This article is filled with guesswork at the dynamics of crowds.

"However, in 1978 the Supreme Court ruled that a five-person jury is not allowed, after Georgia attempted to assign five-person juries to certain criminal trials… "What seems to be apparent reading the literature on this is that the Supreme Court is making these decisions basically on an intuitive basis," said Jeff Suzuki, a mathematician at Brooklyn College in New York. "It's their sense of how big a jury should be to ensure proper deliberation.""

…

"One potential problem with translating this research to real world trials is that it leaves out the interaction between jurors, which Suzuki admitted is a problem. "We don't have a good model for how jurors interact with each other," he said. "The real challenge is that the data doesn't really exist.""

The article simply doesn't address the possibility that jury trials are a terrible model for assuring justice is done.

?aul ?chuler originally shared this post:

The mathematics of jury size: Statistical model shows several interesting properties of US jury configurations

Could different jury sizes improve the quality of justice? The answers are not clear, but mathematicians are analyzing juries to identify potential improvements.