A Proposed Iteration of Mercy and Justice - Personality based Juries

One of the most unusual concepts out there in my opinion is the concept of justice. It is really hard to nail down what it is.  Especially in a practical sense.  How does one go about judging whether or not something is just?  There are so many factors to consider it can make your head spin.  Then at the end of the day we are practically limited by what we are actually able to implement in practice.  A classic example of this is the question of how a person should be judged who has a mental illness and commits some crime.  Many people think of a mental illness plea as a loophole for evil.  I strongly disagree myself, but I am not going to go into why now.    Things become a bit more complicated when you look at them from the Catholic point of view and you throw in the complementary concept of "mercy."  It is really hard to say even what is merciful and what is not. I am going to illustrate what I am talking about with a recent incident that brought all this to the forefront of my mind.  The incident that I have in mind is the recent suicide of Aaron Swartz.  Aaron Swartz was a computer programmer involved with the creation of both RSS and Reddit.  In 2011 he was arrested for breaking into the JSTOR academic database so you could download journal papers and share them for free on peer-to-peer websites.  It turned out that charges were pressed against Swartz and he faced sentences on the order of 35 years in prison, and 1 million dollars in fines.  Now granted the prosecution apparently indicated that they were not going to pursue the maximum sentence.  They wanted Swartz to go to prison for six months.  Regardless, Swartz could not take this kind of stress and killed himself.  If you want to learn about the details of the story I am going to let you check it out for yourself.  Here is one link that talks about it.

www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2013/01/guide-finger-pointing-after-aaron-swartzs-suicide/61015/

Now I could talk about whether or not the maximum sentences were just, but everyone and their brother talks about that so I will not talk about this.  I am going to talk about what I think was going on with Swartz.  First off, (based on my third hand account) Swartz was considered a suicide risk.  Now for alot of people the thought of six months in prison would not be pleasant, but I do not think it would lead them to commit suicide.  I can say however that in the time I have led various teams my observation is that there are some people that just really cannot take stress.  Even what many people would consider normal stress.  I have seen guys get really upset after having to drive past a place where they may have had a bad experience a decade earlier.  I have seen people who would almost breakdown if they could not complete what I would consider simple tasks, and I have seen plenty of others just give up on life after being subject to relatively minor medical problems.  More and more I am starting to wonder if this difficulty dealing with stress has some relation with personality type or Cognitive function preference.  

In the case of Aaron he was most likely either ENTP or INTP.  I would tend to guess INTP.  Either way these are both relatively rare personality types.  Most people would not understand their point of view.  Both of these personality types also happen to be responsible for many of the innovations and paradigm shifts in society.  Einstein for instance was INTP.  I cannot help but wonder if part of what made Swartz so scared was the thought that in his mind he felt he was doing the right thing, but he feared he would be totally misunderstood by society and a jury.  He had probably long experienced being misunderstood by most people. 

What I have found is that different personality types have very different ways of looking at the world.  They naturally have very different values even when they profess to have the same values.  This can lead to major, nearly unreconcilable arguments and conflicts.  It leads people to totally misunderstand one another.  Even when people are aware of these differences they have a hard time actually recognizing it in practice. 

This leads me to a concept I have been toying with lately.  In The U.S. we like the idea of trying people by a jury of their peers.  I would like to suggest that perhaps in the next iteration of mercy and justice we try people with juries entirely consisting of people with exactly the same personality type.  My reasoning is that people of the same personality type will be best able to apply mercy when it is called for.  They will best understand a person's point of view.  In some sense these people will be a potentially very good group of "peers."  Looking back I can say there are people who I have absolutely detested, who I thought were the most terrible human beings that ever lived.  Now I realize all I really detested was their personality.  They still do not amuse me, but I now realize that my dislike of these people was mostly due to how they viewed the world.  Their point f view has positive and negative qualities like every other, and may be more or less effective depending on the situation.  On the other side however, this group of people will also be the best on calling you out when you are acting inappropriately.  When people misunderstand you they can sometimes be too lenient. 

I sometimes wonder if Aaron Swartz would have acted differently if he knew he was going to be tried by a jury consisting of other people with the INTP personality type.  He may have felt much less stressed out and may have felt like he would be understood.  Having the same personality type does not necessarily mean you hold the same positions.  It just means you tend to look at and influence the world and self in a similar manner.  It would not necessarily mean everyone would get off Scott free.  Actually in some cases I wonder if the effect lawyers have to spin stories would be diminished simply because everyone would be on the same page.  Expecially if the lawyer had a different personality type from everyone else in the room.  People might just ignore the lawyer. 

I will be the first to say there are some problems with this concept, but I do think it is worth further reflection.