Clearing Up Trump Trial Misinformation

[CJD]

(06-12-2024, 01:10 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: I took statistics in college, but I am no expert.  That said, I don't think you're correct here.  Every time you pull a person for jury duty there's a 87% chance they're a Biden voter.  That chance doesn't decrease for the next pick, it stays exactly the same.  So, statistically, it would be very easy for the twelve jurors to all be Biden voters.  

I'm not a statistics expert either, but my understanding is that each time you select a jury member, you have an 86.8% chance they are a Biden voter. Statistically speaking, the odds of you hitting that 86.8% chance 12 times in a row is equivalent to .868^12, or 18.3%.
So, if chosen randomly, there is a 81.7% chance that at least one jury member is not a Biden voter.

Quote:There's essentially a one in ten chance that the person voted for Trump,  Meaning out of thirty people in the jury pool three would be Trump voters.  The DA gets more than three preemptory challenges.  Those three would be the first to go.

Your statistics would be workable if the jurors were chosen completely at random.  They aren't.

You are phrasing the selection process as making it more likely for the Trump voters to be removed. I see it the other way. During the voir dire process, jurors are interviewed about their biases during selection. Let's say...25% of the 86.8% Biden voters are incapable of hiding their bias against Trump (a low end estimate, I imagine, if I've ever met a liberal in my life). That means the pool of Trump voters has immediately grown amongst the eligible jurors, as a quarter of the Biden voters have been summarily removed due to their obvious bias.

The preemptory challenges do not require a reason, so the prosecution must save those for the people who they believe are biased, despite hiding it appropriately.

According to this article, 500 jurors were evaluated and 96 were taken to the courtroom. So I am not sure how many preemptory challenges were given to each side in a case with such an enlarged jury pool, but I find it highly unlikely that the prosecution would be capable of eliminating every Trump voter or suspected Trump voter via the voir dire process without the defense objecting and preventing that in some way.

Maybe I'm wrong and the prosecutors totally fleeced the defense and successfully eliminated every single unbiased (and/or biased towards Trump) juror in that 500 juror pool.

But then I'd ask what the hell the Defense was doing to allow that to happen.

Quote:I also must reiterate that I'm not alleging this happened here, just that it is very plausible and that Trump has a legitimate argument that it would be very difficult to impossible for him to get a fair trial in that area.  As I said, the same argument in reverse could be made for a deep red area.  He's so polarizing that I think finding twelve impartial jurors would be exceedingly difficult even in a 50/50 area.

For what it's worth, I agree that I don't think they found 12 unbiased jurors. If you told me 10 of the 12 were Trump hating Liberals who knew they would vote to convict before the trial even started, I wouldn't be surprised. I just think that the odds that they found (and allowed in) 12 of those biased jurors against Trump to be unlikely. They needed to unanimously convict him and I just don't see a Trump supporter or "unbiased" juror doing that if it weren't a legitimate conviction.