Citizen Chevalier! Report immediately to Alien Liaison Officer David1819. You have been selected for specimen study.
BTW mate, juries can be mislead.
They're not detectives and can't order further inquiries. They are not judges, so can't call witnesses back for further questioning or voir dire major witnesses or experts or order the production of new or additional evidence. They could ask the judge to do some of these things, but their formal role is limited to giving a verdict based on the evidence heard. They can freely ask questions, and should be resilient enough to question things, but if evidence is fabricated or planted, it may be difficult to surmise this in the heat of a trial. We can see there are issues with the evidence, but we have the luxury of considering the case at leisure, which the jury did not have.
I think the Bamber trial jury in the end couldn't make up their minds and the majority just fell in with the summing-up - at least, that's what happened according to a couple of the jurors who spoke to, respectively, an Essex journalist and an author. This of course illustrates the danger of abolishing the unanimity protection. We can't know how the dynamics of the jury would have been different if unanimity had been required, but if two or three jurors - maybe more - were sceptical after hearing all the evidence, and if two of them were robust enough to maintain their scepticism to the end, that suggests the prosecution would have been in great difficulty convincing the jury under those alternate circumstances.
