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The judge should have said | 89 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
"permitted to be taken as evidence"
Authored by: rsteinmetz70112 on Thursday, May 17 2012 @ 07:00 PM EDT
I wonder why he didn't just re-read that portion of the instruction to them.

---
Rsteinmetz - IANAL therefore my opinions are illegal.

"I could be wrong now, but I don't think so."
Randy Newman - The Title Theme from Monk

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

"permitted to be taken as evidence"
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, May 17 2012 @ 08:00 PM EDT
The question points to a much bigger problem.

The technical issues are clearly beyond the understanding of the jury. To be
honest, even I am having difficulty keeping up and I have been writing software
(including Java) for 34 years.

We have a situation where an expert from one side says it is black and the
expert from the other side saying it is white. At best, one is telling the whole
truth and the other is stretching it a bit. At worst, there is a bit of
distortion going on on both sides. How can the jury tell? How can a jury without
an intimate knowledge of the inner workings of a virtual machine be expected to
sort out which expert to believe or even which bits of each expert's testimony
to believe?

These cases boil down to a situation where 12 people unskilled in the subject
matter are expected to make an important decision based on presentations by two
adversarial legal firms equally unskilled in the subject matter and presided by
a judge whose skill level is similar to the rest. The only people involved who
do have the skills are the expert witnesses who end up providing contradictory
information, twisted to suit the case of whichever side they are representing.

And we expect this system to work?

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

The judge should have said
Authored by: BitOBear on Thursday, May 17 2012 @ 08:18 PM EDT
Section X, lines y through Z, of the jury instructions cover this topic. I am
not supposed to be more specific than what is written there because that leads
to possible influence of your decision.

If the jury cannot fathom the part of the jury instructions that tells them that
the can consider all of what the witnesses said "as evidence," why are
we expecting them to weigh evidence at all? Is there a "this jury was
unable to take direction" precedent for asking for a retrial?

I suspect that there is one person on the jury who is trying to make everything
every witness said "true" instead of being able to face up to the fact
that one of them has to be -wrong- when statements contradict.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

"permitted to be taken as evidence"
Authored by: Wol on Friday, May 18 2012 @ 10:16 AM EDT
This is a major difference between American and British practice. With expert
testimony in a UK court, their is only one consensus view presented to the
jury.

If the experts don't agree the judge will knock their heads together and tell
them to come up with a joint agreement.

Cheers,
Wol

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

"permitted to be taken as evidence THAT"
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, May 23 2012 @ 09:37 AM EDT
AIUI the jury didn't ask if they were allowed to take something *in* evidence,
they asked if they could take something AS evidence OF something else.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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