No
People aren’t machines and don’t weigh data the way machines do.
It’s more like this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prospect_theory
Than this.
Would that equate loss to a guilty person getting away over convicting an innocent person? Not sure if I’m expressing this great but I mean like people would be naturally and organically aligned with a reluctance to convict that is compatible with presumption of innocence and the proof beyond a reasonable doubt standard?
Like “better a 1000 guilty people walk than a single innocent be wrongly convicted”
I think whoever framed the presumption of innocence and proof beyond a reasonable doubt felt that way.
Jurors themselves are complicated. Some people are racist, some people are just hateful, some people respect authority so much that they’ll just believe whatever the district attorney says. All of these conditions can create a situation where the jury won’t reach consensus easily .
And pretty much everybody just wants to get back to brunch and taking care of their families.
I think what you are speaking to is values. What I’m talking about is emotions as they are felt in the moment and how those will affect a jury’s outcome.
Hence people are not computers.
Juries are a way to say even the idiots believe X. There’s enough people on juries that 1 or 2 will refuse to believe the facts and evidence staring them in the face, getting a unanimous verdict requires skill or having a very persuasive juror.
I’ll just throw this into the mix: the so-called “wisdom of crowds”. I’m not sure if it really applies to juries. But I think the idea that a group of people will be smarter and less biased (or their biases will cancel each other out) is a common notion. It also dilutes the feeling of individual responsibility to some degree.
The wisdom of crowds only works when the inputs are independent.
People are meaningfully biased to conform to group opinions.
Juries are older than computing.
*digital computing. A computer used to be a job, not a machine. A job mostly done by women