The Jury- anyone watching?

I would have liked to have heard the judge’s summing up. I wonder why this was omitted? Because there were different outcomes?

I have served on a jury with case lasting 2 weeks. This “re-enactment” was very flawed in many ways but just confirmed my view that the jury system is outdated, does not deliver justice and should be replaced by a better system.

Jurors bring too much personal baggage and prejudice to their decision making and do not understand the law.
Normally the judge will give direction in his summing up but this didn’t happen in the tv programme.

Just read this on another site.
Quote:
In America juries are required to complete a questionnaire prior to jury selection. For example if the case involves sexual abuse anyone who has been abused or known someone abused is removed from selection. They are told if they falsely declare and it is subsequently found out they will be subject to sanction. It can also lead to a retrial. It's not perfect but it's done to prevent as much as possible bringing personal experience into jury deliberations.

I was always in the manslaughter group not because I don’t think he murdered her but I don’t think he murdered her with intent however the programme was very interesting but if that’s how juries work I think I d rather be tried without one
Some had their own addenda completely, sone were naive or black and white, some were dominant and bullying, some held back and went with the crowd

I see in the real trial he was convicted of manslaughter

I liked the idea of the Danish way where the are trained and pain for 12+months work sounds much more relevant

I haven’t done Jury service thank goodness. My DH has done it twice and DD once. Both had rapes. DD has been excused from jury service as the case was harrowing involving under age rape of a girl. DD hasn’t been the same since suffering with mental health - I think she was 18 or 19 at the time.

I did feel that the juries would have benefitted from an objective chair/foreman with legal knowledge to contribute and who could deflect the personal experience stories and get them to concentrate on the law. What exactly did they have to prove beyond reasonable doubt? - what does reasonable doubt means in this context? - what might be expected of an "ordinary" person?

What about having jury service as a career? If people are well trained, intelligent and analytical by nature they could apply to be professional jurors. I don't think that random, untrained people off the street are ever going to give a fair verdict, for all the reasons we've seen here. We have professional judges and barristers, why not the jury?

Training sessions will help to identify those who might be unable to understand the evidence for whatever reason, or who may be too emotional to come to an analytical decision, either just their nature or maybe trauma in their life which resurfaces when they are faced with someone else's trauma. It's very difficult, but every attempt should be made to find suitable jurors especially when murder is involved.

I agree that education and common sense are definitely not connected, but there must be a good level of education involved in order to understand what may be very complex evidence.

As things are, with the jury having no training, the foreman should not be one of the jurors! The foreman should be a trained person who will give everyone a fair hearing and stop any bullying. If the foreman is one of the jurors there's a good chance they may direct people to vote their way, or be unable to control some of the stronger characters.

The jury system does need to be looked at. Two groups of people who heard the same evidence have come to different verdicts and that is a problem. One group was pressurised by a man whose mission was to get everyone to agree with his opinion. The other group had to compromise but personal experience played a big part in decision making in both groups. We need to look at how it works in places where there is no jury involved.

I definitely think guidance and training would be beneficial for jurors and if that were the case, at such time possibly the suitability of prospective people could be assessed, for example how dispassionate they are likely to be in assessing the evidence.

I don't necessarily think education and common sense go hand in hand, a person could be highly educated but some qualities that would be required in a jury situation are innate and don't necessarily correlate to education.t I do think all jurors need to be assessed for their basic levels of understanding as what is to be presented before them. I did think some of the jurors were so overwrought in the programme that they were unable to make the right, beyond reasonable doubt judgement, I think if there were training sessions possibly such individuals might have been weeded out. I can't imagine how awful it would be to sit on a jury in the most extremely distressing cases that come up involving children, for example The Moors Murders, I imagine such an experience would never leave you.

Chestnut

Real trials can be complex and the evidence can be very difficult to understand. I think the jurors should:
1/ have a decent level of education
2/ speak English as their first language or at least be fully fluent.
3/ no criminal record and no serious trauma in their life

We have seen here that in coming to a verdict people go by their own experiences and instead of studying the evidence they work out what THEY would have done. They are not analytical in their judgement, they are emotional, and some of those jurors should not have been there.

Who decides the above though? In a flawed world you can never get perfection- I think there were some good ideas put forward at the end of the programme about how other countries do it, and one brief example of the Danes do it.

Point 1- education is importnat but if all the population are well educated (certainly not the case here in the UK) then this wouldn't be an issue. In Denmark they receive training which make a lot more sense.

Point 2- as far as I'm aware jurors have to fulfil this criteria, I don't know if translators are available and what the implications for this would be.

Point 3- eradicating serious trauma! How would you possibly do that? What if people don't want to make their business everyone else's business?

I also think people are forgetting this was television, not a serious court case- so the jury were not representative. However, I do think it ipens up some very necessary and important issues regarding our criminal justice system.

Real trials can be complex and the evidence can be very difficult to understand. I think the jurors should:
1/ have a decent level of education
2/ speak English as their first language or at least be fully fluent.
3/ no criminal record and no serious trauma in their life

We have seen here that in coming to a verdict people go by their own experiences and instead of studying the evidence they work out what THEY would have done. They are not analytical in their judgement, they are emotional, and some of those jurors should not have been there.

Jeremy Bamber received a guilty verdict, so I hope the jury were on the ball for that one. It was probably the most complicated trial ever and many people believe he was not guilty. He has been incarcerated since 1985, life imprisonment with a whole life tariff so I just hope this was the correct verdict.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Bamber

I watched it and thought it was an interesting experiment. Life experiences are obviously pivotal with some of the candidates, why wouldn't they be I guess it has to be said and of course that would have some bearing in their reaching the verdict they did. It did seem that both juries had some dominant characters, or maybe that's how it was edited. The man with all the rings certainly came across as one, and seemed to dominate the more reticent with his own point of view. I can't remember any of their names so I am describing them by appearance it did seem the black lady with the long hair had had her own unfortunate domestic issues in her life that had coloured her opinion and right from the start she wanted to go for "guilty" On the "guilty" jury I thought the older and younger black men were both very measured in their judgements of manslaughter when their jury delivered a 10/2 "guilty" verdict. I thought the very young student was a reflection of a person who hadn't really experienced life and possibly didn't appreciate how nuanced the case was, still at that very black and white stage. There were a couple of jurors on both sides, particularly an older lady who we didn't hear too much from, my overall opinion there were several resounding voices who appeared to dominate both procedural jury discussions. At times it all became over emotional and I thought the more dispassionate jurors were drowned out somewhat. Of course it was a highly emotive case, particularly as the accused was given to extended bouts of sobbing himself. I've never sat on a jury so I guess it's hard to say how one would react in a highly charged situation. The fact that two juries could reach different verdicts was quite sobering in that such serious outcomes can be reached on personal prejudices and the whims of random members of the public.

It was interesting to see plenty of casual misogyny given free reign and I felt one of the chaps in one team was a little bit of a bully. I was with the murder verdict as a second attack with a different method tipped it over for me. As in so many cases, it was in the interests of the defence to besmirch the victim as much as possible- inevitable but disturbing.

Yes I’m watching and finding the juries very disturbing. A lot of them bringing their own agendas to the decision making. Misogyny on display - and worryingly the murder victim seems to be more on trial than the perpetrator!

I sat on a totally irrational jury once. The court covered a huge area so jurors could be called up anywhere from dodgy areas of East London to leafy areas of Essex.

So I ended up on a jury of 12 where 5 people had the perspective that the police always lie, 5 people who were adamant that the police never lie - then me and another guy (middle aged history teacher) that actually wanted to talk about the evidence.

The verdicts we reached were in my mind correct, but the process was wild with sandwiches being a crucial and scary issue in the deliberations of some jurors.

The one underlying impression that I had was that there must have been a whole load of evidence and backstory that they chose not to present or perhaps it had been ruled inadmissible. We the jury had to suspend our disbelief that the Hackney serious crime squad had nothing better to do than try and convict the accused for "driving while disqualified" - they seemed to have used a lot of resources - surveillance, multiple officers involved, some who happened to see the guy "driving past" but didn't manage to stop him ....

I guess it's pretty obvious that some jurors will have to give way and go with the majority, otherwise how else could they ever reach a decision.

What I find absolutely terrifying is that the two juries came to a different verdict. I think that tells us that the jury system desperately needs changing, which was touched upon at the end.

HERE IS THE REAL TRIAL:
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-norfolk-21198156

I’m watching and finding it interesting. The jurors are obviously being very emotionally affected by the case, and by their fellow jurors’ reactions.
It’s surprising to me that their opinions are knee jerk reactions and not calmly reasoned.
It’s so distracting that they turn up each day wearing the same clothes. Can’t they go home and change?

Sadly both my husband and I found this tv programme very close to what happens in the Jury room. We did our Jury service and both came away hoping that we were never subject to the whims of a Jury. There isn't even a level of intelligence or education required and so things are often mind boggling. I sat through 2 cases and the 2nd one ended on the last Friday of the fortnightly Jury service period. People were actually open about not wanting to be there for a third week (for various reasons) so were happy to go with the majority view regardless of the evidence they had heard. I was absolutely horrified.

We found our guy not guilty, as we couldn't, beyond all reasonable doubt, say whether he was or not.

Also (on a roll now) when I did jury service the defence was so intent on complicating the facts and distracting us with totally irrelevant detail that most jurors fell for it .. I had to get them all to refocus . Plus the two men in the dock were actually in prison for another crime and one of them tried to leap out the witness box.. so really I had a strong intuitive hunch - no clear evidence back then - now there would be cameras .. it’s hard to get away with things today .

The point of this is to show the flaws in the justice system. You can never really know the facts without proper evidence . The demographic of these juries was not balanced . The naivety that he seems a nice guy .. he smashed her with a hammer ! He may have been a different person behind closed doors.but he was maybe just weak and eventually snapped under pressure .

It's a fascinating insight into an extremely difficult case. Obviously the actual deed is murder but the evidence about the personalities of the man and his wife are compelling and require consideration. The jury is also very interesting with one man being very loud and vocal while attempting to shut down other's opinions, in short, bullying. Some of the comments are thoughtful and perceptive and some just an opportunity for the usual suspects to take centre stage and talk about themselves. It does seem that the fetching of the hammer is a red flag.

oodles It seems likely to me that he wanted to make sure that she was dead.
This is the problem with cases like this, people can only speculate that something 'seems like......' but what we need is evidence and proof. That is what the verdict should be based on, not what people feel might have happened.