Do juries really get it wrong 17% of the time?

According to professors of statistics and law at Northwestern University, juries return the wrong verdict in one case out of six. Patterico disagrees, as do I.

Do juries ever make mistakes? Of course they do. The system isn't perfect and the last time I checked, juries were still composed of flesh-and-blood, fallible human beings. However, whether a jury verdict is wrong is ordinarily a subjective conclusion, reached by someone who doesn't agree with the verdict, usually whoever lost the case. Even so, sometimes newly discovered evidence or the application of new technology to existing evidence (such as DNA) will demonstrate objectively that the jury was wrong in its verdict. In fact I note that Professor Heinz says "We know there are errors because someone confesses after the fact or there's DNA evidence...." But if the evidence was never presented to the jury in the first place because it either didn't exist or wasn't available at the time of the trial, is it fair to blame the jury for not getting it right? I don't think so.

When I was a young prosecutor, a far more seasoned defense attorney (now a federal judge) told me that in his experience, juries usually get it right, although often for the wrong reason and over a 30 year career in the law, I have often remarked on how right he was. The reality is that if a case actually goes to trial, that usually means that there are issues and/or facts that reasonable people can differ about.

Even when you subjectively are convinced that the jury reached the wrong verdict, it is usually unfair to blame the jurors. Their role in our adversarial system is a passive one and based upon my own experience as a trial lawyer and confirmed by the records in most of the thousands of cases I have reviewed on appeal, any problem with confidence in the verdict can usually be laid at the feet of one or more of the more active participants, the lawyers and/or the trial judge or even a witness who commits perjury. In turn, the lawyers involved in the case are human as well and they don't have to be incompetent or unprepared to have a case go south on them (although sometimes that is indeed the problem). An advocate may have simply made a tough strategic or tactical decision that at the time they thought was in their client's best interest but, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, was the difference between winning and losing.

Based upon this article, I agree with Patterico that this study is more headline than substance.