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Grand juries have long been considered incredibly easy to get past, to the point a common joke is that you could even manage it with a ham sandwich. Given that nothing about the system has changed (they're still just made up of ordinary citizens through the jury selection process), the constant failings to convince ordinary people of crime seems to suggest a selection bias. Normal smart prosecutors would never try to indict a ham sandwich anyway so the grand juries never turn them down, similar to how Japan maintains their high conviction rates.
Several of the failures to indict have been -- and been clearly downstream -- of jury pools where a heavy and radicalized Blue Tribe lean is present.
Even the most partisan states are still generally around 60/40 like California and that's not including the rising number of independent aligned voters and nonvoters who are not "radicalized blue tribe". And a grand jury just needs a simple majority, it's famously easy to get past.
Now sure, maybe Trump is just so uniquely unpopular among the normies and independents now that even they are willing to sabotage their indictments against political opponents but I'm not sure the average American is that spiteful.
Do you not know, or not care, how fractions work?
Because I don't think you know, or care, about how jury trials work:
And I also notice that you haven't actually engaged with the point (or examples!) of clear video evidence of criminal behavior being no-billed by Dem-leaning grand juries, juries, and magistrates.
It's a little funny watching people accuse you of letting LLMs do your thinking, because if I wanted a Darwin clone, I could do better with 3B param and a couple hours with an nVidia 3060. But mostly because it's just sad.
Yes, I also understand that not everyone is partisan or political to begin with. Only about 60% of eligible voters turned out in California so even from the very start we have 40% of the population who is not particularly political. Then the remaining 60% of people are also split roughly 60/40 themselves, leaving only about 36% of the population who is Dem leaning. And that again is just leaning, they aren't all hyperpartisan. Some are swing voters, some are people who just vote what their spouse says, some just show up and pick randomly.
The large majority of randomly selected people in a grand jury, even in California, will not be that politically biased against the Trump admin. They're normies like the normies in basically every state. If you're losing them you either have a bad case, or you're despised among even the most apolitical normies.
Or perhaps you misunderstand the specifics of the law, the actual quality of evidence allowed in court (good evidence can get tossed because it was collected illegally or other procedural reasons) wasn't as strong, or plenty of other potential factors like that.
Considering you seemingly don't even know basic concepts like voter turnout not being 100% in the US, ignorance in the American legal field seems likely.
California, specifically, favors volunteer applications for grand juries. This selects directly for civic engagement, but if you think it's a random selection of political engagement, drop that estimate from 3B param to something that runs on a Raspberry Pi.
For Napa County, as the first example to come up on Google, the first random draw I could find was from 2016-2017, and that was still a tiny fraction. If we brought 2024's 65% Harris-voting Napa population and multiply it by the 17/19 that volunteered -- assuming without evidence that the 2 volunteers were just too apolitical to find an excuse -- you still get 58%. I'll leave the math for some place like San Francisco County as an exercise for the reader.
Which you will magnanimously avoid beating like a pinata, because you'd rather use the worst possible arguments instead. Just like you'll ignore the district matter.
Nope, not true. Civil grand juries are voluntary (and not really juries in the typical sense, they're more like government watchdogs].
Criminal grand juries are random like normal petit juries
Please refer back to my prior statement that you do not understand the legal process. This is what happens when the base of your knowledge is going "oh shit, let me Google that" and you should be wondering that maybe you're applying this same ignorance to other parts of these cases.
I stand corrected, I misread that data source.
I still think you’re badly underestimating the selection effects of the rest of the grand jury selection process, of radicalization among the average progressive and lefty, and of statistical artifacts in a random selection, and of the effect of heavily-leaning districts where the political lean is more severe and where most of the political attack happen.
(My “let me google that” also shows some jurisdictions in California requiring a 12/19 or 15/23 majority to issue an indictment, which makes your best-case average numbers much less favorable, but maybe I’m misreading that too.)
Well no offense but that you had read it at all and didn't have little alarm bells blaring in your head to double check that California would have volunteer criminal grand juries is still what I mean by ignorance of the system. That would be incredibly shocking to learn any state did it that way.
I'm not saying there isn't any, but even when we stack the deck and assume that every single Harris voter is a super partisan radical again we still only hit 36% of the total population that is biased in this way, in California one of the bluest leaning states. Also age and intelligence bias go the other way for juries. Random chance might get a few grand juries where they stack the deck with blue partisans, but they're disproportionately smarter, younger and higher income people who will get out of jury duty easier!
For the most part of any grand jury anywhere you're gonna have to deal with convincing a bunch of normies who couldn't manage to get out and bored retirees who are just happy to be doing something again. And often those times where you think someone got off unfair is really just because you didn't understand the specifics of the law just like you didn't understand criminal grand juries. There's multiple understandable parts, if you know the specifics, why he didn't get indicted.
The government's laughable attemps to upcharge it as a felony. The cop laughing it off later as no big deal (and lying in court about the details too for some reason) made it harder to suggest there was a reasonable chance of bodily harm in the sandwich throwing given that it didn't result in harm. (It's not impossible since we're talking about chances, but juries see "X happened and Y didn't" as evidence that X causing Y is less likely then), that they had originally released him without charge until the scene went viral later weakened their case significantly (if it was clearly assault to them, they should have pressed then and not let him go) suggesting politically motivated prosecution rather than fact based ones which the felony upcharging and public statements by the Trump admin did not help. And the history that other "soft objects" throwers don't normally get charged under this statute weakened the case even more from that.
That a grand jury refused to indict a hilariously upcharged felony assault over a case which was blatantly politicized in prosecution motive, one that the officers themselves had initially treated as no big deal and nothing to charge over is not that much of a surprise. They then had to cut it down to a misdemeanor, but given the already rocky history and details here and the still hilarious allegations that the sandwich caused bodily harm, the petit jury at trial found him not guilty. Sean Dunn was probably guilty of something, but through multiple unforced errors of choosing stupid statutes to charge him under, letting him go to begin with, blatant politicized prosecution motives, etc the prosecution really hurt their chances at what could have been a slam dunk. They wanted to make an example out of him and fucked up.
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Jury trials have other issues than mere spite, especially when race gets involved.
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By treating ‘rights of the accused’ as a suggestion?
Probably in part, but they also don't bring the indictments in Japan to begin with. https://usali.org/comparative-views-of-japanese-criminal-justice/carlos-ghosn-and-japans-99-per-cent-conviction-ratenbsp-examining-japans-criminal-justice-system-from-a-comparative-perspective
There are some other differences including just weird statistical quirks like that, but being selective in only bringing high confidence cases is a good thing for both efficient use of taxpayer money and minimizing harassment of innocents.
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If his characterization of a specific case is correct, none of what you said is relevant. It's perfectly possible that on average things are more or less lime you describe, but people make an exception for Trump.
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