Jury supremacy is a type of judicial supremacy whereby someone, typically a liberal or a plaintiff's attorney profiting from the system, pretends that because a jury decided a particular way it must be true or otherwise infallible. In fact, jury decisions can be as improper as United States Supreme Court decisions can be, as in Roe v. Wade.
The Salem Witch Trials were an early example of abusive misuse of juries, whereby class jealousy was exploited in order to convict wealthier members of society, ultimately targeting the governor's wife. Historians attribute those decisions to non-rigorous rules of evidence, but that was unlikely to have been decisive. To this day class warfare and geographic bias are commonly exploited in jury trials to try to turn a jury against a defendant. Political bias is also exploited, as in cases relating to Donald Trump.
Pretrial publicity impacts jury verdicts
Numerous studies demonstrate that pretrial publicity has an effect on jury verdicts,[1] and yet courts often pretend otherwise. What is the point of having a jury echo the verdict of the liberal media? A great deal of time and money could be saved in bypassing the fiction that the jury would reach an a verdict entirely independent of the liberal media.
Manipulation of juries by plaintiffs' attorneys
"Conventional wisdom says the longer the jury deliberates, the higher the verdict will be."[2]
Inflation in jury awards
Manipulation of the system caused a massive increase in the amount of jury awards in just a few years:
| “ | In just five years, the average verdict in the National Law Journal’s Top 100 Verdicts more than tripled from $64 million in 2015 to $214 million in 20191. It’s not just the number of record verdicts. In fact, the same data shows there were 30% more cases in 2019 that pierced the $100 million threshold than there were in 2015.[3] | ” |