Juries Are Wrong In One-in-Six Cases?

According to a recent news report, a forthcoming article in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies will show that juries are wrong in one-of-six cases. 

So much for US justice: juries get the verdict wrong in one out of six criminal cases and judges don't do much better, a new study has found.

And when they make those mistakes, both judges and juries are far more likely to send an innocent person to jail than to let a guilty person go free, according to an upcoming study out of Northwestern University.

"Those are really shocking numbers," said Jack Heinz, a law professor at Northwestern who reviewed the research of his colleague Bruce Spencer, a professor in the statistics department.

The full story is available here (via Olson).  I'm clueless how the authors of the forthcoming studied determined that a jury reached a wrong result.  UPDATE: A draft of Bruce Spencer's articles is available here.

Comments

[Anton]

There's no doubt that we'd get a much more effective jury system if we chose the jurors randomly, rather than gaming the system through voir dire until we get a jury one or the other of the lawyer's likes.