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Speaking of the right to a jury, my main problem with the Constitution is the 7th Amendment, which, because of the text "the right of trial by jury shall be preserved," has judges comparing modern day cases to the legal system of 1791 England in order to determine whether this trial would have been by jury had it taken place more than 200 years ago in another country. It's the equivalent of asking which room in the White House Thomas Jefferson would have put his xbox in.

Tom Hagen wrote:I think Continental European models are a good place to start; bench trials for lower-level criminal offenses, mixed panels of judges and lay jurors (without a unanimity requirement) for more serious criminal offenses. Also: abolish the death penalty, roll back congressional limits that have been placed on federal appellate review of state convictions. It's idiotic that we Americans have a system that preserves the right of defendants to have 12 of their uneducated peers decide their guilt or innocence, but denies them effective appellate review for new evidence, ineffective counsel at trial, etc.

You were going pretty good until you got to the "uneducated peers" crap. I've sat on juries that both amazed and appalled me. Those that amazed were invariably the Joe Six-Pack types (which likely reveals a great deal more about my own biases that I care to) and those who appalled were the supposedly more educated ones. For example, the civics teacher in Denver who, during jury selection, grumbles that this was all a waste of time because the guy had been indicted so just go ahead and sentence him. He's obviously guilty or he wouldn't have been indicted, right?

But generally your reforms are on the right track. Now let's work on adequate representation regardless of income or wealth.

I meant "uneducated" in a mostly non-pejorative sense, as in legally uneducated, as in this process would go much better if we could be confident that all the principles involved accurately understand what the relevant legal burdens are and mean.

The only jury I've been on was a civil case involving a car accident. I got myself appointed foreman and commandeered the process to suit my own judgments. Determine how that reflects on our legal system as you will.

Brian C wrote:The only jury I've been on was a civil case involving a car accident. I got myself appointed foreman and commandeered the process to suit my own judgments. Determine how that reflects on our legal system as you will.

Well, I hung a civil jury once. Car accident case, too. Couldn't agree on the award. It wasn't that I thought that the plaintiff didn't deserve something, it was the amount asked and the basis. The injured party was a young woman and her husband was seeking damages for loss of "services" - in 1992.

I couldn't even really be sure the plaintiff in my case was really hurt. She had a doctor testify for her, but his testimony seemed less than thorough; IIRC he had only seen her once or twice over a period of many months, and his diagnosis did not seem as dire as the plaintiff's case made it out to be. But being a young woman with kids, there was a lot of sympathy for her, which I shared. At first, almost everyone wanted to award her something, but a few agreed with me to find for the defendant pretty quickly. I finally convinced the holdouts by saying that, hey, it's not that I didn't feel bad for her. If I could have printed money and given it to her, I would have considered it well-deserved. I just didn't think the other guy deserved to have to pay it. That distinction seemed like the key.

My point was, though, that basically things went the way I wanted them to just because I bothered to argue for it. The experience actually soured me on the jury system somewhat, because my impression was that I could have just as easily convinced the group to go the other way had I felt like it. It seemed so arbitrary to me - with a slightly different jury, the outcome might have turned out completely differently. That's simply not a very reliable system of justice.

Now, that was a minor civil case. If I had been on a criminal jury, perhaps the other jurors would have been more emotionally invested in the outcome than they were arguing over details of a routine car crash. But then again, maybe with more on the line, the others would have been even more intimidated by the process and kept quiet. I guess that, again, it just depends - and what good is that?

Well, I hung a civil jury once. Car accident case, too. Couldn't agree on the award. It wasn't that I thought that the plaintiff didn't deserve something, it was the amount asked and the basis. The injured party was a young woman and her husband was seeking damages for loss of "services" - in 1992.

I was on the jury for a wrongful termination case -- heard in federal court, because the employer was a municipality. Said municipality certainly screwed up by not following the letter of their sexual-harrassment and termination policies, but it was also pretty evident that the plaintiff was exploiting that screw-up for what she hoped would be an enormous, undeserved payoff (I believe her lawyers were asking for a multimillion dollar decision). The deliberations dragged on for days because myself and a few other jury members could not countenance giving this woman more than token punitive damages -- we were on board with compensating for lost wages. But, to my eternal shame, the rest of the jury wore us down (one guy repeatedly insisted that we go along with the majority because he had to get back to his contracting business), and ultimately, if I recall correctly, we awarded her something like $700,000.

In other words, 12 Angry Men in reverse.

Which is pretty much the perfect counter-argument to 12 Angry Men's sentimental fiction. If one stubborn hold-out can bring around an entire jury, why should you assume that the stubborn ones are always going to have right on their side? In the real world it's not just the heroes who are bloody-minded.

That's true, but what I meant was that the majority wore down the few dissenters, rather than a lone dissenter bringing everyone else to the light.

Anyhow, Sidney Lumet made a movie.

Understood. I was just extrapolating to a 12 Angry Men equivalent situation. In most cases you're probably going to get a less extreme split if there's serious dissent. Good luck swaying a couple of dyed-in-the-wool bigots with cool logic and the Power of TruthTM

I know people have strong opinions on Peter Biskind but his book analysing 1950s cinema, Seeing Is Believing, has an excellent essay seeing 12 Angry Men (and films like Rebel Without A Cause, On The Waterfront and Twelve O'Clock High), as much more of a film about politics, with the building of a 'common sense' consensus leading to isolation of dangerous 'extremist' elements, eventually making their objections seem more and more lunatic in the face of overwhelming group dynamics (and rooting this lunacy in personal psychological issues that are the fault of the individual not the society, such as prejudice), with of course the change from seeing the group as hostile to becoming a force for good as the floating voters move onto the 'correct' side.

Really the actual murder case is the McGuffin as being the only way that all these people would ever interact with each other, and they will likely never meet again, allowing them to 'be themselves' (i.e. archetypes) in the Jury Room to an even more bull-headed extent.

I'm not sure what juror number I am for this conversation =]

Having seen this a number of times straight - creative reasons - I think the main point is that you have a near-unanimous jury that started out based on presumption and in the end became a unanimous jury based on actual thinking. Juror 8 wanted to make sure there was no reasonable doubt as to the boy's guilt and he instinctively thought there was some doubt. And if there is doubt about the evidence presented to make a case someone is guilty (and in this case, means he's killed by the state), then he should be found not guilty.

All the other stuff are a nice bonus.

Also food for thought: how come it's OK to be extremely thorough - nitpicky if you like - for a film and yet not so thorough amongst a jury for a criminal trial where the mandatory sentence is death?

It should make one wonder if juries were just as thorough as Internet film viewers. (Probably still act like assholes though.)