Commentary
What a circus. This week the Brittany Higgins/Bruce Lehrmann rape trial imploded when the jury was dismissed due to misconduct by a juror. The case seemed to be heading for a hung jury after five days of deliberation, during which not a single question was put to the judge—which suggests that the jury was battling over beliefs rather than wrestling with understanding the evidence.
But then one juror appears to have taken it upon themselves to do their own research, coming up with an academic paper described by the judge as a discussion of “the unhelpfulness of attempting to quantify the prevalence of false complaints of sexual assault and a deeper, research-based analysis of the reasons for both false complaints and scepticism in the face of true complaints.”…