• halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    It’s remarkably hard to do in a well diversified like NYC.

    There is a set group of randomly chosen individuals for jury duty. From that group some will be dismissed for issues unrelated to the case, at the judge’s discretion. From the thinned group we get voir dire where each side will ask questions to determine any sort of biases they want or don’t want. Each side has a limited number of dismissals. At the end we get 12 people (plus some backups). And those 12 individuals must come to a unanimous decision, if not then we get a mistrial and the Prosecution has to decide whether to spend the time and public funds to try it again, from the top with a new jury. Who again go through the same process. There are seemingly slam dunk cases that get dropped simply because of multiple juries not coming to an agreement.

    With highly politicized topics, finding 12 random individuals from the jury pool that can come to a unanimous agreement is a tall order, and that doesn’t even get into jury nullification where they decide that it happened but they don’t care, or think it was justified.

    And when your jury pool is going to be filled with individuals that the victim was directly responsible for causing pain and suffering… Well it might not BE possible.

    • pivot_root@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      The Prosecution has to decide whether to spend the time and public funds to try it again, from the top with a new jury.

      And they will. Considering they’re trying to throw every possible charge at him out of desperation and to make him into an example, there isn’t a chance in hell they would let him walk.

      • halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        Finding one set of possible jurors is hard enough, if they don’t get it the first time, the chances get even smaller each additional time. Especially since those potential jurors will have had a chance to see the evidence that already resulted in one failed prosecution.