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Comment by exe34 | Hacker News Reader

I've never understood that. There's a claim you are guilty of robbery. You get charged and go to court. You plead not guilty. The da insists and you go to trial. During trial, you manage to provide cctv showing that you were 1000 miles away. The jury says "not guilty".

Is there any reasonable way to say "we don't know, he might be guilty, we just didn't reach 'beyond reasonable doubt '"?

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A jury I was on came to that exact conclusion. Some crimes require state of mind to be proven. In my case, a guy was at a bar and got kicked out. He went to his car and grabbed a gun and fired two shots. Ultimately the decision hanged on "did he fear for his life" when two bouncers rushed him in the parking lot.

He was probably guilty of the two counts of aggravated assault, but the prosecution never showed that it wasn't self defense, which is what Arizona required.

If he was able to get to his car and retrieve his gun and shoot at them, it seems very unlikely that the “two bouncers rushed him in the parking lot”. He could have just driven away. Much more likely he was angry about being kicked out and went back with his gun and then the “two bouncers rushed him”.

Not in the US. In Scotland, until this year, there was a "not proven" verdict, which was more or less what you just said.

The effect was the same as "not guilty", but there was an idea that allowing the jury to express doubt allowed them to avoid erring on the side of guilt. But it also confused people so they finally got rid of it.

CCTV shows you were in the general area of the crime, but your shady friend says you were hanging out with him at the exact time the robbery happened, and the guy who says he saw you do the robbery is also kinda shady. I think it’d be reasonable for a juror to think you probably did it (because your friend is untrustworthy and has obvious incentives to lie) but didn’t do it beyond a reasonable doubt (because the witness just isn’t credible enough).

Yes that's the obvious case for the "we can't be sure". It's the classic example really. It's not what I asked.

Well the point of the trial is to make a binary decision, so it has to be guilty or not guilty to a certain standard of evidence.

Think of it as "should you bring an umbrella to go outside today?" – the weather forecast has a probability, but your job is to turn that probability into a decision based on your risk tolerance. You can't bring a 30% umbrella for a 30% chance of rain.

The closest thing is probably a mistrial due to a hung jury. That allows a retrial.

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