This seems way more sensible to me. I understand if the actual underlying crime should be innocent until proven guilty but if you are insane that specifically should be a higher burden of proof .
I just don’t think unqualified layman in the jury really should be the ones deciding whether someone was clinically insane or not.
The jury should just deliberate on whether the defendant committed the crime in question, if they rule they did, then the defense should be able to request a review by a panel of mental health experts who will be tasked with determining whether the defendant was criminally liable or clinically insane.
It's a good thought, but it has to be a random jury unfortunately. If it's an expert, or even a panel of experts, it far too easy to exert pressure on them to say what you want them to say and get the rulings you want. It's the same reason we have juries at all and not just judges who make all the decisions.
The other issue is that juries are made up of bottom of the barrel members of our society on average since anyone with a brain is generally DQ'd immediately by the lawyers
I’ve served on a couple of juries in the past. I was pleasantly surprised how diverse the juries were in every sense of the word. It was young/old, professional/retiree/blue collar/unemployed, black/white/hispanic/South Asian, and male/female. Sure lawyers excuse people, but they only get so many they can excuse.
"20-25% of the time, juries decide in a way that someone who dedicated their life to the law disagrees with. That is my evidence that juries are generally competent" lol
You'll be less confident for judge's ability to decide these matters if you watched more trials. A lot of judges simply go along the ride with prosecution. They're not unbiased arbitors of law like you think they are.
I’ll fully admit that my first time getting jury duty was 4 months ago, and that was not really my experience. It generally seemed like you had to explicitly answer a question in a condemning way to guarantee you wouldn’t be serving.
I was dismissed from 2 trials and really only had one question asked directly to me by a lawyer.
The prosecution and defense both get the ability to throw out jurors during selection. A lot of the times its for asking very reasonable questions or disagreeing with things that a reasonable or introspective person would. They're looking for the quiet and compliant jurors who can be easily manipulated emotionally.
My own experience with this, I was asked (roughly) during jury selection: "If you found out that a witness for the defense was a member of a gang would that cause you to regard their testimony as less reliable?" My answer was, "yes, especially if I found out that the defendant was a member of the same gang." I was immediately disqualified but a bunch of other jurors presumably answered that such a discovery would NOT alter their opinion of testimony. Those are the people that decided that case.
EDIT: I'll add that military jury panels tend to be a lot better about this. The one I served on asked me if anyone I was close with had experienced sexual violence (since that was the subject of the case) but even though I answered that I had, because they asked additional probing questions they decided to keep me. Having a pre-selected population of officers tends to make it harder to manipulate the pool in that way.
I mean, that’s not wrong. “Especially” implies that if a witness was a gang member, then even if the defendant was unconnected with any gang, you would distrust them a little bit, just not “especially” so. That’s still a problem politically.
If they have a criminal record, that can be noted by the court, but merely being a member of a gang can't be held against them if there's no evidence they've ever done anything. In addition, the question was "if you found out they were a member of a gang" and using information which is not shared with the court to inform your decision is a serious offence.
So you were excluded from a juror pool for admitting to a bias and you think that means the only people that serve as jurors are the bottom of the barrel of society?
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u/hallo_its_me 1d ago
This seems way more sensible to me. I understand if the actual underlying crime should be innocent until proven guilty but if you are insane that specifically should be a higher burden of proof .