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Andrew Luscombe's avatar

How does the prediction market work? When does the market close and when is rhe punishment handed out - when the jury retires to decide or just prior to anouncing the verdict? So the defendant knows their punishment during the jury deliiberations. The jury knows their decision doesn't matter for the court case, but only for the market pay out.

Many of these markets will be pretty small in volume. Probably not hard to move the market in the last minute.

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Peter Gerdes's avatar

I'd suggest that much of the complexity in US law is exactly to limit the influence of juries. As time on twitter quickly illustrates just finding out what random people think tend to just tell us what the juror's prejudices or desires to signal happen to be.

Yes, early in our history the simple jury system worked well but that was because jurors were judging disputes in their own communities. Once jurors are deciding cases between major companies or lawsuits against the government they're likely to just rule based on who strikes them as a dick.

Indeed, consider all the various system's for crime insurance or various contracts you've suggested over the years. Virtually every one of them is something that strikes the average citizen as horrible or objectionable in some way. Without the extra legal complexity which prevents jurors from exercising unlimited discretion you'd constantly find the rules we'd like to create to incentivize innovation or other behaviors getting overturned because it makes the jurors feel bad.

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