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Very meagre for a top-level comment, I know, but I felt it was worth sharing because it's peak culture war: it turns out the sole holdout in the Lindsay Clancy case was a Black man.
(For those living under a rock: Lindsay Clancy was the woman who killed her three young children, pleaded non guilty on the basis that she suffered from post partum psychosis, and the murder trial ended in a mistrial because only 1 out of 12 jury member found her guilty.)
I think this revelation will end the debate about whether the jury failed to reach the right verdict. Although ostensibly the discussion revolved around what level of proof was provided (Massachussets has an unusually low bar for insanity defenses, in that the prosecutor must prove that the defendant was capable of discerning right from wrong beyond reasonable doubt, rather than the defense proving their client was incapable at least to the level of preponderance of evidence, as is the case in most jurisdictions.)
In practice, the issue seemed to be mostly framed in terms of identity politics, along the lines of “mistrial caused by obstinate man who refused to listen to reasonable majority of mostly women”. Substitute “black man” and “white women” and this loses its cachet: suddenly it reads like a proud person of color bravely standing up against a group of Karens trying to browbeat him into submission.
Another aspect of the fallout of the trial is all the jurors giving interviews are inadvertently revealing they themselves did not follow the law in the least during deliberations. Several of them have consistently used the line that they didn't think the state proved she killed the kids. This was not properly at issue. Others have admitted to inserting themselves as pseudo medical experts on the jury (the nurses of course). That is not proper during deliberation. Several others have used the phrase "100% sure" which seems to have been a mimetic phrase in the jury room. This is not the same standard as "reasonable doubt."
In a technical sense, no, but it's inevitable, and difficult to prevent. Either of us would make terrible jurors because our training and experience would mean that the jury would be looking to us for clarification and interpretation. If I say that the burden of proof isn't met it means more than if some rando says it, because it's presumed that I would know more about the burden of proof than the average bear. Suppose a case involves a trucking accident, and a prospective juror used to be a trucker. You can voir dire him all you want but unless he says something like he quit because trucking companies never follow safety protocols or that normies don't know how hard it is to drive a truck and if a passenger car got hit by one it's because they were probably doing something stupid, you're not getting the juror disqualified for cause. If he merely says something to the effect of some trucking companies don't care about safety and some truckers don't care about safety but some do, and he can't make a determination on the case until hearing the facts, then he's on the jury unless you use a peremptory, and you might not want to do that; the guy is a wild card, but you may need to save your challenges for ones who are obviously bad. So the guy gets on, and when it comes time to deliberate he's going to tell the jury what the standard of care is, that the plaintiff's/defendant's expert is full of shit, and the jury is going to give him more weight than the expert.
And I'm not going to blame the trucker for this. If he knows from 20 years of experience that you're never supposed to do something, I can't expect him to forget that and give my expert who says it's okay to do that sometimes as much credence as someone who knows nothing about trucking. And if I'm a juror who knows nothing about trucking then I'm going to give the guy in the room with me who has 20 years of trucking experience more credence than some expert who was bought and paid for.
Sure. I think the big problem is claimed expertise when there is none. Not sure for example that a nurse is an expert in the pharmacology of different drugs depending on their dosage.
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