this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2025
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Luigi Mangione
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Good thing we thought of that already (250 years ago or so) and don't let the prosecution just pick whoever they want to be on the jury.
Here, have a read: https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/jury-selection-criminal-cases.html
I'm mistaken, then, sounda as well thought out as the rest of the US system, like the winner-takes-all "democracy."
Man, those guys 250 years ago were so smart! Like so smart you should never ever do anything differently than they'd do it.
It's a pretty bedrock part of every nation with trials by jury that the accusers don't get to unilaterally select the jury. "Finding 12 people that will have him killed" would as you said, be easy. So would finding 12 people that would not. That's why the prosecution and the defense are given equal powers to appoint and reject jurors, in a process that sometimes goes on longer than the actual trial.
It’s interesting to me to note the differences in jury selection between the US and Australia: here in Aus (at least in my state of NSW) both sides get to strike jurors, but there isn’t a round of questioning - it’s purely based on physical appearance - and each side only gets three challenges (per accused person). That means for most trials, those with only one defendant, at least six of the original randomly selected jurors will end up serving.
I’ve done jury service twice - once I was part of the original 12 and wasn’t challenged, and the other time I replaced the last challenged juror but each side only ended up challenging two.
I feel like not being able to question jurors and having limited strikes makes the system far more random and, therefore, more just in terms of the jury being a random selection of citizens.
That is really interesting the differences there. I think the intended goal of the US system is to make sure that you get 12 people capable of being objective about the subject at hand, rather than 12 random people. For example, it usually takes all 12 jurors to make a conviction, so if you get just one person who won't convict no matter what because of religious reasons or pre-existing biases or whatever, then automatically you have a hung jury that can't be swayed by evidence. So the US system tries to insure we get 12 people who are willing to put aside their biases and be objective (enough) to render a verdict based on the facts before them either way the facts lead. So it's a long process, but in our system anyway we try to weed out anybody who might believe, for example, that all Mexicans are criminals if it's a Mexican on trial, or someone who doesn't believe that rape should be a crime in a rape case. And the big one of course, people who are already so convinced by media they've consumed that the person is guilty that they can't act as a fair juror.
Yeah, it seems clear that the goals are different and so the methods of selection have to be different in order to try to achieve those goals. I wonder if there are any statistics available to determine what approach results in more accurate results in terms of convictions! Personally I see the merit in both approaches, and potentially in other approaches to the jury selection process.