A Random Walk Down Centre Street

Posted by Marc Hodak on February 25, 2008 under Revealed preference | Read the First Comment

Today I went to my local federal court house for jury duty. Unlike the typical professional who sees jury duty as a nuisance, I actually like the idea of jury duty. As long as it doesn’t get in the way of certain client or family needs, I think hearing a case would be pretty cool. I actually sat on a jury once, and haven’t been picked since. According to lawyer friends, I should never expect to be picked again.

Since my last jury stint, over 20 years ago, the jury selection technology has gotten pretty sophisticated. Here’s how one lawyer friend puts it:

Defense attorneys don’t want smart people on the jury. They’re looking for people with barely enough reasoning to follow a Mother Goose tale, but also with enough sense to know that they can’t quite figure it all out.

Prosecutors and plaintiffs attorneys consider such people way too intelligent for their juries. They look for complete morons, people who don’t even know that they don’t know what the frig is being said by either side. They want people who believe conspiracy theories. It goes without saying that prosecutors like people who respond to authority figures with an “Uh huh. OK,” reflex.

What this means for justice depends on what is being prosecuted. In traditional criminal cases like burglary or homicide, the accused are generally not too far from the typical cross-section of jurors in terms of class and culture. In white collar criminal cases, modern jury selection practices guarantee that the defendant won’t have anything resembling true peers on their jury. They’re more likely to have jurors saying things like “I didn’t know anything about what they talked about.” or, “For a man who knew every aspect of the business, why didn’t he know what was going on?” The joke in the white-collar world is that you don’t want to be judged by twelve people who were too stupid to avoid jury duty.

All the same, I like our judicial system. While far from perfect, at least it’s not as politicized as our other branches of government. I think a lot of that benefit has to do with the randomness of jury selection. I actually believe that our legislature would be far better if congress-critters were selected by lot rather than by elections. What we’d lose in the quality of the individuals placed into office, we would more than make up for by the lack of influence peddling, false promises, savior complexes, and other cynical political theater that mark our current system.

I think I would be fine with the first 200 people in the phone book being our legislators for brief periods of time. Amateur lawmakers would know their temporary status, would probably not be too keen in working that hard in coming up with new rules, but would be keenly aware that they would be spending far more of their lives living under those rules than enjoying whatever gains they may have had in making them.