Juror 10 Quotes

jurors can’t help themselves. They’re swayed by their life experiences as much as the evidence and the law. Still, with all my bellyaching, here’s the strange thing. Juries usually get it right!

Then why did we sue for $50 million when the most we can get is only $1 million?” Another question with a long answer. First, it’s called making a statement. We’re angry and fighting back, and suing for $50 million sounds much more aggressive than a mere $1 million. Second, a quirk in this already screwed-up law prohibits the jurors from knowing about the $1 million cap. They can sit through a month of testimony, evaluate the evidence, deliberate thoughtfully, and return a proper verdict of, say, $5 to $10 million. Then they go home, and the next day the judge quietly reduces the verdict down to the cap. The newspaper might trumpet another big verdict, but the lawyers and judges (and insurance companies) know the truth.

SOLOMON’S LAWS 1. Try not to piss off a cop unless you have a damn good reason . . . or a damn good lawyer. 2. The best way to hustle a case is to pretend you don’t want the work. 3. When arguing with a woman who is strong, intelligent, and forthright, consider using trickery, artifice, and deceit. 4. A prosecutor’s job is to build a brick wall around her case. A defense lawyer’s job is to tear down the wall, or at least to paint graffiti on the damn thing. 5. Listen to bus drivers, bailiffs, and twelve-year-old boys. Some days, they all know more than you do. 6. When the testimony is too damn good, when there are no contradictions and all the potholes are filled with smooth asphalt, chances are the witness is lying. 7. A shark who can’t bite is nothing but a mermaid. 8. When the woman you love is angry, it’s best to give her space, time, and copious quantities of wine. 9. Be confident, but not cocky. Smile, but don’t snicker. And no matter how desperate your case, never let the jurors see your fear. 10. Never sleep with a medical examiner, unless you’re dead. 11. If you can’t keep a promise to a loved one, you probably aren’t going to keep the loved one, either. 12. Life may be a marathon, but sometimes you have to sprint to save a life.

it is not uncommon for experts in DNA analysis to testify at a criminal trial that a DNA sample taken from a crime scene matches that taken from a suspect. How certain are such matches? When DNA evidence was first introduced, a number of experts testified that false positives are impossible in DNA testing. Today DNA experts regularly testify that the odds of a random person’s matching the crime sample are less than 1 in 1 million or 1 in 1 billion. With those odds one could hardly blame a juror for thinking, throw away the key. But there is another statistic that is often not presented to the jury, one having to do with the fact that labs make errors, for instance, in collecting or handling a sample, by accidentally mixing or swapping samples, or by misinterpreting or incorrectly reporting results. Each of these errors is rare but not nearly as rare as a random match. The Philadelphia City Crime Laboratory, for instance, admitted that it had swapped the reference sample of the defendant and the victim in a rape case, and a testing firm called Cellmark Diagnostics admitted a similar error.20 Unfortunately, the power of statistics relating to DNA presented in court is such that in Oklahoma a court sentenced a man named Timothy Durham to more than 3,100 years in prison even though eleven witnesses had placed him in another state at the time of the crime. It turned out that in the initial analysis the lab had failed to completely separate the DNA of the rapist and that of the victim in the fluid they tested, and the combination of the victim’s and the rapist’s DNA produced a positive result when compared with Durham’s. A later retest turned up the error, and Durham was released after spending nearly four years in prison.21 Estimates of the error rate due to human causes vary, but many experts put it at around 1 percent. However, since the error rate of many labs has never been measured, courts often do not allow testimony on this overall statistic. Even if courts did allow testimony regarding false positives, how would jurors assess it? Most jurors assume that given the two types of error—the 1 in 1 billion accidental match and the 1 in 100 lab-error match—the overall error rate must be somewhere in between, say 1 in 500 million, which is still for most jurors beyond a reasonable doubt. But employing the laws of probability, we find a much different answer. The way to think of it is this: Since both errors are very unlikely, we can ignore the possibility that there is both an accidental match and a lab error. Therefore, we seek the probability that one error or the other occurred. That is given by our sum rule: it is the probability of a lab error (1 in 100) + the probability of an accidental match (1 in 1 billion). Since the latter is 10 million times smaller than the former, to a very good approximation the chance of both errors is the same as the chance of the more probable error—that is, the chances are 1 in 100. Given both possible causes, therefore, we should ignore the fancy expert testimony about the odds of accidental matches and focus instead on the much higher laboratory error rate—the very data courts often do not allow attorneys to present! And so the oft-repeated claims of DNA infallibility are exaggerated.