It always seemed odd to me, the Jury. It never quite sat right with me. Everyday people with no real knowledge of the legal system kind of makes sense on the surface; appeal to common sense & common morality.
Each person goes through a vetting stage to make sure they're sound of mind and can be unbiased as possible, and are randomly selected per trial.
Again, always sounded good to me, but something at the back of my mind itched.
Then I came across this little data fact from research by the Ministry of Justice and I'll be honest, it scratched that itch immediately:
In the gargantuan 244 page report, it states:
These studies found that the race of the defendant may affect Black jurors’ judgements more
than it affects White jurors’ judgements, and found specifically that Black jurors exhibited
same-race leniency towards Black defendants and were more likely to rate White defendants
more harshly than Black defendants
Now there's details and questions you can think about all day here - This particular result can be found on page 182. But the point here is humans are human, and humans are tribal.
And there's no fiddling around with the details we can do to avoid that. Black people vote other black people innocent far more often. They vote white people guilty far more often. White people do not do this, in fact the opposite, possibly due to an insufferable feeling of white guilt.
And this is not to pick specifically on black folk, as it does say BME (black / minority ethnic), but I'm also sure in some regions where the jury is selected with a different culture of white folk, the shoe would be on the other foot.
My concern is even stronger when considering secular/religious division.
Let's say a Pakistani Muslim is on trial. Pakistanis stick together extremely strong, perhaps more than any other 'community' - don't get me started on the cost to the NHS as a result of their incestuous relationships. Since they stick together, the region in which the jurors are selected would be majority Pakistani too, so we would expect the jury to have a significant proportion of other Pakistani Muslims.
Well, what do you expect the results to be in this case? Completely fair, unbiased and based solely on the evidence presented? Gimme a break.
I'm not just being jaded, either. There are now multiple Members of Parliament in constituencies across the country who were voted in purely along religious lines in the UK. Their vote was due to the majority populations in the area being Muslim, and their focus was explicitly and openly about supporting Palestine. We know this, because when they won, their victory speech was simply about Palestine, and chanting about freeing palestine.
What on earth that has to do with fixing the roads and improving the recycling service, I have no idea. Because it didn't matter. They were voting, in the UK, on purely Islamic lines. This is what they do.
Decades or centuries ago, I have no doubt the English folk would have had a particular class bias. Perhaps as simple as favouring your own class (working/middle/upper) and discriminating against the others.
In the USA, It must surely be true that white people would have been racially charged enough for white people to just call black people guilty without so much as listening to a single scrap of evidence - there are, after all, plenty of stories of falsely accused black folk who ended up in the chair, their convictions only being overturned many years after their deaths.
And so what am I to take away from that?
It's outdated.
A jury, to me, seems like it may be most functional when taking place in a homogenous society. Not necessarily simply a skin colour thing although that's certainly a big factor. But religion and culture will also be playing a strong part in this. When the jury system came to be, that is how society was. 100% white English with the same heritage and customs, the same food, language and belief systems, and the same understanding of the law.
Now - FUN FACT - our jury doesn't even need to consist of citizens. All you need is the ability to vote and to have lived in the UK for 5 years.
This means people who were born and raised in Malawi,Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Jamaica, Poland, New Zealand, Uruguay, Spain, USA, Argentina, Hungary, and dozens more, can serve on our jury after hanging out for merely five years. They could have zero connection to our land or legal system, no ties of any kind. And they can just appear in our courts with their own country's legal systems in their mind, and make judgements based on that.
This seems absolutely mortifyingly wrong to me. People around the world simply do not share the same values as us. That's ok, for them. They can have their own values which we also do not share. But that is surely going to influence the outcome of our criminal justice system significantly.
As far as I'm aware, there are no other countries in this world that have the same broken allowances in place.
This is not just speculation either - this isn't a new phenomenon. in the 1960's, Singapore, one of the most ethnically diverse places in the world, found that their own judicial system simply couldn't function 'due to jurors choosing to convict or acquit based solely on ethnic prejudice rather than the facts of the case', and ultimately abolished it. You see, Singapore inherited the British legal system, a system divined in the British Isles for British homogenous society.
Singapore in the 1960s was marked by significant ethnic tensions, exemplified by the 1964 and 1969 race riots between Malay and Chinese communities. These riots highlighted deep-seated ethnic divisions, raising concerns about whether juries could remain impartial in a multi-ethnic society
Lee Kuan Yew, the prime minister at the time, is said to have used this to his advantage when he was a criminal defense lawyer, stirring hatred against white people to get an acquittal on his clients, four Malayians accused of killing a Royal Air Force Officer and his family.
It was the guilt of his actions here that convinced him that, in the context of a very diverse Singapore, this form of judicial system simply could not work.
Well, the UK is now and will forever increasingly be, a multi-ethnic, highly diverse nation. Even as recently as the 90's, we were about 95% ethnically white. Now that number is down to the 70%'s. London is closer to 35%.
We are not the same country, and we will never be the same country again. The justice system needs to adapt accordingly, or we are going to see, more and more, very clearly guilty criminals of one tribe getting away with their crimes, and clearly innocent people of 'the other tribe' being convicted unjustly.
There's a case to be made in numerous trials in the US that it's already happening over there. But I've already made my point pretty clear, I reckon.
FIX IT!
I got called up for Jury Duty a few years back. During the height of Covid. We had to wear masks in the court, in the jury room, in the building, etc. We only unmasked to eat, some of us in the Jury room, others in a park nearby.
The case I was on ended in a hung jury. The judge's words are the only thing that struck me "you must be convinced beyond all reasonable doubt". For me, a highly analytical person - there was plenty of reasonable doubt - not just from the defense's case, but also for the gaps in that defense the prosecutor didn't open.
At one point, the case for the prosecution asked a line of questioning that had answers of "yes" for the defendant - except, when he said "no", to one - she didn't stop, she kept asking the follow up questions that would require a yes to any prior question in her chain.
The passion and pride in her voice even escalated in a theatrical manner as she did this. It was only four questions later, her, perhaps lost in an elevated stage in her mind - that she realised, and rescinded that entire line of questioning.
The one thing I observed, and the one thing I learned - the process doesn't respect anyone's time. It had been something like 10 years since the alleged events.
That's wild for somebody presumably on a massive paycheck after decades of education in the field... I feel like incompetence generally has spread much more far and wide than we all appreciate... Another reason to be cautious about the systems in place.
Not that I have a solution...
I can apply this to the entire British services of any kind, tbh. Waiting 18 months to 2 years for life saving surgery, backlogs in all forms of stuff going back in queues of millions of people... No surprise why people are on the streets protesting right now more than any time I've ever seen
The prosecutor was fairly young, probably 2-3 years into her tenure, but still, I wasn't the only one in the jury box who noticed.
I wasn't even the most educated person in that jury. We had school teachers (x2!) an engineer, a paramedic, a doctor, a mechanic who was hilarious and I got along with very well, and a bunch of other forgetful faces, because they were mostly behind masks.
Oh oh! Public Service(s)! That reminds me about the ordeal I had with the Post office recently that I WILL turn into a post. I will write it in a very satirical and irritated manner, but only because that is the only way to cope with such systemic failure.
The issue still isn't resolved, even though I provided them with all the required paperwork. I will... write that shortly, and publish it ... in the future. (I have such a queue of things ... queued, and I don't want to mess with the order!
I often go and read the sentencing remarks - if I need a cure for my insomnia - and they're sometimes hilarious, particularly when beyond from the legalese and procedural prose, comes a heckle from the gallery or the prisoner, and the language goes from formal to cutting profanity.
Haha this is my favourite kind of read - a good old rant about the state of things XD
Will pop by to read if I haven't died by then from overheating (A/C isn't working at work.. .37C every day)
I hope you survive not only this day, but the rest of the days. I have stuff scheduled up for like... the next ten days at this rate. I have TOO MANY WORDS.
They are chasing me, always. But I kind of like it.
People are biased. This is possibly something AI will do in the future better. The early attempts create bias though, because they are based on historical data, where bias already existed.
People are toying with Grok lately and it's gone all viral. Some update made it so it finds white supremacist dog whistles in literally anything; photos of burgers, a dog standing on two feet, a regular bald guy... Even Grok's own logo. Pretty funny. But clearly, a long way to go if we're gonna start using it in court
Congratulations @mobbs! You have completed the following achievement on the Hive blockchain And have been rewarded with New badge(s)
Your next target is to reach 85000 upvotes.
You can view your badges on your board and compare yourself to others in the Ranking
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word
STOP