In a certain way it is depressing, but Reddit is also very cynical and will paint things like these in the same light.
The more optimistic perspective is that jurors shouldn't have any external motivations for being there: no political agendas, not seeking entertainment, not there to influence the judgement of other jurors, etc. The reason why experts are often not picked is because the lawyers are afraid that they might use their expertise to position themselves as more authoritative that other jurors, kind of becoming "pack leaders."
You generally want a juror to be as close to a reasonable but otherwise boring person as possible.
I'm guessing this is the US? In the UK we get randomly selected to go to the court, then the pool of jurors get randomly allocated to each case, so the judges/lawyers have absolutely no say/sway in who's on the jury. It's completely randomly allocated
Is it really no say at all? I understand the value of random selection but I assumed for a jury to be representative of the population, they should be choosing a representative sample from that random selection, if that makes sense. And that would include things like a distribution of income levels, education, etc. It also seems so risky because what if you end up with a jury solely comprised of one ethnicity when the defendant is something else, or a jury full of rich people when the defendant isn’t, etc. Idk I’m not a lawyer but not being able to exclude people based on biases or a jury not being representative feels so risky! (But again, I know those exclusions can be used to influence the outcome so there’s no real good solution.)
There's going to be internal biased no matter who gets picked, there's no way to ensure a perfectly neutral jury. At least this way there's no external influences to those internal biased
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u/Playful_Marzipan8398 Jul 16 '26
Ah. How depressing