11 Comments
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Viddao's avatar

Finally, I have been waiting for someone to write an article on this subject. If it would have taken longer, I would have had to do it myself. Great way to start the conversation!

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Estate of Bob Saget's avatar

Do you care about race of the jurors

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Simon Laird's avatar

Yes. We got rid of the all white jury and we got the O J Simpson trial.

But that’s a separate post.

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Garreth Byrne's avatar

Far too strict a rule. You would run into all sorts of problems trying to implement this. Then you need to control for race as well, etc. Best to just have a random sample of their peers which I assume is roughly how they attempt to recruit now. Though naturally I assume those who actually show up is biased downwards on all sorts of metrics. I'd ask why desire such a radical change to jurys they don't seem to work that bad in practice. If you want the best policies as much as you say, surely some empirical evidence should be presented that demonstrates your idea works better in practice.

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Simon Laird's avatar

Juries today are not a random sample at all. Juries today don't work that well in practice.

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Viddao's avatar

Arguably one of the flaws of contemporary juries is that they genuinely are just randomly selected warm bodies, regardless of whether they are capable of moral judgement.

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Simon Laird's avatar

But they're not randomly selected. There's an extensive jury selection process

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Viddao's avatar

They are screened for bias, but the original pool is the entire population. This is probably the worst of both, not limiting it to responsible social classes, yet also allowing the judge to thoroughly screen for "bias". An impartial jury sounds nice in theory until you realize that it means the government basically gets to pick who gets to be on a jury, since the judge is the arbiter on what constitutes "bias" or not.

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User 1's avatar

Do one on whether blacks should serve in juries. Very interesting stuff there.

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forumposter123@protonmail.com's avatar

What about effeminate men. My wife has a very bad jury experience with one of those.

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Viddao's avatar

Like, the kind that oppose the death penalty?

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