Re: My Take
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"Another problem with insisting on a numeric standard for guilt when this may be difficult to quantify accurately, is that it might push us away from a "jury of peers" system toward having "professional" jurors, perhaps trained in statistics. And while this might sound nice in terms of accuracy, its disadvantage for society is that it would undo one of the truly strong protections we have against tyrrany."
Truly strong? Cmon. A moderate protection perhaps. So how much of a reduction in the error rate of juries would be needed before you would accept the idea of eliminating people who can't think well from the jury pool. Especially if it was only done for whodonit cases.
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I'm not thrilled that some people have brains with (and forgive the appropriation) "very low horsepower" doing anything important.
That said, how much improvement do you think a change would actually supply?
Many wrongful convictions (for the record: I'm much more concerned with these than wrongful acquittals, although both are worth reducing) will result from judicial malpractice, unreliable witnesses, prosecutorial negligence or misconduct, police negligence or misconduct, etc - in other words, problems not necessarily solvable by a mere change in the makeup of the jury pool.
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