Georgia Thompson's Lawyer SHOULDA Known

Maybe her attorney doesn't keep up with the studies:

What Professor Leipold found is that federal judges used to be somewhat more likely than juries to convict defendants--but starting in the very late 1980s, this reversed--and now, juries convict in 84% of jury trials, while judges convict in only 55% of bench trials.

Across the board, for all categories of crimes, federal judges are less likely to convict than juries. The smallest difference (87% jury conviction; 80% bench conviction) is in immigration-related offenses; the large difference is the public order offenses (83% jury conviction; 47% bench conviction), but the category that I thought would be the biggest gap--drug cases--turned out to be right in the middle (87% jury conviction; 62% bench conviction).

(Study of Federal courts.)

HT: Volokh via Clayton Cramer