cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1874605
A 17-year-old from Nebraska and her mother are facing criminal charges including performing an illegal abortion and concealing a dead body after police obtained the pair’s private chat history from Facebook, court documents published by Motherboard show.
Here is a interesting statistics problem:
Let’s say 50% of your state wants abortion to be legal. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/state/nebraska/views-about-abortion/
Lets say 10% wants it legal, but will vote to convict someone that committed an abortion. So, 40% will vote to acquit since they don’t see it as a crime. Lets say that of the remaining, 10% of those with obvious views of jury nullification will be kept off of the jury by the prosecution.
Twelve people. Each person will vote to convict 70% of the time and 30% will never vote to convict. What is the chance of a conviction? 70%, right? No, in civil trials you need a majority and in criminal trials you need a unanimous vote. So to get all 12, you will have a (0.7)^12 = 1.3% chance of conviction. Lets say the jury pool reflected Nebraska, 0.5^12= 0.02%. What about if only 10% would vote to block? 0.9^12=28%. Remember, ~10% believe the moon landings were faked. You can get 10% to basically believe anything. Even with the worst case scenario, you have under a 1 in 3 chance of being convicted.
That is why all post-roe laws target doctors and not (directly) women. Much easier to remove someones medical license then to get an abortion conviction.