As I read this one, it’s not arguing the jury got it wrong. The question the article is interested in seems to be, “How to stop pernicious, subtle sexism, if you cannot prove it in the courts?” Its jumping-off point is a claim that there is considerable pervasive sexism but not rising to the level of enough of a smoking gun to make a provable legal case, so therefore it needs to be dealt with through some other mechanism than court cases. That doesn’t contradict the jury’s finding, which is only that there was not a legally provable case of sex discrimination (the jury’s job wasn’t to decide about Kleiner Perkins’s culture or sexism more generally).
Other articles do also argue that the jury got it wrong, but this article seems to have a different goal, and as I read it seems pretty sympathetic to the jury (e.g. each time a piece of evidence is mentioned, the article also points out the various doubts one might have about whether the evidence is sufficient as proof).
Yeah. That’s the central point here - yes, a lot of this stuff is not provable and is never going to be, and that’s not the court’s fault and not really the law’s fault either. The fact that it’s not provable doesn’t mean it’s somehow not a problem.
A jury’s job isn’t to prove innocence. The verdict is not “innocent”, but merely “not guilty”. There is an important difference: the jury cannot find enough convincing evidence to convict. This does not mean that there is no problem at all or that all of the evidence is faulty.
For an analogy, that’s how hypothesis testing works in statistics. You rig your test so that only the most exceptional observation will disprove your null hypothesis. In a court of law, the evidence must overwhelmingly discredit the “not guilty” null hypothesis.
There seem to be no shortage of media articles telling us how the jury got it wrong. I guess they know better?
As I read this one, it’s not arguing the jury got it wrong. The question the article is interested in seems to be, “How to stop pernicious, subtle sexism, if you cannot prove it in the courts?” Its jumping-off point is a claim that there is considerable pervasive sexism but not rising to the level of enough of a smoking gun to make a provable legal case, so therefore it needs to be dealt with through some other mechanism than court cases. That doesn’t contradict the jury’s finding, which is only that there was not a legally provable case of sex discrimination (the jury’s job wasn’t to decide about Kleiner Perkins’s culture or sexism more generally).
Other articles do also argue that the jury got it wrong, but this article seems to have a different goal, and as I read it seems pretty sympathetic to the jury (e.g. each time a piece of evidence is mentioned, the article also points out the various doubts one might have about whether the evidence is sufficient as proof).
Yeah. That’s the central point here - yes, a lot of this stuff is not provable and is never going to be, and that’s not the court’s fault and not really the law’s fault either. The fact that it’s not provable doesn’t mean it’s somehow not a problem.
A jury’s job isn’t to prove innocence. The verdict is not “innocent”, but merely “not guilty”. There is an important difference: the jury cannot find enough convincing evidence to convict. This does not mean that there is no problem at all or that all of the evidence is faulty.
For an analogy, that’s how hypothesis testing works in statistics. You rig your test so that only the most exceptional observation will disprove your null hypothesis. In a court of law, the evidence must overwhelmingly discredit the “not guilty” null hypothesis.
Flagged, not technical. These arguments are usually best left over at HN.