The Illustrated Guide to Criminal Law
Chapter 11: Excuse Me!
Excuse pg 10: Who is the “reasonable person”?
Let’s go back to that phrase “reasonable person.” It’s used a lot in the law. In this defense, you’d need the jury to believe that a reasonable person—not just the accused person—would have been equally provoked.
Average Joe talking head
AVERAGE JOE
It’s an “objective test.”
(When you’re concerned with what the accused was actually thinking, we say you’re being subjective.
When you’re concerned instead with what some hypothetical reasonable person would have thought in that situation, you’re being objective.)
Legal theorists have tried for generations to come up with a definition of “reasonable person” that juries could apply. But in real life, when a juror is asked to think of what a reasonable person would have done, he simply asks if he would have acted that way himself.
A variety of people sitting in a jury box
In other words, the theoretical “reasonable person” in practice is simply the jury itself.
[SUGGESTED EDIT: Mention that this makes sense, because the jury represents the community, and they’re applying their community’s values]
That’s an EPIC amount of room for abuse…
As opposed to what? Doing away with juries altogether? The whole point of even having a jury is to provide a standard for a reasonable person.
I think a better way to do it would be to ask what the ‘average’ person would do. That way, the government could have a mandatory survey of everyone in the country, and then use the results of that as a gauge for this kind of defense.
Sounds like about as close as one can get to the “reasonable person” standard. So to make an operational definition of the “reasonable” standard, ask a large random sample of the population what they would do in the given circumstances, and then take the average (with hopefully a small standard deviation) response as the “reasonable” one.
Or just use what’s probably already in place, which is basically taking the average of the responses of the jurors.
The one problem with that is that the responses might not be normally distributed. The median respondent might claim to have more self-restraint than the average respondent, or vice versa. My preference would be to go by the median person rather than the average person, because that way you don’t have to worry about the people at either tail of the distribution skewing the results.
For median to have meaning, the responses must be orderable. For an arithmetic mean (what most people intend when they say ‘average’ without qualification) to have meaning, the responses must be numeric. I’m not sure what the question is, but I’m having trouble coming up with one that would result in numeric or even orderable answers.
I think you want the modal average, in which case normal distribution is irrelevant.