On Thursday, 23 July 2015 15:51:40 UTC+1, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
In article ,
whisky-dave wrote:
On Thursday, 23 July 2015 14:15:18 UTC+1, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
In article ,
Tim Lamb wrote:
As regards juries starting out with unbiased views, it's nonsense.
They are human beings. Some may have prejudice against the police,
some against an ethnic origin. Etc.

Maybe you get nicer jurors down here.

I still say the jury members must not have an interest in the
outcome.

Really depends on what you mean by interest. If you mean some sort of
financial reward, obviously. But then if they'd agreed to vote in a
particular way for financial gain, you probably wouldn't be aware of
it.

For those that have been on jury service, I seem to remmeber that I/we
were instructed to base our decision of guilt or innocence on the proof
provided in court and not on what we thought or believed to have
happened.

Oh indeed. Evidence as presented in court. Not what you might find by
Googling. ;-)

There are other ways of deciding other than googling, google didn;t exist when I was on jury service so we had to think for ourselves ;-)


My point being that we hope and expect that jurors won't be intimidated by
others on that jury.

Well intimidated no, but the jurors are meant to discuss the case and you are allowed to say why you are going to vote the way you are going to vote, and other jurors are allowed to agree or disagree and dicuss the finer points.
In one case we wanted one of the jurors removed for her attitude that the defendants were definantly guilty. Where as most of us thought he was probably quilty but the police didn't bring enough evidence.