Topic awaiting preservation: Just Plain stupid or plain wrong??? (Page 1 of 1)

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We Find Ourselves ? Guilty
Should we punish juries that get it wrong?
By Steven E. Landsburg
Updated Monday, May 19, 2003, at 7:46 AM PT



Twelve years ago, a New York jury acquitted Lemrick Nelson of stabbing Yankel Rosenbaum and set him free. This week, following Nelson's stunning confession that he had in fact stabbed Rosenbaum, a federal jury convicted him of violating Rosenbaum's civil rights (though they also seem to have concluded that the stab wounds did not cause Rosenbaum's death). In other words, the first jury blew it.

Five years ago, an Indiana jury convicted Richard Alexander of multiple sexual assaults and sentenced him to 70 years in prison. Three years later, two other men were charged with the same crimes after one was linked to the assaults by DNA evidence and the other confessed. By then, Richard Alexander had served three years in prison for a crime he did not commit. In other words, that jury blew it too.


But the members of those juries will never be punished for their errors. That means they never had the right incentive to get their verdicts right in the first place.

That's not to say the juries were intentionally malfeasant. It's only to say this: Weighing evidence is a difficult job. It requires a lot of attention and a lot of energy. And it would be a good thing if juries performed that job with diligence. The way to make workers diligent, as every manager knows, is to reward them when they succeed and punish them when they fail. It would be easy to apply that principle to juries: When subsequent evidence reveals that jurors got the verdict right, send each of them a big fat check. When subsequent evidence reveals they got it wrong, hit each of them with a big fat fine. And if you worry the associated risk will discourage people from serving on juries, pay them each a big fat fee for serving in the first place.

With that system in place, there would be a lot fewer jurors falling asleep in the courtroom, or ignoring evidence that might take some intellectual effort to decipher, or allowing others to cow them into submission in the jury room. There would still be some manifest unfairness?cases where jurors do the best possible job, still get the verdict wrong, and are punished despite their good efforts. But manifest unfairness is part of any good incentive system. You can spend years learning the restaurant business, carefully line up your investors and decorators and kitchen staff, brilliantly fill a market niche?and still fail because of a stray rat, a random terrorist attack, or a sudden fad for cooking at home. That's unfair in a sense?but we accept such unfairness as part of a system that encourages entrepreneurs to do the best they can with the limited information they've got, and yields, on average, better restaurants than we could get any other way.

Likewise with juries. Of course juries will make mistakes, and of course some of those mistakes will be unavoidable. But if we punish the juries who acquit the Lemrick Nelsons or convict the Richard Alexanders, we'll get better verdicts on average.

Of course, the goal is not to get jurors to convict everyone they think is probably guilty; it's to get them to convict everyone they think has been proved guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. But it's easy to adjust incentives to get whatever results you want. If there's a general sense that juries are too quick to convict, we can either raise the penalty for a false conviction or lower the penalty for a false acquittal. If they're too quick to acquit, do the opposite. In fact, that's one of the hallmarks of a good incentive system?it's easily tweaked when you want it to work a little differently.

One problem with this scheme is that cases like Nelson's and Alexander's, where the truth emerges eventually, may be too few and far between to concentrate a juror's mind. Rewards and punishments are less effective when they're less likely ever to be delivered. One solution might be to hold occasional "mock trials" of defendants who are known in advance (say through confessions or incontrovertible DNA evidence) to be either guilty or innocent. Withhold the key piece of evidence from the jury, let them deliberate, and then ignore them if they get it wrong and reward them if they get it right. Jurors would never know whether they were sitting on a real trial or a mock trial, so there's always the prospect of a big reward and an incentive to be accurate. The mock trial system would be horribly expensive, but it would also have benefits in the form of better verdicts. Is the cost worth the benefit? I haven't a clue, but it's at least worth thinking about.

In the meantime, there's no reason we couldn't use the occasional Lemrick Nelson case to send jurors a message. Every assembly line worker in America, every cab driver, every doctor and lawyer and magazine columnist, reaps financial rewards and punishments that depend on his performance. Only jurors are excepted. You can justify that exception only if you believe that getting court verdicts right is the least important job in America

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So let me get this right, the prosecution presents its case on whom it believes is the suspect, the defence says no its not, so when later it turns out either way they blame the jury....

because the jury based on the eveidence presented by either side delivers the judgement they believe is right....

so who is more wrong the jury,the prosecution or the defence???

totally fucked up idea if you ask me

Yep, pretty stupid.

What about the judge who presides over the whole thing? What about the police who collected the evidence against the falsely accused in the first place?

Silliness.

:::krets.net:::

Dumb dumb dumb

I don't have a problem with paying people more to sit on juries. In St. Louis the rate is $10/day for pre-court stuff and $18/day for actual trial, if you're chosen.

I don't have a problem with holding prosecutors and police officers criminally responsible if they purposefully withhold evidence that the defence was, indeed, innocent.

The whole thing with juries is that they ARE already held responsible for their decisions. In theory, at least, the jury is made up of the defendant's peers, lives in the same neighborhood, goes to the same supermarket. If they let a criminal go free the criminal might attack a juror, his/her friend, spouse or child. If they put away the wrong guy, the bad guy is still out there to prey upon the juror, his/her friend, spouse or child. Adding a monetary incintive and this mock trial test thing is both wasteful and stupid.

I have to agree 100% with each of you so far. This is a terrible idea. Perhaps it's not completely stupid to throw the idea out there for consideration in an article like this but it would definitely be wrong to implement it.

. . : slicePuzzle

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The way to make workers diligent, as every manager knows, is to reward them when they succeed and punish them when they fail. It would be easy to apply that principle to juries: When subsequent evidence reveals that jurors got the verdict right, send each of them a big fat check. When subsequent evidence reveals they got it wrong, hit each of them with a big fat fine. And if you worry the associated risk will discourage people from serving on juries, pay them each a big fat fee for serving in the first place.

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This is so wrong, on many levels...

First of all, many Jurys come to a conclusion based on the evidence allowed into Court! This must be changed, to allow a Jury to come to the best ruling possible. It must be up to a Jury to allow evidence...because cases in the past have shown, that When a Judge disallows certain evidence, the ruling of the Jury is often wrong.

Second, punishing a Jury for coming to the 'wrong' conclusion will only deter citizens from doing their duty...and that cannot be a good thing.

Why not punish the Judges? Why not punish the Lawyers? Why not punish the Law Enforcement Officers that were involved in the case? One can see where this type of system leads to...

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When subsequent evidence reveals...

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And that should be the end of that thought right there.

If the jury doesn't have the evidence in front of them, they can't take it into consideration.

Making sure all of the evidence is available, and no "subsequent evidence" exists is the duty of the police, the attorneys, and the judge. End of story.

The only juries I think should be punished are the ones who award huge settlements in frivolous lawsuits =)

I'm with WS. Juries can only make their decision on what's allowed in court and based on the arguments of the attroneys. If a defendant's lawyer f*cks up, (or the prosecutor for that matter) why is it the jury's fault for coming to the "wrong" verdict?

<looks at jury summons on desk>

I'm also with DL on the subject of frivolous lawsuits. However, can it be any surprise that it happens given that it's the only time "the little guy" has a chance to even the score with the conglomerates?

Fix the system that allows corporations and the government to run rampant over the public and the citzenry, and the frivolous lawsuits will go away.

Edit: And no, I have no clue where to begin on that one. Big(ger) government to whip the corporations into place? Little government to let market forces dictate corporate survival? Who knows? But this business of big business buying and running the government isn't working.



[This message has been edited by brucew (edited 05-22-2003).]