Luigi Mangione prosecutors have a jury problem: "So much sympathy"
Luigi Mangione prosecutors have a jury problem: "So much sympathy"
A former prosecutor has said he has never seen so much sympathy for a person accused of murder.
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Based on the recent Emerson poll (https://emersoncollegepolling.com/december-2024-national-poll-young-voters-diverge-from-majority-on-crypto-tiktok-and-ceo-assassination/), they'll find a jury just fine. They will have to weed out strong sympathizers, but it's not going to halt the process or anything. While it's uncommon for murderer cases to get this level of sympathy, prosecutors of high profile cases with a sympathetic defendent have delt with this before.
There's limits on selecting people. You can only say not that one so many times.
This is correct. I've been in two juries that went to trial, and each side got a handful of denials that they could use, each. Like 5 for my cases, or something in that ballpark. I think that the number is at the discretion of the judge, so because there is so much sympathy for the defendant, the judge may allow a much larger number of denials.
Disclaimer: I have no legal training and my trials were not in New York, so my comments could be inaccurate.
Edit: according to this article, this is the number of peremptory challenges (i.e., objecting to a juror during selection for no reason) each side gets - https://codes.findlaw.com/ny/criminal-procedure-law/cpl-sect-270-25/
- Each party must be allowed the following number of peremptory challenges:
(a) Twenty for the regular jurors if the highest crime charged is a class A felony, and two for each alternate juror to be selected.
This is in addition to presumably an infinite number of juror dismissals for cause, like, for example, if the juror tells that the judge that they would not be able to follow the law.
I'm pretty sure they have to give each side the same number though, right?
Yes. Also, see my edit. I found the law for New York. For a felony of this type, each side gets 20 for regular jurors plus 2 for each alternate juror.
I'm not sure how much I trust that poll.
Data was collected by contacting cell phones via MMS-to-web text, landlines via interactive voice response and email (phone list provided by Aristotle, email lists provided by Commonwealth Opinions), and an online panel of voters pre-matched to the L2 voter file provided by Rep Data. The survey was offered in English.
If someone just called or texted me out of the blue for a survey like that, I would be tempted to lie about my opinion of Luigi out of fear. Honestly I find it shocking so many people 'confessed' to that... it has to be an underestimate.
Statistically speaking: if 17% of people say that the murder of the healthcare CEO is even somewhat acceptable, if you were to pick 12 people randomly from that group (so not accounting for any other potential filters from a jury questionnaire), you'd only have a 10% chance that all 12 answering it is unacceptable.
That's not how jury selection works, though. They find people, filter some out, bring in the alternates, filter them out, and repeat until they have 12 they're happy with.
The defense gets to weed them out too, and I feel like less sympathetic jurors would be quite "obvious"
They will try, but people will answer that murder is not acceptable and then find not guilty later anyway. And they can potentially do that truthfully. If they find small issues with the evidence, they can go with not guilty.
You are correct. That's why I said specifically not accounting for filtering from the jury selection questionnaire, when extrapolating the ABC poll to statistics for a hypothetical 12-person jury. Of course the actual jury is not selected once and entirely randomly, but I was hoping to provide an interesting statistic.