My statements didn’t included citations but my argument did reference multiple studies and post verdict interviews, a subtle difference.
Here’s a quote for my 3/4 agree, 5x more likely to convict when they disagree: “ The judge and jury in the Kalven-Zeisel survey of 3,500 criminal cases agreed in 78% of the cases on whether or not to convict. When they disagreed, the judge would have convicted when the jury acquitted in 19% of the cases, and the jury convicted when the judge would have acquitted in 3% of the cases” https://criminal-justice.iresearchnet.com/forensic-psycholog...
Feel free to look up some more, there’s some variation here.
The term is quite literally meaningless to some people yet: “In one case, a jury asked for a “layman’s” explanation of “reasonable doubt,” and an appellate court said the trial judge acted properly by simply rereading the original charge.”
I could go on, but instead I am going to simply ask you for some demonstration as to why you think it is commonly applied.
> Yet you made no reference to it in your poorly executed attack.
I am not attacking you and I did make direct reference to this.
You wrote:
> In practice reasonable doubt is generally ignored by juries.
> Interviews of post conviction juries show they often convict
> people who they have serious doubts actually committed the crime.
> They say stuff like, “If he’s innocent it will be reversed on appeal.”
I wrote:
> While the system is not perfect and errors do occur, the claim
> that juries "generally" ignore the standard of reasonable doubt
> is a sweeping statement.
You then wrote:
> It’s a sweeping statement backed up by actual evidence.
I then wrote:
> Actually your post containing the sweeping statement doesn't
> contain any evidence.
It's correct that you didn't support the claim.
Your own evidence didn't substantiate your claim, it directly refuted it.
You posted a Kalven-Zeisel study comparing the decision-making processes and outcomes of judges and juries in trials which concluded that judges and juries generally agree on verdicts in a high percentage of cases (78%). In fact, it is stated that "when they disagreed, the judge would have convicted when the jury acquitted in 19% of the cases, and the jury convicted when the judge would have acquitted in 3% of the cases—a net leniency rate of 16%". The study that you've given me shows that when the jury and judge disagree, the jury is more lenient than the judge. This directly refutes your subsequent claim that "Interviews of post conviction juries show they often convict people who they have serious doubts actually committed the crime. They say stuff like, “If he’s innocent it will be reversed on appeal”" and indicates that the jury err on the side of reasonable doubt rather than ignore it.
The article you have subsequently posted is about the interpretations and articulation of what "reasonable doubt" means to juries. It does not substantiate any claims about "reasonable doubt" being generally ignored by juries or make any claims about them being more likely to convict. It's conclusions are about how "reasonable doubt" might be better communicated or understood.
I specifically said they agree most of the time. The fact that judges are more likely to convict means it’s a risky option, but says nothing about accuracy of either option.
> It does not substantiate any claims about “reason doubt”
There’s zero possibility for someone to use a standard they don’t understand. Every single case where a Jury is confused as to the standard is a case where they aren’t using it.
Any suggestion that they follow a standard requires them to both understand the standard and for them to apply it. If 60% understand and 60% of those that understand follow it then 36% are following the standard. (No those numbers shouldn’t be taken as an argument.)
The Kalven-Zeisel study indicates that juries and judges agree on verdicts 78% of the time, suggesting they have similar interpretations of the evidence. When they do disagree, juries are more lenient 19% of the time, indicating they don't 'ignore' the standard of reasonable doubt but may actually err on the side of it. Your supplementary article doesn't prove that juries generally misunderstand 'reasonable doubt' either. So, neither of your sources substantiate your claim that juries 'generally ignore' the standard of reasonable doubt and instead choose to convict when they have "serious doubts".
78% agreement isn’t a sign of one side consistently following the reasonable doubt standard. Juries could beat 50% by picking randomly.
3% of the time a judge disagrees with all 12 members of the jury that someone is innocent. Considering what percentage of defendants are likely guilty that’s a surprisingly high probability.
The 78% agreement rate between judges and juries suggests a shared interpretation of evidence, which indirectly indicates both are following the same 'reasonable doubt' standard.
The 3% disagreement where judges would have convicted doesn't prove juries 'ignore' reasonable doubt; it reflects normal variance in human judgment.
Legal decisions aren't coin tosses—such a high agreement is unlikely if both parties weren't generally applying the same legal standard.
Again, Juries that don’t know what is meant by this term will use some standard, but reasonable doubt is supposed to have a specific meaning.
I am not suggesting legal results are actually a coin toss, just that this level of agreement doesn’t require shared logic let alone using the same standard. If you have two people roll a dice with 90% yes and 10% no then they will agree 0.9 * 0.9 + 0.1 * 0.1 = 82% of the time with absolutely zero logic involved. A much lower standard say ‘the preponderance of the evidence’ is easily enough to hit 78% agreement which is really quite low.
Nobody other than yourself is arguing that reasonable doubt is being generally ignored by juries. You either misunderstood the Kalven-Zeisel study that you brought to the argument or you failed to read it.
The study showed that juries had a higher threshold for conviction than judges, which is a direct repudiation of your point that "reasonable doubt is generally ignored by juries. Interviews of post conviction juries show they often convict people who they have serious doubts actually committed the crime." It also explained that similar results to this had been reproduced many times over.
It's not even conclusive that it is purely due to juries having a different interpretation of reasonable doubt as it is explained that "Much more research is needed to map experimentally the differences and similarities between the judgments of judges and juries before concluding that judges are better than juries at specific tasks (e.g., assessing risk) or that deliberations enable juries to outperform judges on other tasks (e.g., assessing conflicting testimony)."
To be clear, your claim that juries are more likely to convict was disproven by your own data and your claim that they ignore "reasonable doubt" is unlikely given that they err on the side of reasonable doubt. The later article you posted doesn't really have anything to say about either of these things, but instead presents better ways to articulate the idea of reasonable doubt to a jury.
I don't find your latest argument about dice rolling persuasive either as (1) it's not an empirical argument, and (2) this oversimplifies the complex dynamics of legal decision-making and doesn't effectively challenge the implications drawn from the Kalven-Zeisel study -- unlike the randomness of dice, legal decisions are derived from a deliberative process grounded in law, evidence, and rational argumentation.
Summarizing the 2 statements (without commenting on their accuracy or veracity):
(1) A statistical smell test: A random dice roll (under reasonable[?] assumptions) achieves an agreement rate of 82%.
(2) unlike the randomness of dice, legal decisions are derived from a deliberative process grounded in law, evidence, and rational argumentation.
Retrics argument appears to be: For (2) to empirically pass (1), the agreement rate between judges and juries must thus be >>82%. The Kalvin-Zeisel study found a rate of 78%.
I'm out-of-steam with this argument but making a probability-derived argument based on a cherry-picked agreement rate of 90% instead of an empirical argument that considers the legal deliberation process and culture that produced this agreement rate isn't persuasive to me.
Kalven-Zeisel specifically argues "Disagreement rates were no higher when the judge characterized the evidence as difficult than when the judge characterized it as easy, suggesting that the disagreements were not produced by the jury’s inability to understand the evidence." It seems impossible to mathematically tease out how much of the agreement comes from a shared understanding of the reasonable doubt standard vs other facts from the case -- either way, the idea that juries generally ignore reasonable doubt and err towards convicting people is not evidenced.
You haven't substantiated your claim.