Jury selection weeds out the enthusiasts who want to be on a jury, the people who can manage to get out of it, and the people who have too much domain knowledge related to the case.

The lawyers are performers in a play, to some extent. Theatricality can pay off, in the right amounts.

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saghm 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Jury selection weeds out the enthusiasts who want to be on a jury, the people who can manage to get out of it, and the people who have too much domain knowledge related to the case.

In my (extremely limited) experience, the latter two are probably true but not necessarily the first one. I've been called for jury duty exactly once so far, and it happened to coincide with a period where I wasn't particularly happy with my job situation and was pushing for some changes with my manager, which made me motivated to try to get picked so that I could stall a bit to see if my situation changed. As far as I could tell, almost everyone in the room full of like 40 people who were in the pool for the civil trial they put me in the room for first was trying to get out of it, and I ended up being the first person picked (out of I think 8 overall; there were only six jurors needed for this trial and if I recall correctly there were two alternates). It genuinely seemed to me like the lawyers were basically happy to have someone who actually wanted to do it rather than have to force someone to go who wasn't going to want to actually pay attention or take it seriously.

My guess would be that they don't want someone who's enthusiastic because they have a particular agenda that's against the verdict they're looking for. If you're a prosecutor, you're probably not going to want to pick someone who's obviously skeptical of law enforcement, and if you're a defense attorney, you're probably not going to want someone who's going to convict someone because they "look guilty". I'm not convinced that someone who really wants to be on a jury because they thought it looked fun on TV or something but otherwise doesn't have any clear bias towards one side or another would get weeded out, especially for most civil cases where people probably won't have as much concern about either letting a guilty person go free or putting an innocent person behind bars.

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xg15 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I get the reasoning behind that kind of jury selection, but yeah it seems this would also select for the most gullible people to be in the jury - especially if you want people without domain knowledge.

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ceejayoz 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That's what both the defense and the prosecution are looking for.

The same will happen with expert witnesses; both bring in people willing to say virtually anything, for the right pay.

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xg15 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Ok, but at least expert witnesses are constrained by the basic state of science in the field: They can certainly have a biased opinion but they can't go against established knowledge - and the other party can also interrogate them and try to show holes in their argumentation.

Whereas for jury members, the only people who could do that are other jury members, who would be just as clueless.

(I get that you don't want a jury with wildly different levels of domain knowledge. e.g. if you had one "expert" and the remainder being laymen, the expert could quickly dominate the entire jury - and there would be no one there to call out any bias from them)

	▲	saghm 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Ok, but at least expert witnesses are constrained by the basic state of science in the field: They can certainly have a biased opinion but they can't go against established knowledge How can you tell if you're not also an expert? > the other party can also interrogate them and try to show holes in their argumentation Yes, and when the science is beyond the experience of the jury, experts giving opposite opinions will be as hard to distinguish as conflicting non-expert witness testimony (or even the testimony of the defendant compared to the accuser or litigant).
	▲	ceejayoz 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> at least expert witnesses are constrained by the basic state of science in the field This is absolutely not the case. > and the other party can also interrogate them and try to show holes in their argumentation Sure, and now the jury - with zero domain knowledge - sees two very confident sounding experts who disagree on a critical point... and you wind up with it coming down to which one was more likeable.
	▲	rbtbisrespected 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[dead]

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xxs 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

case in point - rounder corners worth billion(s)