How are we supposed to convene an impartial jury for a trial involving high profile political people? [USA]
Supporters of the person would just vote non-guilty and opponents would just vote guilty. It would just result in hung juries over and over.
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How does the court system evaluate that? That seems like a super hard thing to check.
Jury selection usually involves asking the prospective jurors various questions, with the lawyers on each side being allowed to dismiss jurors they think will be biased.
jury selection is a very tedious process where every juror is interviewed by the judge and possibly both sides. They get whittled down by the court before being fully assigned, and then the prosecution and defense get to boot a certain number of jurors.
advising on jury selection is actually very lucrative business with both sides dishing out massive amounts of cash to make those checks.
in any case, in this situation, it's not that they're looking for unbiased jurors, it's that they're looking to balance out the biases of the individual jurors with jurors of apposing bias. I mean, you'd have to be living under a rock at this point to not have a bias as far as trump is concerned.
But what if the person balancing the biases is biased?
It's not balanced by a single person. The lawyers from both the prosecution and the defense do it adversarialy.
Oh, clever
They are. One is the prosecutor and the other is the defense.
Judges normally follow a very strict procedure on who to kick, like people that may have worked for trump or family, etc, so it’s at least supposed to be objective. The lawyers are the ones sorting subjectively
What if you die stepping out of the shower? All choices have consequences and nothing is perfect, at some point you have to accept that certain things are not and cope anyway.
You can't just balance out the bias though.
If one juror just plain will not return a guilty or not guilty verdict, then the whole trial is for naught.
Pretty sure it’s a hung jury and they do it again (or bring in an alternate that’s been in the trial watching every thing as well.)
You’re right it’s a problem. Would you prefer trial by combat?
For Trump? Yes!
I’d prefer trial by ordeal. Hog tie him and toss him in a pond. Sinking? Innocent. Floating guilty.
The problem is this system would almost certainly opress more people.
Our current system is quite flawed. But it’s not nearly as flawed as it could be
Voir dire is the process, if you lie you go to jail