Over on my comic, reader Martenzo this morning asked: While this is off-topic for the current chapter, I got curious after reading about the recent Bundy acquittal in Oregon. Are you ever going to cover jury duty in greater detail, and will you mention jury nullification? Are you, as a...
Anyone who has served on a jury or tried a case knows that the American jury system is pretty stupid. Don’t get us wrong — it is absolutely without a doubt a sacred institution designed to ensure justice better than any other system we know of — but it’s still...
Back in the infancy of this blog, we wrote a piece called “No More Google Mistrials: A proposal for courts to adapt to modern life.” In it, we lamented that our jurisprudence hadn’t caught up with the realities of the internet age, and that mistrials were still being called whenever...
In more than a dozen years of conducting and observing felony jury trials, at both the state and federal level, we’ve seen enough jury nullification to know it’s a real phenomenon, and not merely anecdotal. We’ve seen jurors refuse to convict the most obviously guilty defendant, because they felt sorry...
Our jury system is supposed to maximize justice. So how come our system only makes it harder for jurors to do the right thing? Take this example: A judge in Florida today began reading some 100 pages of instructions to the jury in a case charging a lawyer with stealing...
“Google mistrials” are in the news again. Every few years, we hear about mistrials being declared because jurors were caught researching the facts online. It’s not a new phenomenon — there have always been jurors who felt the urge to find out for themselves what really happened — all that’s...
In 1963, the first year of comparable recordkeeping, 91% of murders were solved. In 2007, the number was only 61%. At the same time, the technological ability to solve murders increased dramatically. Scientific crime scene investigation significantly increases the amount of useful evidence that can be found. Digital crime labs...
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