M3aT and B3aST - Fast and Slow on a Grand Jury

"Your subjective experience consists largely of the story that your System 2 tells itself about what is going on."
"We cover long distances by taking our time and conduct our mental lives by the law of least effort."
"The world makes less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way our minds work."
- Daniel Kahneman

In Thinking: Fast and Slow, Kahneman demonstrates the ways that our minds are the union of two systems. The intuitive and fast System 1 operates below the level of consciousness and tends toward simple tactics guided by heuristics which short circuit our intense cognitive machinery. The hard work of contemplation and computation of higher math depends on System 2. Universally the unaided intuition of System 1 drives us to disbelief in System 2 as a separate entity. System 2 is lazy because invoking it's power strains our brains with mental heavy lifting thus violating the law of least effort.

Fuck Da Police

Federal Grand Jury 1988-1

The Two Indictments
I have been pondering the events of my 18 months on a federal grand jury for some time. From January 1988 until June 1989 I was one of 25 (23 with two alternates) members of a GJ that met once a month all day. We needed 18 members present to vote and 12 members to vote for an indictment. I cannot remember a single indictment that was not returned.

I was the only member of the jury that ever asked procedural questions. I was one of only a handful that asked clarifying questions. One case has troubled me for all these years. During a raid on a home where drugs were alleged to have been sold and distributed, a man in a pick-up drove up the long driveway to the secluded location. He was arrested and was named in several counts of the indictment. I was troubled that he was not actually doing anything wrong but may have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Perhaps he was picking someone up and taking them to work or otherwise engaged in some other innocent act. I reluctantly voted to indict.

The next month the prosecutor re-presented all of the counts of the indictment against this individual and reduced the charges against this man. No explanations were given but this time I refused to vote for indictment. The individual was indicted again anyway.

The thing that bothers me to this day is that not one single member of the grand jury hesitated to indict on the reduced number of counts. I even asked why several of the counts of the indictment were changed and was told that it was just trivial paperwork. There is absolutely not one single thing that is trivial about an indictment from a federal grand jury. Not one single thing; not one single punctuation mark is trivial.

The problem was that everyone in the room except me had used System 1 thinking on the original indictment and any change of heart would run up against a cozy conviction that the man was guilty -- because they had found him guilty before! And they were completely, 100% wrong. The evidence against him was so flimsy that it had to be excised to fit the facts. What confidence did we have that the new indictment was true?

Say hello to my innocent little friend

The Missing Counts of the Indictments
The federal prosecutor said "This is a 5 count indictment" and then read only four counts. I was primed by the re-indictment of the innocent above. When the prosecutor stopped at four and then asked for a vote -every hand in the room went up but mine. "You only read four counts." I told him. He looked startled and said "Are you an attorney?"

NO BUT I CAN COUNT TO FIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (not what I said of course)