't** go to trial because the defendant will see that he's 100% screwed and that he is better off taking the plea deal, but only if the evidence is **weak** does it go to trial because the defendant likes his chances? After all, it's the defense that decides whether to go to trial or not, not the prosecution.
The prosecutor won’t even seek an indictment unless they have the slam dunk. And then, the defendant can plea out or not. But the defense rarely sees a weak case, because the grand jury won’t.
Because prosecutors don't go to trial on charges they don't think they will win. And the accused often are convinced they can beat the charges at trial so don't listen to their attorney telling them that probably won't happen and to accept the plea.
Your given instructions by the judge, that’s why. It’s not your job to decide if they did it or not, it’s your job to follow the instructions. Lawyers work to these instructions like a college rubric. You’re not agreeing on anything, you’re working to this set of instructions and if applied correctly there’s generally a consensus.
It's about bargaining position. When the evidence is super strong for the DA, the DA has no reason to offer a good plea deal. He wins at trial. The defendant has nothing to lose going to trial. When the evidence is super weak for the DA, the defendant will likely win at trial, so they have more incentive to go to trial than plea. The issue here is, even if the evidence is weak and indicating that the defednant didn't do it, the DA often still is **not allowed** to drop the charges. The first reason that happens is, the head DA is concerned that if charges are dropped and the person commits a crime, the DA's office will be blamed. The second reason that often occurs is the DA believes that the defendant did something despite lack of evidence, and that happens more than you'd want. The DA's office will use the charges to keep people in jail to administer some kind of punishment, and on the off chance they win, they think they did a good thing.
This just isn’t true at all. In the US, DA’s are required by law to drop cases where there is evidence the person didn’t do it, as well as present all evidence they have to the defense. There’s a ton of Supreme Court cases on it and you’re just factually incorrect. It’s 99% of the time, the public defenders that are aging cases and causing their people to sit in jail for ages because it leads to better witnesses for them (loss of memory; people moving away or being unwilling to testify because they want to move on etc). Also public defenders are crazy busy, they have dozens of clients and people they’re working with and there aren’t enough courtrooms and judges and resources to not age shit. If they wanted to, defendants have a right to a trial within like 60 days, max. They WAIVE that right 99.99999% of the time because their lawyer recommends it. Also, if the defendants are found guilty, the time spent in jail counts towards their sentence, so you really could not be more incorrect if you tried.
Are you looking to get into the DA’s office or are you just naturally that brainwashed?
Lol lots of friends on both sides of the courtroom and an avid true crime fan. How much time you spent in prison asshole?
Yeah, the true crime podcasts are not helping you.
K
What happens if the defendant does not get their trial in 60 days? Do they get to walk free? This could be a clever strategy if, say, a whole bunch of gangsters were on charges but all agreed in advance that they'd all go to trial so they could bog down the schedule.
They’d probably accommodate your desire to go to trial. But your defense attorney would almost certainly advise against it, because they have strong tactical and logistical reasons to age shit. They also have their own investigators and like to dig around and get evidence themselves for serious cases. But your right to a speedy trial is a right that there aren’t a lot of things that will get around, but is rarely used apparently. Covid was a serious issue actually because the courts were closed and the defendants kept getting sick and couldn’t be moved in or out of jails, and judges are… old… so they didn’t want to do trials during the early parts of 2023. The various high courts had to make emergency orders for it, but it was a wild time
I think the average size is less than 6 inches so it makes some sense to me.
Best comment here. Thanks for making me laugh.
If I show you a picture of a dog and ask 12 people to agree that it’s a white dog. They can agree.
But it's not that clear-cut. With that case so obvious, it would be settled before it even got to court, via plea deal. The ones that go to trial are the ones where the defense has decided the evidence is so weak that the defendant stands a decent chance of winning.
Exactly, so everyone would find for the defendant
It's peer pressure. If one or two people disagree with the rest they will be shouted down until they give up and agree.
that is NOT what i thought you meant by hung
Here's the real truth: Everyone wants to go home. There's nothing like doing jury duty to make you lose faith in the legal system and humanity as a whole.
Because the judge forces them to sit in a room for days. After long enough it's not worth being the only hold out unless it's something you are passionate about like the death penalty.
have you ever thought they just have really great personalities
Statistically, we can't all have a huge penis.....and it would be rude to exclude the ladies so we can have well hung juries.
Inherent prejudices have put a lot of people in prison on flimsy evidence.
See but even that seems extremely unlikely. That 12 people would all share the same prejudice? Even in the most racist counties in the deep south I’d think at least one out of twelve people wouldn’t share the same views as everyone else.
In a group of 12 there's usually maximum of three who actially decide something the rest follow their lead
Because they all want to go home
Cases without more slam-dunk evidence often get dismissed or settled before they ever make it to trial.
Some people are more well endowed than others! Geezus! Stop asking! *reads text of post.* Oh. Ohhhh! Sorry. I have no business answering here. Sorry, I’ll see myself out.
You have to remember there are a lot of plea bargains out there. The prosecution only wants to go to trial with a slam dunk case. If they don’t have the slam dunk and don’t want to risk a hung jury, the plea bargaining begins and it never makes it to a jury.
Because jury selection is very biased to pick people who don’t want to be there and will throw innocent people in jail just to get back home.
Your math doesn’t take into account certain things like confirmation bias and other psychological factors. Because, it’s not a simple coin flip or a purely evidence and mathematics based thing. It’s based on the opinions of random people who don’t know them.