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Random selection is necessary to create stable meritocratic institutions

(assemblingamerica.substack.com)
360 points namlem | 2 comments | 14 Jul 25 15:28 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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like_any_other ◴[15 Jul 25 13:50 UTC] No.44571164[source]▶
> Juries, widely trusted to impartially deliver justice, are the most familiar instance.

Trusted by those that have not looked into whether this is actually the case. The first prime minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, was famously against trial by jury, because of how easily lawyers can abuse biases in multiracial societies, based on his first-hand experience [1].

A UK study found his experience is the norm, not the exception - Black and minority ethnic (BME) jurors vote guilty 73% of the time against White defendants, but only 24% of the time against BME defendants [2]. (White jurors vote 39% and 32% for convicting White and BME defendants, respectively. You read that correctly - Whites are also biased against other Whites, but to a much lesser degree)

Edit: To answer what is the alternative to juries: Not all countries use juries, in some the decision is up to the judge, and in some, like France, they use a mixed system of judges and jurors on a panel [3]. The French system would be my personal preference, with the classic jury system coming in second, despite my jury-critical post. Like democracy, it's perhaps the least bad system that we have, but we shouldn't be under any illusions about how impartial and perceptive a group of 12 people selected at random is.

[1] https://postcolonialweb.org/singapore/government/leekuanyew/...

[2] https://www.ucl.ac.uk/judicial-institute/sites/judicial-inst... - page 165 (182 by pdf reader numbering), figure 6.4

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury

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digitalPhonix ◴[15 Jul 25 14:20 UTC] No.44571429[source]▶
That statistic could also be the result of excessive prosecution against black/minorities and not necessarily just jury bias. (Which would also explain the white bias against whites)
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like_any_other ◴[15 Jul 25 14:45 UTC] No.44571673[source]▶
A universal counterargument that works on any data. But unlikely to be true, given that the UK sentenced a BME perpetrator to a short 2 years for one-punch-killing an 82-year-old veteran [1], while "threatening gestures" at police and chanting "who the f- is Allah" earn the White perpetrator 18 months in prison [2], and merely being present at a protest, while not engaging in any violence, earns 32 months in prison [3].

We also have to ask - if the biases in that study were flipped, if White jurors were far more likely to convict BME defendants, and pardon White defendants, and BME jurors were the more even-handed ones, would this not be trumpeted as conclusive evidence of racism?

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-derbyshire-66959198

[2] https://www.newhamrecorder.co.uk/news/24515551.london-disord...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/aug/08/pens...

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digitalPhonix ◴[15 Jul 25 15:29 UTC] No.44572201[source]▶
The sentence isn’t relevant to the jury bias discussion (unless the jury is involved in sentencing in the UK?)

> We also have to ask - if the biases in that study were flipped, if White jurors were far more likely to convict BME defendants, and pardon White defendants, and BME jurors were the more even-handed ones, would this not be trumpeted as conclusive evidence of racism?

Yes, but why is this relevant? That’s not the case in the statistics you cited.

My comment was pointing out that there are multiple possible (probably simultaneous) causes for the jury statistics.

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like_any_other ◴[15 Jul 25 15:43 UTC] No.44572335[source]▶
> The sentence isn’t relevant to the jury bias discussion

It's relevant as an indicator of the bias, or lack thereof, of the system as a whole.

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1. m-watson ◴[15 Jul 25 15:48 UTC] No.44572391[source]▶
The very study you cited states in their initial summary of findings that "The study provides the first evidence to support a widely held belief: that racially mixed juries do not discriminate against defendants based on the defendant’s ethnic background. While the assumption has been that racially mixed juries will not discriminate against ethnic minority defendants, this study showed that racially mixed juries also did not discriminate against White defendants.[0]"

[0]https://www.ucl.ac.uk/judicial-institute/sites/judicial-inst... - page iv

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2. like_any_other ◴[15 Jul 25 23:01 UTC] No.44576819[source]▶
Because the bias was diluted by the other jurors - from the passage on page iii, I assume the juries in the study were only 10-33% BME. The study follows your quote with:

Even though the defendant’s ethnicity did not have an impact on jury verdicts, the research found that in certain cases ethnicity did have a significant impact on the individual votes of some jurors who sat on these juries. Statistical analysis of the individual votes of all 319 jurors who took part in the case simulation showed that in certain cases BME jurors were significantly less likely to vote to convict a BME defendant than a White defendant. [..]

The report concludes that this highlights the benefits of permitting majority verdicts and of having 12 member juries. The fact that 12 jurors must jointly try to reach a decision and that majority verdicts are possible meant that more verdicts were achieved and individual biases did not dictate the decision-making of these racially mixed juries. If juries were smaller or if unanimous verdicts were required, then individual juror bias might potentially have a greater impact on jury verdicts.