this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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I think the most likely outcome is it will end in multiple hung juries because the US has a population of brainwashed pro-Trump sycophants who are going into this with a preset belief that it is political persecution.
Let's make some assumptions and model the chances mathematically:
Firstly, what is the chance of a complete acquittal? We can use the negative binomial distribution to calculate this. Let's consider the Voir Dire process, and define each juror being successively presented as a Bernoulli trial. We'll define success (to use standard Bernoulli trial terminology, no moral judgement implied) as the juror being from the 38% that are Trump sycophants, and failure as them being from the other population. The probability of 11 or fewer successes before at most 10 failures can be computed using the negative binomial CDF, nbinom.cdf(k=11, n=10, p=0.38), giving a probability of 24.5% of outright acquittal per trial.
But what about the chance of a conviction, i.e. selection of a jury of 12 from the 62%? Even with no voir dire, the binomial distribution gives us a probability of 0.003% of no Trump supporters being in a jury of 12, so the chance of there being none is vanishingly small.
However, apparently the prosecution gets 5 strikes. This is getting difficult to compute the distribution, so I simulated it instead, assuming that the prosecution use on of their 5 strikes, until they run out, and the defence use on of their 10 strikes, until they run out. The result (from 10,000 simulated trials) was 96.6% ended in mistrial, 2.54% convicted, and 0.85% acquitted.
Once we factor in up to two retrials following a hung jury mistrial, it comes out as 90.28% never get a result, 7.45% get a conviction, and 2.27% end in him being acquitted.
However, it is quite sensitive to population differences. If he is tried in an area with a low population of sycophant potential jurors (26% instead of 38%) it comes out at a 59% chance of a guilty verdict across the retrials. If Trump sycophants are more likely to be jurors and make up 45% of the pool, then there is only a 1% chance of a conviction.
Thank you for this exhaustive investigation!
Lordy, that's depressing.
He better hope that his cult continues to love him, then. Remember how quickly they turned on Bush? I'm not saying that they had the same relationship with Bush; I'm just saying that crowds are fickle things.
If they start seeing him as a loser, he might be in real trouble