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I would think that over time, people who are deaf would develop their own ways to determine whether or not someone is telling the truth based on their own past experiences. For instance, a person with good hearing might depend upon tone of voice, while a deaf person might instead be more attuned to facial cues or gestures.

If the demeanor of a witness is so critical to determining the truth, should the court reporter be obligated to record the manner in which the witness provided an answer? Should the record include comments like “[with a nervous chuckle]” or “[voice quavering]” or “[feverishly twisting his ring back and forth]”?

Is there anyone but me who enjoys being on a jury?

Bob

Although I see the author’s point on the importance of demeanor evidence, I disagree with the article that being deaf impedes someone from assessing credibility.

If anything, in my experience, juries generally give too much weight to how a person looks and sounds when he testifies, and not enough weight to how credible the person’s story actually is.

Thus, although being deaf might impede someone from assessing “voice quavers” or other signs of either nervousness or dishonesty, the person is also less likely to be biased against a shy witness or easily hoodwinked by a slick talker.

What they should do is prevent innumerate or even retarded jurors from serving: those are the ones who really cannot judge accurately. But given the number of mentally challenged jurors serving, I think it is unfair to impugn the ability of deaf or blind jurors to judge witness testimony fairly and accurately.

I would far more trust a smart and rational deaf juror than a semisenescent and irrational hearing juror to render an accurate verdict.

Slippery slope. If basic ability is a requirement, then should we only impanel accountants for tricky accounting cases? If a juror doesn’t remember his Algebra 2 (or Heaven forbid, never took Algebra 2), then they are more disabled than a deaf person.

If a person doesn’t have at least a BS in a science field, they aren’t competent to evaluate DNA tests or other forensic evidence.

Disgusting behavior from this atty. and dumber that he said it publicly, but disabled people are in a happy place right now where the discriminators have not learned to hide their evil intent yet.

Is he under the impression that deaf people are going around unable to tell truth from lies? “Why sure, I will help this fine gentleman emailing me from Niger.”

The fact is believability is determined by many things: tone of voice. how it matches to body lang. and so on. Losing one sense makes the human mind make more of the other senses, so a deaf person is much more likely to notice the visual cues of lying, and point them out to their fellow jurors.

Taken to its inevitable, ridiculous, conclusion that would mean most handicapped people would be excluded from juries even in ADA cases. Imagine trying a race discrimiation case with a white only jury.

3 senses?

I’d say 2 minimum. Smelling seems like the most likely candidate for #3, but I don’t think you need to sniff someone to judge his/her credibility and I’d certainly hope that witnesses and defendants aren’t smellable from across the room.

I doubt that Greenfield means to argue that there’s any tasting or touching involved.

Mr. Greenfield seems to be arguing that sight and hearing (and un-named other senses) are necessary (without any sort of proof) to determine the truthfulness of a witness’s testimony. While other lawyers have managed to argue, successfully, that sight and hearing are not both necessary to pilot a 40-ton semi truck full of UPS packages down a busy street, in the face of evidence of the danger, and much higher consequences if there is a mistake.

Does anyone else want to see these guys in a closed-cage match?

AW – Yeah, no way could you ever get a fair trial in a race discrimination case with an all white jury.

Could you be any less self aware?

“is not an affront to the rights of the citizens to serve, but a debt owed by society to a defendant. The ability to determine the credibility of a witness requires the use of three out of five senses minimum, as well as the absence of numerous other deficits. This may be politically incorrect, but it beats living in a fantasyland.”

So he avers, but does he have **scientific data** that hearing people are more adept at detecting falsehoods? Or is the opposite possibly true?

The link appears to be dead.

Having not RTFA, I think that asdf fff is on the right track.

Furthermore, I think the standards for a jury member should parallel the standard of care in a civil case. If the court would hold a hearing-impaired defendant to the objective standard of a reasonable prudent person, wouldn’t it be strange to exclude a hearing-impaired person from determining that standard?

I think this line of thought avoids dustydog‘s slippery slope, ie a person would not be held to the standard of a “reasonably prudent person who has taken algebra.”

Greenfield’s whole site seems to be down. I’d assume this is a temporary outage and would check it again later.

The site is backup now.

Quoting the newpaper article: The court concluded that boat owner Scott Speer of Fairlawn didn’t receive a fair trial because a hearing-impaired woman was on the jury and she couldn’t fully comprehend the vocal nuances in Speer’s 911 call, a key piece of evidence in the case.

For all of those here that are saying how silly the argument that disabled people should not be excluded from jury service, what about in the case where a lack of a sense prohibits a person from actually examining a piece of evidence?

In this case, the evidence was a 911 tape that one juror could not hear or hear well enough.

How can it be fair to either the prosecution or the defense that one person on the jury cannot examine a piece of evidence? Won’t that juror have to either simply not take into account that piece of evidence or rely on other jurors to communicate what the evidence indicated, therefore eliminating the disabled juror’s ability to evaluate evidence on their own?

I don’t think it is too plausible that a “vocal nuance” can be a “key piece of evidence.” If a “vocal nuance” really were so key, either side could get expert testimony to testify about its significance or lack thereof.

The “vocal nuances” were not a key pieve of evidence. The 911 recording was. The nuances were a part of that recording.

Even if each side gets an expert to attest to the “significance” of the nuance, the fact of the matter is that the juror cannot evaluate what the experts are saying because he cannot hear that which the the testimony is based. You are therefore back to the same thing – the juror must either totally ignore the evidence or rely on what other jurors heard.

Neither is right for either side.

I am 50-50 on this one.

I am not against having deaf people in juries, but there are times when a deaf person would be at a clear disadvantage.

It is my understanding that sign language is a whole different language … at least I have seen it taught as a foreign language at colleges and universities here. It is missing thousands of the words, grammar, etc. that is found in our American language. Would we accept a German-speaking only juror that requires translation? No … and for this reason, I don’t think we could accept a deaf person. Reading lips isn’t possible because a witness is often times speaking to a point away from the jury.

It is my understanding that sign language is a whole different language … This is true. ASL (American Sign Language) is what most hearing impaired people use, and it has an entirely different syntax and vocabulary than that of English. Certainly the deaf juror would have had access to a written transcription of the 911 tape, so I think we can put the translation argument to rest.

As for the foreign language only juror, are non-English speaking jurors excluded from a jury pool? That’s something I’ve never even thought about.

IANAL, so somebody help me. If the deaf juror had to rely on a transcript, wouldn’t that be hearsay?

My elderly grandmother was very hard of hearing. She couldn’t read lips (and couldn’t see a witness’ lips from 10 feet away, for that matter.) She got called up for jury duty and had to sit in the jury pool. She was pretty sure that she wasn’t actually on a jury, though.

IANAL, so somebody help me. If the deaf juror had to rely on a transcript, wouldn’t that be hearsay?

IANAL either, but no, reading a transcript is something a juror will do to clarify or to refresh memory on what was said during the trial. How is that hearsay?