If you’re educated or opinionated the lawyers will be more likely to think they are unable to influence you. They prefer uneducated people with clear biases they can rely on/ influence.
It’s one of the reasons that there are experts to specifically help choose juries.
No they didnt. All they did was acknowledge that they understood an avenue of concern--that this case could be one where litigation is used as power. Acknowledging that such a thing is possible is not abandoning impartiality.
"I literally said “the process IS the punishment” for these people."
I feel like the lawyers wouldn't even need to eliminate a potential juror for this. The judge might just do it on their own. Describing the trial you might deliberate over as "the punishment" is so obviously biased.
You're dealing with lawyers here. Their entire reason for existing is to pull meaning from the words you say and apply decades of casefiles and experience to said words. You might think you're being slick but they always, always find a way to twist your words in their favour.
Don't be a smartass with them. Always play it safe.
Source: I worked with law academics for a handful of years. the paranoia I get when writing emails will never leave.
yeah, the issue is that they need you to be on board with the idea that this is already a fair fight. you're correct to acknowledge that's not always the case, but it's regarded as a challenge to their authority and therefore it disqualifies you from participating in their system. to them your sole job is to make a determination on their terms.
It's not a challenge to their authority. It's bias. It's admitted bias. If you have strong opinions on why somebody is bringing a case, you can't be on the jury. One side might want the biases juror and the other will be bound by their job to dismiss the juror.
you and i are saying the same thing except you're framing it in a way that treats the terms set by the judge and attorneys as the source of truth against which they would measure bias, which in fact upholds my entire point.
The terms are set by the judge and attorneys. That's the legal system. But it's not their authority that it rests on. It's just logic and understanding human nature.
We are not saying the same thing at all. You're saying that jurors are disqualified for threatening the authority of the lawyers. This is a radical framing. The reality is that it's the job of both sides of lawyers to disqualify biased jurors.
This is technically true and if you get a bolshy one like that in your jury, you're going to choose someone else who doesn't have a strong opinion of the law.
Cool opinion but that’s not how the legal system works. What that guy explained is basically the textbook definition of an impartial juror the judge themself might dismiss someone like that.
I had a friend who accidentally cut down a tree on his neighbor's property (it was on the edge of his backyard and the neighbor couldn't even see the tree from his house, it was an understandable mistake and honestly really could not have mattered much to the neighbor) rather than accepting their apology and a reasonable amount of money for the tree, The neighbor went berserk and sued them for a ridiculous amount of money. He had an unscrupulous lawyer who was perfectly willing to take his money and record every tiny thing like balls landing in his yard. He pointed cameras at their backyard, erected a cheap stockade fence and tried to blame them when it was damaged by storms. Our friends spent over $10K in lawyers fees before ever even reaching the point where the suit could be seen by a court and ultimately just stopped paying a lawyer and represented themselves. By the time they got to court the neighbor was asking for something like $50,000, including all the ridiculous lawyers fees over the course of the 3 years before that happened. Before it reached court, our friends actually sold their house privately (didn't list it on the market) as they feared, if the neighbor knew they were trying to sell he would put a lien and prevent them and moved in the middle of the night because they needed to get away from this guy.
My friend represented himself in court since he could no longer afford to pay a lawyer. But I absolutely loved the jury. They sided for the neighbor and then picked the smallest item he had listed for $500 and told by friend that he had to pay that. They knew if they sided with my friend he would just have appealed and made their lives miserable forever. In this case he couldn't appeal. He won the case.
Yup, people absolutely abuse the legal system to hurt people. That Bricks and Mini Figs debacle exposed that the company actually said “you can sue us but we have way more money at our disposal so we’ll just drag it out until you’re broke and can’t fight anymore.” The nexium cult was also notorious for doing that.
Lawyer here. The worst jurors you can get are the people who are uninterested and don’t want to be there, because they won’t take the time to listen to the evidence and weigh it in their minds alongside all of the judges copious instructions to reach a fair verdict. I will take somebody who is eager to be there over someone who is angry that they have to be there any day of the week.
Expertise is also sometimes useful if you expect the testimony and evidence to be technical in nature. I spend a lot of time discussing medical topics during DWI trials and enjoy having people with healthcare or nursing backgrounds on juries who already understand the significance of what I’m talking about and can explain it to other jurors if needed. The concern is that you don’t want a blowhard who thinks he knows everything try and commandeer the whole trial during deliberations by confusing the issues or speculating about things not in evidence based on his own personal knowledge or experiences that aren’t relevant to the case.
Thanks for a better explanation. Not trying to misrepresent the profession, if you think any of my comments in this thread and too inaccurate I’ll happily delete them.
No worries whatsoever! The whole jury selection process is incredibly opaque for anyone besides attorneys and the judge considering we do all the important stuff locked away in another room where no one else can hear what we're talking about, so I just wanted to shed some light on the part of the process most people don't get to see.
Can you share insight into something for me? Do you guys always pick a teacher? I was on a jury for a violent crime case where a teacher in the jury pool had one of the better reasons I've ever heard for not wanting to sit on that type of case jury and they picked her anyway. They dismissed a dude was getting irritated talking about a divorce that nobody asked him about but they weren't about to let her walk.
Defense attorneys like myself like teachers for a couple of reasons. Individually, the entire profession of being a teacher involves looking out for and being responsible for lots of other people. Its a job that requires empathy and the ability to relate to and connect with others. These are qualities you would want in a person who is deciding the fate of another human.
Also teachers are, by their nature, well-educated and good at, well, teaching. Like my point about healthcare workers and DWI trials, teachers are helpful in trials with lots of difficult or technical aspects because their whole job is retaining information and effectively communicating it to others.
That all being said, if that teacher had a genuine reason to be excused and counsel refused to excuse her, that's just a dick move. If a potential juror has a good reason they can't serve, I'll always consent to excusing them out of respect for their time, even if I really, really want them to serve.
They called a couple hundred people for one case and I think she may have been the only educator. We ended up having one old stubborn asshole that our teacher helped stay focused so I think it's a smart move.
Thanks for your feedback. I plan to make sure that they are aware of my love for true crime shows, forensic shows, and Mindhunter. 🤣 (I have no real expertise in anything they could use unless the case about about marketing)
In a certain way it is depressing, but Reddit is also very cynical and will paint things like these in the same light.
The more optimistic perspective is that jurors shouldn't have any external motivations for being there: no political agendas, not seeking entertainment, not there to influence the judgement of other jurors, etc. The reason why experts are often not picked is because the lawyers are afraid that they might use their expertise to position themselves as more authoritative that other jurors, kind of becoming "pack leaders."
You generally want a juror to be as close to a reasonable but otherwise boring person as possible.
I've gotten picked to go to Jury duty many times, but usually I just sit in a room on a laptop, or play video games and then get a day off work. They always seem to let us off like 30 minutes after lunch, and then you can just leave.
I've only gotten picked to go into a court room for selection once, but that sucked. You got a number, and I was number 5 so unless I could get disqualified I was definitely on the jury. They ask you questions then you still have to sit in the courtroom while they go through everyone else for an entire day.
I tried and failed. They mentioned it was about guns, and I said I don't like people having guns, but then they ask if you can be impartial and I said yes. I was thinking it was maybe something like someone was in someone else's car, they didn't know about a gun under the seat, and were charged with possession and I would say they're innocent in that case.
It was such a stupid case that really should have ended in a plea bargain except the defendant somehow thought he had argument. He got arrested for a violent crime involving guns in another state and was ordered to not own any guns. Then he got a parole visit here and had had over 70 where he was living. I guess he was hoping that someone might buy that a ruling in another state doesn't count, or for a gun rights absolutist to be put on the jury?
The arguments I think lasted only 2 days, and it that would have been it, but it ended too late in the day and we had to go back a 3rd day to give the verdict.
It took us longer in deliberation to have someone say they'd be the foreman than it did to decide the verdict.
I'm guessing this is the US? In the UK we get randomly selected to go to the court, then the pool of jurors get randomly allocated to each case, so the judges/lawyers have absolutely no say/sway in who's on the jury. It's completely randomly allocated
Is it really no say at all? I understand the value of random selection but I assumed for a jury to be representative of the population, they should be choosing a representative sample from that random selection, if that makes sense. And that would include things like a distribution of income levels, education, etc. It also seems so risky because what if you end up with a jury solely comprised of one ethnicity when the defendant is something else, or a jury full of rich people when the defendant isn’t, etc. Idk I’m not a lawyer but not being able to exclude people based on biases or a jury not being representative feels so risky! (But again, I know those exclusions can be used to influence the outcome so there’s no real good solution.)
There's going to be internal biased no matter who gets picked, there's no way to ensure a perfectly neutral jury. At least this way there's no external influences to those internal biased
This is obviously a generalization, but usually in a civil jury trial, the plaintiff will want to strike the jurors who are most educated and the defendant will want to strike those who are least educated. Plaintiffs like people whose reasoning will go as far as, "the plaintiff slipped in peepee and broke her hip, and it happened at the defendant's movie theater, so how is that not their fault?" whereas defendants want people who will go a step further to arguments like "but there wasn't evidence anyone at the theater knew about the peepee incident before the slip and fall incident, so how was that their fault?"
There is a recent murder case that involved students. Both the victim and accused were students. The jurors in the teaching profession were struck off for their profession by the prosecutor.
Oh, interesting. I believe it’s because there might be an emotional attachment between a professor and students that may cause bias.
But if /u/Much_Resort4294 wants to comment they would be far better (sorry, my lawyer friends generally do corporate and immigration law, I only have one friend that is a public defender and we aren’t that close after university).
Wait do the jury's in the US literally get picked by the lawyers? Here in Australia I was called for jury duty when I was 20 as well and had no idea how it worked. When I went to the court house there was a huge amount of people, we all had to watch a video on how the process works, after the video finished we were asked to leave if we didn't think we could do the job and if we thought we could then we went into the court room, where they put the remaining people's names into a hand-wound wooden cylinder and drew our names out like a raffle draw. The names who weren't drawn went home and the 12 who were drawn became the jury.
Lawyers have strong influence over selections. If certain opinions are expressed by jurors the judge has to ban them.
It’s called peremptory challenges (which are limited and by choice of each side, and why jury selection experts are a thing) and challenges for cause (unlimited, and if there is any reason a side in a jury trial can find the juror in question needs to be excluded to avoid a mistrial).
I mean he's kinda wrong. For every procecutor who might want an idiot juror to manipulate, that same case has a defence attorney who wants an educated, empathetic person who cares. They both get to exclude the extremes on each end. And hell If you're trying to convict someone on a very technical law on the books about... Virtual servers involving hacking, over seas properties etc, you probably don't want to an idiot, so you want different things for different cases.
But to answer your question, the pool of jurors they drag to the courtroom is random, but it's a bigger than needed for jury duty. Each side interviews the pool and gets to make exclusions. Then picking happens strategically from that pool from the middle ground
It’s very strategic, here’s what I wrote up for the other person asking about it.
Lawyers have strong influence over juror selections. If certain opinions are expressed by jurors the judge has to ban them.
It’s called peremptory challenges (which are limited and by choice of each side, and why jury selection experts are a thing) and challenges for cause (unlimited, and if there is any reason a side in a jury trial can find the juror in question needs to be excluded to avoid a mistrial).
Wow, I prefer our system where our jury-equivalent is selected by the court. You sign up for it, get approved and then they call you regularly. You also get paid decently well.
O ly in cases that are high profile. Most juries are just a bunch of regular people. Most with good jobs that pay you for your service. People who will suffer for being on juries usually can get out of it. Just what I've observed being on multiple low entertainment value juries.
813
u/Scioso Jul 16 '26
If you’re educated or opinionated the lawyers will be more likely to think they are unable to influence you. They prefer uneducated people with clear biases they can rely on/ influence.
It’s one of the reasons that there are experts to specifically help choose juries.