Having just served on a jury, I can say that I've actually gained some confidence in the American justice system and its use of a jury of peers. When it comes down to it, the task for the jury is fairly straightforward, narrow, and well-defined: to examine the facts as laid out in the trial and to objectively execute the law as it is defined at the time while being fair and impartial. Their backgrounds and prior knowledge and experience are not supposed to come into play, and to the extent that the judge and attorneys have chosen a panel of objective, intelligent jurors, their backgrounds really do not and should not matter.
I recently read a comment that framed the law as being software. After my experience, I've come to think of juries as being the computers that run such "software" in the context of a trial: to execute the instructions as handed down by the judge, given the evidence and testimonies as factual inputs and to ultimately output a verdict that follows (as closely as possible) the rules codified in the law.
I feel that the problem really lies in the evidence provided by the expert witness. In this particular case, it sounds like there was an expert witness on both sides, but perhaps one witness was more effective than the other, at least to the jury. To reduce any bias, ideally there are (many) multiple witnesses providing testimony on the same issues, so that the evidence presented will average out to be as close to the factual truth as possible. Unfortunately, that's almost certainly not scalable in the context of a trial.
Being on a jury gave me the opposite experience. The guy who slept through parts of the trial was given as equal a say as those who stayed awake and the topic of them sleeping was a joke to many of the jurors. Charisma counted for more than reasoning. It made me have a lot more believe in the statement that the innocent seek trial by judge while the guilty seek trial by jury.
I had the same experience. There were some really varied backgrounds. There was an engineer, a consultant, a nurse, a couple entrepreneurs, a handful of blue collar workers and some stay at home parents.
I was really impressed how well they grasped the concepts of American justice. When someone said "he's guilty because of X", a lot of people jumped in and said "we're supposed to look at alternative explanations and if they are reasonable, we need to find him innocent."
It much improved my faith in the jury system.
This was in SF and I will say that all the 20-something tech guys did their best to get our of jury service. In fact, all of them did.
I recently read a comment that framed the law as being software. After my experience, I've come to think of juries as being the computers that run such "software" in the context of a trial: to execute the instructions as handed down by the judge, given the evidence and testimonies as factual inputs and to ultimately output a verdict that follows (as closely as possible) the rules codified in the law.
I feel that the problem really lies in the evidence provided by the expert witness. In this particular case, it sounds like there was an expert witness on both sides, but perhaps one witness was more effective than the other, at least to the jury. To reduce any bias, ideally there are (many) multiple witnesses providing testimony on the same issues, so that the evidence presented will average out to be as close to the factual truth as possible. Unfortunately, that's almost certainly not scalable in the context of a trial.