A misapprehension many people labor under
I was reading the blog of my learned friend, and fellow libertarian, J. Neil Schulman, over at Rational Review. J. Neil has many apposite things to say, but sometimes he lets his dislike and distrust of government, all government, lead him straight into folly.
Specifically, he stated that once a jury has come in with a "Not guilty" verdict, that that requires all people to believe it. To some extent, he's correct. I despise the modern practice of going after people who've been found not guilty with slightly-different charges, hoping to find them guilty of something, anything at all, or to wear them down into pleading to a lesser charge.
But I know of too many cases where juries, to put it very bluntly, had their heads up their collective asses to think that a "Not guilty" verdict is equivalent to proof of innocence. Casey Anthony, Lizzie Borden and Madeleine Smith were all let off (Madeleine got "Not Proven," which is the Scots courts' way of saying "Don't do it again!") but I'm as certain as I am of my own name that all three of them were as guilty as could be.
All three enjoyed the advantage of being female; all-male or mostly-male juries are reluctant to convict women, for the most part. Add in the fact that Lizzie was (prior to her little legal contretemps) a socially-prominent, eminently respectable maiden lady, pillar of her church and of the WCTU, and from a family that wielded great influence in the town she was tried in---and Madeleine was very easy on the eyes, eminently respectable (before her letters were read out in court, that is) and her victim was French, and acquittal was fairly certain. Casey didn't have the advantage of being respectable, but she was good-looking, and the jury was badly confused about what "reasonable doubt" means. (For the record, it does not mean "Maybe the alien space bats did it?")
Another example of juries getting it 100% wrong and turning a guilty murderer loose was OJ Simpson. Schulman believes, on some very flimsy evidence, that OJ Didn't Did It, but he's about the only person who does. Unfortunately, the prosecution was walking on eggs lest they set off another riot, the jury was the 12 dumbest human beings in the Greater LA area, and Simpson was able to wrap himself in the mantle of "poor, persecuted brother" in the eyes of the black community. This despite the fact that for all intents and purposes, he'd left that community behind long ago. Hell, he was "whiter" than I am in a lot of ways!
While, in general, I agree with Vincent Bugliosi that juries are "500 combined years of experience and knowledge, and 12 bullshit detectors in operation simultaneously" they do get things wrong sometimes.