Jury service: Does it need an audit/supervisor?

Quantum Erasure · 04-08-2025 04:11AM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123688432#Comment_123688432

You can't handle the truth!

plodder · 04-08-2025 10:55AM

I served on a criminal jury not too long ago. It was mostly a positive experience. The jury members were a very impressive cross section of the community and did it to the best of their ability. The specific directions from the judge were also clear. Aside from that we were completely and surprisingly on our own. Of course, you are supposed to all trudge down to the court which has to be reconvened to deal with queries to the judge from the jury, and we did that at least once. But, the effort involved means there's a threshold for the perceived "importance" of the question and a reluctance to keep doing it. Nobody ever mentioned anything about jury confidentiality. I was expecting some kind of "debrief" at the end of the case, but there was nothing, just sent on our way. I see all the practical (and theoretical) problems with a facilitator, even one who sits outside the jury room and is only called in when necessary. That job might be like the jury minder, but able to answer certain procedural questions. We were half way through deliberating when it transpired that some jurors thought if we failed to find the accused guilty, they were automatically innocent. I would have thought a few printed pages of general information would be the least that jury members should get.

skallywag · 04-08-2025 11:05AM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123688340#Comment_123688340

Women have been able to participate in jury duty for quite some time?

magicbastarder · 04-08-2025 11:11AM

that was part of the joke.

Claw Hammer · 05-08-2025 12:45PM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123690600#Comment_123690600

IF you weren't warned , you weren't on a jury at all and this is a troll. Everything that is said and happened in the jury room is part of the case details and if leaked would enable the defendant to argue against the fairness of her trial.

cml387 · 06-08-2025 08:29AM

Having recently been selected for jury service (but not rquired in the end) , one thing struck me.

When the roll was called, I would guess that maybe 70-80% were not present. So the few that were there were already demonstrating a sense of civic mindiness that would work well in a jury room.

Plus I doubt if there was any sanction for those who didn't attend.

Peregrinus · 06-08-2025 09:09AM

About 20-25% of those summoned do attend. But the rest are not necessarily in breach.

A proportion of those summoned are exempt due to age or profession. (The relevant data isn't included in the electoral register, from which summons are randomly drawn, so there's no mechanism for filtering these people out before summonses are issued.)
Some apply for, and are granted, an exemption.
Some apply for, and are granted, a deferral. (Deferrals and exemptions are both fairly easy to get.)

A study done in the Dublin circuit some years ago found that only about 20% of those summoned attended, but only about 10% were no-shows without explanation. The remaining 70% were either automatically exempt, were granted an exemption or were granted a deferral. I don't know if the experience in other parts of the country is similar.

On the issue raised by the OP of how good jurors are at discharging their duties as they should, when it comes to considering evidence and finding a verdict, the key issue is not how good each individual juror is, but whether juries function collectively to do this effectively and properly — is the inattention, laziness, prejudice, etc of some jurors "neutralised" by the fact that other jurors do what they should?

When you're picking jurors at random and compelling them to serve under pain of penalty, it's pretty well inevitable that you will have a proportion of people on juries who are not very good at the job, and/or not very keen to do it. That's not a bug; it's a feature of the system — the whole point is that the jury are not experts, or a collection of people pre-approved as being apt, willing, etc; they're just a bunch of citizens, warts and all. And some of them will be pretty warty.

The aim is not to exclude the warty ones; it's to develop processes and cultures through which juries arrive at correct and proper verdicts, even with the participation of the warty jurors. To test that, you don't need to eavesdrop on jury deliberations; you look at the verdicts and measure them against the evidence presented. How may verdicts are perverse, given the evidence presented? How many verdicts are set aside on appeal, on grounds which suggest the jury cannot have properly considered the evidence?

Royal Legend · 06-08-2025 09:18AM

We're you the foreman of the jury by any chance?

Peregrinus · 06-08-2025 09:56AM

No. I was summonsed once but I'm exempt!

magicbastarder · 06-08-2025 01:18PM

i was summonsed twice. first time all juries were formed before they got to me, and second time i got a second letter a week beforehand telling me not to attend (was late 2021 or 2022) as there was a shortage of judges to hear cases.

Jury service: Does it need an audit/supervisor?

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