[bonoboTP]

It seems that the selection process optimizes for either liars or dumb people who are easiest to emotionally manipulate. If you appear very reflective and capable of complex thought, you're a risk.

You could've said, you're open to whatever sentence, you make no prior commitment and will decide for whatever sentence is appropriate based on the court proceedings and the law as given by the judge. But they would have called bullshit on that too, they are good at seeing who is a difficult person to work with from their POV.

It's a very broken system and I'm glad to live in a civil law country. The power imbalance is huge. The lawyers are incredibly well prepared regarding tricks around jury psychology but the jury are selected for being the most naive people possible. If you seem too much of a smartass to them who knows their tricks, you're out.

[lovich]

> It seems that the selection process optimizes for either liars or dumb people who are easiest to emotionally manipulate.

It does. Having expert knowledge is a deal breaker too. I actually want to serve on a jury but because I am unwilling to lie to a judge I’ve been bounced everytime when I am asked if I would believe the police testimony and I reply with “that would depend on if they were a Brady cop”

[bonoboTP]

I once saw the livestream of jury selection in a big trial and read up on the whole thing and it seemed like such an obviously weak point of the whole process. The whole language around the concepts that underpin it seem totally ignorant of human psychology and pretend that humans are great at self reflection, won't hide their motivations etc. Like asking whether you're able to put aside X and Y from influencing your judgment, and if you say yes, that's good, if no, you're out.

Of course it's impossible to look into people's minds, but it's clear that the kludge is a result of historical push and pull of interests and a kind of truce and compromise they could arrive at that people still find convincing enough in the end, but also practical for the lawyers. Like, I understand this isn't easy, you don't one one highly qualified person dominate everyone else, even if just subconsciously. You want to encourage all jurors to feel that they have an equal input into the process. It's certainly not a system that's engineered for finding truth, and much more concerned with pretense in favor of the appearance of truth. A realist retort would be that pursuing a truth-finding system is only possible in utopia idealized situations, so going with the adversarial system is the best bet we have for getting some acceptable balanced compromise.

[bombcar]

The jury system works because there’s 12 and people are generally honest.

In many cases as the defendant you can opt for a bench (judge) trial. Jury’s usually a better gamble overall.