Jury Duty is slavery!

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You pulled a clever scam by exploiting the dumb public's ignorance about asperger's to get out of jury duty.

Pretty slick!

But now you're "disturbed" that the scam worked?

But then you contradict yourself by saying it wasnt a scam, and that you really are incompetent to serve on a jury.

But then you contradict yourself AGAIN by saying aspies can serves as judges or anything else, but for some reason cant be trused to serve on juries.

Im sorry, but im confused as to what your point is.

Aspies would make perfect jurors. The would pay attention to the facts and nothing else.

ruveyn

Quite.

And while I am quite aware of the base sense of peer here, I cannot help thinking some updating and restructuring of the concept might improve the setup.

Scam? I wasn't involved in any scam.

I did not exploit "the public's" ignorance of AS to avoid jury service. I talked to a judge during a sidebar with lawyers present. It was not a great big public announcement. Neither naturalplastic nor anyone else should presume that those people were all ignorant of AS.

And I did not argue with them. I stated a fact, and it was enough for them to know that they did not want me on the jury panel.

There are multiple purposes of a jury, one of which is to convince the public that the testimony and evidence were weighed fairly by the jury. The topic of jurors with AS undermines this role of convincing the public that the trial was finished properly. The concern is that the juror with AS might misapprehend the social cues in the testimony, or from other jurors in the deliberations. I will not be going any further in debating this. If you want to do it with other members, you are all on your own.

The topic of having AS should not be avoided by prospective jurors with AS, because the avoidance would probably be perjury if the affected juror understood the diagnosis and were asked whether he or she might have an impediment to conducting a fair trial. You cannot have a closed natural communication channel which the public would expect you to have open, and also be conducting a fair review of the testimony. People being deposed in court (like jurors in voir dire) do not have any particular right to privacy or to keep secrets while answering the questions. Again, argue it amongst yourselves, not with me.

As for whether the aspie would almost always be dismissed, it was simply a prediction. If the judge, the lawyers, and the parties want you on the case, and you have not hesitated to discuss AS during voir dire, then you are qualified to be on the panel.

As for my comparison of judges to jurors: There are safeguards in the appointment of judges. Judges are uniquely qualified by their experience and education, and through the process by which they were selected. On the other hand, when a jury is composed, it is selected from random members of the public. The competence of a jury is safeguarded merely by a brief interview with the judge and counsel, and by the honesty of the jurors.

And no, serving on a jury is not a personal legal right that can be protected. The government wants people to feel that way, so that they feel good about doing the job. People like having notions of entitlement and empowerment. The truth is that people do not legally have an option of accepting or avoiding the role. What is more, juries will not be purely random and egalitarian, since the members are cherry-picked by judges and lawyers after depositions called voir dire.

I won't be talking about my feelings. I have said enough now.

Okay.
Im sorry
You werent trying to avoid jury duty you were just being honest about the fact that you had aspergers and the lawyers just made of it what they made of it.
Basically its like most things everyone reveals about themselves in jury selection.
Your aspergers was just one more of the dozens of factors that the opposing lawyers put in the cauldron to do their mysterious alchemy of picking who they want on their jury and ( like you said) its niether an honor nor a dishoner to make it on the jury.

It may not have had to do with them thinking you were impaired so much as thinking it would make you biased in some way.

Who knows. Maybe one lawyer was afraid your aspergers would make your judgement too good and too accurate- and that might have hurt his case!

The judge told us not to even try to devine how lawyers pick their juries the last time I was called for jury duty.

Such as making jury service voluntary.

We have people giving blood voluntarily, we have people helping sick folks voluntarily, why not have voluntary jurors as long as they are legally qualified to hear a case.

ruveyn

Exactly what makes them undesirable.

I think it would be interesting if the courts started taking volunteer juries in cases where both disputing parties request the arrangement in advance. I couldn't predict whether lawyers would ever be interested in bringing cases to volunteers though.

But there are reasons not to volunteer very often. A person's voluntary participation might later provoke the suspicion of one of the parties, and the volunteer could be sued for trying to control the outcome of the case.

You seem to labour under a misapprehension of the role of a jury.

Juries are "triers of fact," who are there to make decisions about the facts demonstrated by the evidence, and to apply the law as they are instructed in it by the judge's charge. However, those decisions about facts require jurors to make assessments of credibility. When two witnesses tell mutually incompatible stories, it is left to the jury to determine which of them (if either) is telling the truth. Focussing on, "facts and nothing else," is a failure to focus on those aspects of a witness' demeanour that tend to establish or detract from credibility.

the only way to rationally disambiguate conflicting testimony is by way of the questions the opposing attorney s ask. Going by body language is dicey and of questionable reliability. A good actor could fool the unwary.

ruveyn

On the contrary--juries are remarkably good at sorting out the credible from the incredible. One of the reasons that trial by jury has lasted as long as it has is that the legal profession in England and Wales has an abiding respect for the clarity of decision making that results from a very unstructured deliberative process. In Canada and the United States we inherited a product that was simple, elegant and had centuries of testing and refinement. The difficulty today is finding 12 disinterested people in a world in which editorial content is a few keystrokes away.

It's an old aphorism in the law that you never prove anything in cross-examination, but you can give the witness an opportunity to disprove everything.

I lied in my defense to the post by naturalplastic, whose apology I utterly accept.
I have more to say, and might debate aspies on juries.

I like how naturalplastic called the empanelment process alchemy, because that's what it is.

When going to court, it helps to have an open mind and a sense of awe and humor about what should happen. Graveyard humor, much like the Monte Carlo cups loaded into the court's coffee dispenser at my venue of service.

What we do to people in courts is voodoo and it is downright medieval. We call the jinn on them, which really does involve some sophisticated wizardry. The logic in doing it is hard to refute, because centuries have shown that the surest way to make quarreling parties settle down is to start calling the jinn.

Behind a curtain of nerve-rattling seriousness among the participants, we are really going "MUUUU-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-AHH ... OOOOOgaboogaboogaboogaboogaboogabooga ... SHAK-alakalakalakalakalaka ... aummm aummm aummm ...".

The spirit which we are calling is the great and terrible jinn, the electrifying Prudent Person. The Prudent Person is metaphysical and lurks in the recesses of every courthouse. It is the sum total of the hive mind's expectations and compulsions. It is perfect in an infinite number of ways, does not receive much love despite how it defends people, and has never cracked a smile toward an aspie. The jinn may be prudent, but it is chilling if ever it grants a wish.

It is so scary that nations write preponderances of laws in desperate attempts to manage it. But no book has ever been written which was too heavy for the jinn to just pick up and throw through somebody.

The goal is to have it possess and act within all participants. And the participants must remember that the supernatural cannot be invoked without surrender and an open mind. If somebody damages the seance of rationality by doing something not expected of him or her, the jinn may not be called (mistrial) or the process might even blow up.

What is expected of a diagnosed aspie in the jury, is to disclose and discuss it with the judge and counsel before the aspie ends up in the coven (meaning the chosen panel). An aspie in the coven is a ritualistic mismatch, like white shoes with black pants.

At trial, I played the part needed of me. As a juror, I was questioned about whether I could form fair opinions for the case. My opinion was that I did not have an opinion, and would not have an opinion because I could not have one.

How come five percent of the felons convicted of murder in the State of Illinois by jury were later found to be innocent of the crimes of which they were convicted. I would say juries are piss poor at making rational judgments.

ruveyn

I think there are two relevant issues. First of all, no system is perfect, and any panel of jurors, whether coopted or volunteer is liable to error. But I agree that a demonstrated 5% margin of error is unacceptably high.

The other factor that I think is relevant is related to competence of counsel, both prosecutorial and defence. The rules of disclosure have become more stringent over time, meaning that today prosecutors are effectively barred from trial by ambush. However, at the time that some of these convictions were entered, it may be possible that prosecutors had more discretion about withholding disclosure, leaving defendants less prepared to respond to evidence.

In addition, prosecutors are generally required to disclose all relevant evidence to the defence in advance of trial, not just the evidence that the prosecution intends to introduce. A failure to disclose relevant evidence that tends to exculpation (even a legitimate failure under earlier rules) could well have hampered the defence.

At the end of the day we are left to speculate why the juries found as they did. None of us were present at the trial or in the jury room. But I do believe that there are other circumstances that are more likely to have contributed to wrongful conviction than incapacity of the jury.

As I understand the rules of court, the prosecution is only required to disclose evidence that will be (or likely will be) introduced at trial against a defendant. There is no duty to disclose exculpatory evidence, but there might be ethics violations is the defense can prove the prosecution had evidence proving the innocence of the accused but chose to prosecute anyhow.

The duty of the state to prove guilt implies that innocence is the norm. The ethical problem is that juries often believe in the guilt of the accused by virtue of the person being on trial in the first place.

I cannot, of course, speak to the rules of court in other jurisdictions, but Canadian law has been abundantly clear since R. v. Stinchcombe in 1991. The relevant law was more recently summarized: