https://people.com/crime/3-murdaugh-jurors-open-up-about-deliberations-today-show/
It is worrisome to hear how often in American juries their decision to convict is based on a personal skepticism of the sincerity of emotions displayed or claimed by the defendant. They aren’t experts in this, and (for what I hope are obvious reasons) this is heavily laden with bias risk. Furthermore, even if juries were robustly accurate in assessing the emotional state of the testifying defendant (or recorded defendant), absence of grief has all sorts of explanations that don’t entail criminal guilt; likewise for a mask of exaggerated or fake grief.
The jury is appropriately the finder of fact. And they of necessity need to evaluate the reliability of testimony. But the one level removed derivative assessment of the reliability of testimony based on folk psychology notions of how people function, or supposed intuitive expertise in judging truthful emotional expression, goes a step too far because it unnecessarily introduces high potential for error.
You can wind up with a sort of Dunning-Kruger type scenario where sophisticated jurors abstain from influencing the deliberation in favor of the defendant because they don’t trust their own intuitions on the topic, and less competent evaluators of sincerity, or less competent epistemic introspectors, overconfidently express their distrust of the testimony, which will inevitable feel more persuasive and feel like social pressure in the jury room compared with testimony that is merely being remembered and isn’t by a person you are peered to. This is one sense in which a “jury of your peers” can sometimes never happen. The jury room itself creates a subgroup dynamic.
Well anyway, at the least I wonder if jurors should have training on this issue.