Contra Scott Greer on Juries
Juries aren't infallible, but they're usually pretty okay.
Due to a failure in my browser permissions I read and began submitting a comment on Scott Greer’s article Trial By Jury Is Now A Joke regarding the Trump trial before realizing when I went to submit that his Substack comments are locked to paid subscribers, as is, of course, his right. But it so happened that I already had the comment typed up figured I might as well publish it before it dries up like a raisin or explodes.
The jury is one of the last things to blame in the Trump case. Juries are triers of fact, not triers of law, and the facts of the case here are fairly straightforward. I think that not even Greer would contest that Donald Trump 1. falsified a business record 2. with Cohen 3. to support his campaign 4. without reporting the expenditure; if the jury agrees with those facts, they are instructed to convict. The problem is with the fact that a tailor-made felony prosecution was ginned up for such a petty offense in the first place and very much not that the jury observed a bunch of straightforward facts and followed the jury instructions.
Greer proceeds to highlight some miscarriages of justice by juries. It is without question that there are in fact idiotic, insane, and evil jurors out there, but it’s a bit less common to get a full slate of twelve such idiotic, insane, or evil jurors, so I will be passing over the mistrials and deadlocks. The most supposedly horrifying acquittals are the following:
A black man in Iowa was found not guilty of murder in 2022 for his role in the death of his white girlfriend. He severely beat the victim and the woman fell from her apartment balcony during the assault. She died from the fall. The jury found the black man not responsible for the death—only for the assault.
A black man in South Carolina was found not guilty in 2021 [sic; link is wrong] after shooting and killing a white retired volunteer fire chief as the victim sat in his car. The shooter claimed the victim startled him and that was a sufficient explanation to find him innocent of murder.
It's not clear the jury got the South Carolina or Iowa cases wrong. If you shoot someone because you were startled, even unreasonably so, that does in fact mean you are not guilty of murder under South Carolina law, because in South Carolina murder conviction requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt of malice aforethought.1 The state could have prosecuted him for manslaughter and put him away for 30 years, but they declined. In the Iowa case, beating a woman so viciously until she tries to escape over the balcony to her death is not murder. I'd wager it's more likely than not that he pushed her but I wouldn't bet on it at ten-to-one. The jury can consider the defendant as responsible for the death as they like (I'd wager every single juror in the room did) but that does not create a murder conviction, and the lack of any charge available between class-A murder and class-D assault is a defect either of the prosecution or the available law. Once finding their facts, juries are restricted by a judge-presented flowchart as to the verdict they must deliver.2
And it's not like these were random jury trials. These were, I assume, Greer’s choice to pick the absolute worst of the worst across millions of trials in America every year. If there's any problem with these cases it's with the prosecutors and with the law, and the fact that these absolute worst miscarriages of justice ever turned out to be fairly normal intersections of bad facts and bad law gives me, if anything, confidence that trial by jury is superior to most of its alternatives - and definitely superior to trial by internet pundit.
The theory presented by the defense is that Dunham was scared that Stevens was reaching for something in his car and proceeded to run away while firing at the car. This would make him guilty of astonishing and callous disregard for life, horrific judgement, and rank stupidity - but probably not malice aforethought.
Well, they can nullify, but presumably if you think juries are morons you would hardly want them overruling judges given that the only plausible alternative to jury trial is bench trial.