
Jury Duty - eropple
https://medium.com/@jurornumber5/jury-duty-b354a53f126e
======
YorkianTones
"Edith looks up from a game of solitaire and casually mentions that she
actually thinks the murder was committed by the accomplice, who was never
found and is not on trial. But since the defendant’s lawyer did such a poor
job exonerating him, she concludes, she’s going to deliver a guilty verdict.
My jaw drops. No one questions her obviously flawed reasoning, because she’s
on their side."

This, for me, was the most terrifying bit in the article. To convict a man of
murder, and to send him to life in prison or perhaps to his own death, when
you think he's innocent? It shocks me what people are capable of sometimes.
But this article doesn't shock me, because I know what people are capable of.
Kudos to the author for sticking to his moral compass in the face of
adversity.

~~~
geomark
Brings back memories. I served on the jury when Jello Biafra of the Dead
Kennedys was on trial for including a rude poster in one of their albums[1].
Jury deliberation was a circus. One woman hung the poster up (it was pretty
rude [2]), looked at it for a while, and said "Kinda makes you horny".

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Kennedys#Frankenchrist_an...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Kennedys#Frankenchrist_and_obscenity_trial_.281985.E2.80.931986.29)
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penis_Landscape](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penis_Landscape)

~~~
e0
Haha. And did she vote to convict or aquit?

~~~
geomark
Of course she voted to acquit. So did the old guy who shouted "Nothing is
obscene!" the moment he entered the jury deliberation room, despite the fact
that Jello was not charged with obscenity. And the girl who said "The defense
attorney is pretty cute."

~~~
icebraining
What was he charged with?

~~~
geomark
"Distribution of harmful matter to minors." The law requires a warning that
says it shouldn't be sold to minors. Instead, they put on a sticker with a
snarky remark about how some people might find the contents objectionable,
"but life is like that" (something like that). So kids were buying the album
and parents were freaking out when they found the poster hanging in their
bedrooms.

There was never really any notion about being charged with obscenity. Most
people reject that out of hand anyway. The issue was that there is a law that
attempts to ensure parents get some warning so they could decide if some
materials may not be appropriate for their kids. The matter before the jury
was to decide if that poster was that kind of material, and if the snarky
sticker was sufficient warning.

------
ketralnis
I sat on a civil jury trial between a boilermaker in the Navy that had been
exposed to asbestos and developed mesothelioma, and a company that made
asbestos insulation.

Neither side could actually put the man and the company or its insulation in
the same room at any point in the past. Lots and lots of companies made this
type of insulation. (In an "accidental" outbust from one of the attorneys that
we were instructed to ignore, we learned that he was in fact suing most of
them.) The Navy kept meticulous records about where he had worked, and both
the Navy and the company did the same about work orders and where the
insulation had been installed. The best evidence the man had was "I saw their
truck in the parking lot once".

This type of civil trial only required a 9/12 majority and the other jurors
really only saw this as a chance to stick it to the company. "Of course this
man should be repaid for the damage done to him!" Any sort of nuance like,
"okay sure but should this company be the one to pay it?" was totally lost.
He's hurt, so somebody should pay up. That was it. That was their justice. The
jury instructions like the actual claims to damages were totally ignored.

I sure hope I never have a jury deciding my fate.

~~~
geomark
I feel the same way. The three times I served on a jury were all the same.
Very few people bothered to read or try to understand the jury instructions.
Few considered the evidence that was presented. Most were utterly clueless,
totally lacking the ability to perform any logical reasoning. Most just voted
their biases.

Although, if you have a sharp attorney he could very well get a hung jury for
you even if the evidence is slam dunk for a conviction. He just needs to be
really good at jury selection.

~~~
agiamas
these same people are voting for your president or prime minister or MP. If
anything, the (unfortunately, long term..) solution is to educate these
people, not to abolish jury duty.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Good luck with that. We'd have to start with totally remaking news media, or
even getting rid of them altogether - it's them who present a new outrage
every day with a handy judgement to cache and retrieve the next time you see a
similar looking situation.

But "free speech!", "free media - the cornerstone of democracy!", something
something.

~~~
derefr
Remove economic incentives from news media, perhaps. You'd think news-
organizations-as-charities would work, but even being donation-driven still
incentivizes populist pandering at the expense of real journalism.

We need something that is to current journalism as the Senate is to the House:
unable to be blown around by society's ephemeral tastes.

The simplest method is probably to pay for journalism through taxes. The BBC
is a decent model. Ideally we'd want to retain a multiplicity of viewpoints,
though. Maybe a BBC-alike as a grant-funding organization, where small
independent journalist groups get grants to go out and investigate, in
exchange for an agreement to publish their stories onto the BBC-alike's news
wire service (which would then be freely licensed to distributors—basically
putting those stories into the public domain.)

Rather than the BBC-alike deciding who to hire, let a Journalist's Guild
decide who's good enough to publish; anyone allowed into the _profession_ will
be trusted to have done something valuable whenever they submit a story, and
will be automatically paid out. It's the Guild's responsibility (i.e. that of
the other Guild members) to catch their peers submitting nonsense and report
them, and have those people's journalistic credentials suspended or disbar
them entirely.

That'd neatly realign the concept of "journalistic integrity" or "journalistic
ethics" to stand at the same strength-of-force on journalists as the
equivalent concepts in medicine and law do for their professionals.

~~~
TeMPOraL
That's it, but I'm out of ideas how to do it. Charities are not good enough;
you need to disconnect the incentives for writing the stories from how readers
like them. News, after all, is about observable reality so it shouldn't be
affected by the moods of the society.

Yeah, BBC may be a step in the right direction. The grant-funding organization
idea is interesting. Or maybe the reverse? Let's make news just like a public
agency - collecting data (stories) and releasing it as a public service, just
like NOAA does with weather? But then again, we'd need a way to incentivize
the reporters to dig into government/whoever-funds-this problems and make sure
that such reports get published as well.

It's a hard problem, and alternative solutions won't be perfect either, but
the current situation of constant outrage-fueled brainwashing is taking a
heavy toll on the ability of our society to reason, so IMO it's worth
considering a change.

BTW. I think that a regular change of such systems may not be a bad idea. The
problem with media, or with justice, or democracy, or even with markets start
when they're getting _too_ optimized, and thus start to deviate from the
original purpose. So i.e. if you look at the arguments about _why_ democracy
is awesome and all, they all seem to make sense... if applied to the system
from 100 years ago, back when it wasn't so thoroughly gamed. We want our
systems efficient, but not _too_ efficient, because they're not _perfectly_
aligned with our shared values.

------
rayiner
> In the end, only two men of color make it to the jury, and I am one of them.
> The other is Latino. There are two Latina women, one African-American woman,
> and one Asian woman. The remaining six jurors are white.

Thats basically the racial composition of the U.S. Indeed, people of color are
over-represented in that jury.

~~~
geomark
So the jury was 6/12=50% white, 3/12=25% Latino, 2/12=17% Black and 1/12=8%
Asian.

The US racial demographics are White: 64%, Hispanic: 16%, Black: 12%, Asian:
5% [1]

Looks like Blacks and Latinos were overrepresented on that jury.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States#Race_and_ethnicity)

~~~
hawkice
Juries are composed of 12 people. Saying there are discrepancies between the
jury pool and the US of less than 8 percentage points is somewhat silly --
making even the smallest change would not reduce the size of those errors.

~~~
geomark
Indeed. One jury is far too small a sample size to draw any conclusions (too
obvious to even state but I did anyway).

When comparing proportions (in this case racial makeup of juries versus racial
makeup of the population) you want a sample size large enough that you have at
least 5 expected cases for each group. In this case the expected cases are the
population proportion (p) times the number of jurors (n). So you would need n
* p >= 5 and since Asians are the lowest proportion at 5% you would need data
on at least 100 jurors. Then you could do a Chi-square goodness-of-fit test to
see if something is really going on.

If it seems like I'm being geeky it's only because I just recently worked on a
problem exactly like this, determining if jury demographics matched population
demographics. Turns out in many cases there IS something going on, but then
the reasons for it aren't always what you think. One reason is that in some
communities there is a shortage of eligible jurors due to high rates of felony
convictions.

------
piker
This article is an interesting narrative depicting the exact sort of nuance
that the term "reasonable doubt" is intended to elicit once criminal
prosecution reaches jury deliberation. As others have noted, this seems a
somewhat comfortable result, albeit at a human cost. Justice delayed/served.

The author touches on it, but another interesting aspect of the criminal
justice system is the funding, politics and police practices that motivate the
prosecution of minor crimes that never see a court room. Many unnamed players
in this story had vested financial and political interests in particular
outcomes. In this case, the stakes were large enough that the jurors lost
sleep and distressed over the details. One wonders if softening the charges to
lesser charges would have weakened his resolve.

It's poetic that at trial, the defendant, the witnesses, the prosecutor, the
defense attorney, the judge and the jury cannot lie. Police, however, are
trained to do so during investigations as a best practice in pursuit of
justice. That fact probably contributed to the author's initial distrust in
the system, sewing the seeds of this mistrial.

------
wtbob
I've served on two juries, one for murder and one for a far lesser offense. In
one the defendant was a fairly wealthy young man; in the other a poor woman.
One defendant was guilty; the other not.

My experience in both those trials was nothing like the author's here. Indeed,
I wonder how much of his experience was due to his own concern about things
like race and politics instead of, y'know, guilt and innocence. Perhaps had he
not been looking down on his colleagues and arguing from emotion, but rather
from facts, he could have convinced them to find not guilty.

In both cases, we started with a preliminary vote. In both cases, we argued
_cordially_ , with a deep and abiding interest in justice and what the right
thing would be. We took turns arguing against our own positions, in order to
try to better discover the truth of the matter. We were scrupulous in our
decisions, and I feel confident we chose correctly both times.

Both experiences were profoundly inspiring. I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

As an aside, I won't claim that the author is lying, because this may vary
from state to state, but after both of my cases the judge and both sides of
lawyers came in and spoke with us, asking questions about the case and our
decisions; there was no notion of post-decision jury confidentiality the
author alludes to.

Also, we were intructed in both cases to use our life experiences, not ignore
them as the author indicates. Again, this may vary from state to state.
Suffice it to say that the system the author depicts is not the one I
experienced twice.

~~~
TheRealDunkirk
I was the foreman in a murder trial, and the experience, for me, was also
inspiring and uplifting. There was only one bump in the road for us. Early on,
people starting bringing up a hesitation of rendering a guilty verdict, for
fear that the man would be put to death, and they didn't know if they could do
that. I don't know about other districts, but we weren't voting on the
sentence. The judge would do that later. It was an easy argument to point out
that this wasn't under our purview, and people dropped that concern quickly.

We were done in 2 hours. It was a drug robbery; someone got shot and died.
"Felony murder" makes it really clear: everyone involved is guilty. The
statute made things very easy.

The thing that haunts me about my case is that, out of 3 people (the shooter
and his 2 accomplices, who were to be tried together in a separate case), our
guy produced the gun for the police. If anything, the case made me wonder why
there isn't tribal knowledge (unfortunate phrase wording, in this case) among
inner-city, young, black men that YOU DO _NOT_ DO THIS? It was open-and-shut,
despite all the nonsense about a coerced confession and its subsequent
retraction.

~~~
jonmb
> I don't know about other districts, but we weren't voting on the sentence.
> The judge would do that later.

The one time I was called to jury duty, the judge told us the same. We're not
doing the sentencing. We're just there to decide if the evidence shown should
render a guilty verdict.

But I found that to be sort of a half-truth. Sure, we are not giving the
actual sentence. But if I give a man a guilty verdict, I can't really pretend
that I had nothing to do with his sentence.

If I know someone is likely to burn down a house, and I give him a match, how
can I pretend to not have anything to do with the house burning down? I _knew_
it was likely going to happen. Likewise, if I know the judge is likely to send
someone to jail for 30 years, how can I pretend to not have anything to do
with it if I render a guilty verdict? My verdict gives the judge the ability
to sentence, just like my hypothetical match gave the hypothetical psycho the
ability to burn down the house.

------
amateur_soclgst
Wait so this article is basically him saying that the system worked?

That's the impression that I got. Even disregarding his early learnings
towards high-school level leftist protest and mistrust of the government,
doesn't his careful consideration of the case show the reasons why we use a
jury system? Even if the 'mob' e.g. the other jurors decide that a person is
guilty, one or two reasonable arguments can decide otherwise.

It seems to me that everything worked out as it should. I wouldn't feel bad if
I was the author. (oh and he'll be back in court, serving a case in most
states only gives you a 3-5 year reprieve from jury duty)

~~~
jrockway
I think the conclusion from _12 Angry Men_ is "holy shit, what if Henry Fonda
weren't there".

~~~
amateur_soclgst
Hrm, good point, didn't really think of it that way.

------
thwyperson
Not quite jury duty but this story did strike a chord.

I'm someone who strongly believes, in theory anyway, in the presumption of
innocence and that everyone is entitled to a strong defense. A prosecutor
should have to earn a conviction. However I also feel strongly that
perpetrators of some crimes, upon conviction, should face harsh punishments.

Earlier this week, we got a message from a defense attorney inquiring about
our services to assist with a criminal case. There were no other details left,
so we googled the attorney and found that this attorney is involved in a very
high-profile criminal case defending someone accused of an _extremely_ heinous
crime. It's a Law and Order-type crime, and it happens to be in one of the
category crimes that I find to be particularly egregious.

I'm torn. The part of me that believes in the right to a strong defense wants
to assist, not necessarily because I support the defendant, but because the
prosecutor shouldn't be a rubber stamp. The other part is wondering what
happens if I help defendant get off and he hurts someone else.

We left a message with the attorney asking for more detail and haven't heard
back. It may be that the attorney found someone else, decided our field won't
help, or maybe just can't afford us. But if we do hear back, if we are able to
assist, and if the attorney does want to retain us, I don't know how we'll
respond.

I hope I have the courage to say yes. But I don't know that I do.

(throwaway account to mask my normal HN identity).

~~~
justinpombrio
And what if you don't help, and the defendant is innocent but goes to jail for
a heinous crime they did not commit? Does that possibility hold less weight
with you?

\---

> not necessarily because I support the defendant

Suppose the defendant is innocent until proven guilty. Now that they're
innocent, would you like to support them?

~~~
thwyperson
_Does that possibility hold less weight with you?_

In _general_ no, in this _specific_ case, yes, because the evidence is so
overwhelming. Think "twenty dead bodies found buried in defendant's basement
next to bloody knives with defendant's fingerprints." I know this might be an
unsatisfactory response, but I really can't be more specific without pointing
to the actual case and I don't want to get into specifics in case I do decide
to assist.

~~~
justinpombrio
Ah, then you needn't worry much, because when your evidence is presented the
jury will be thinking instead about the twenty dead bodies buried in the
basement, right?

If the evidence is overwhelming, a little defense shouldn't hurt, and if it
isn't, maybe they're innocent after all.

------
noonespecial
_" It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent
suffer."_

It takes a lot more courage to let a possibly guilty person go free than to
convict a possibly innocent one.

Always show up for jury duty if you can.

------
RyanZAG
As a non American, the USA justice system honestly sounds like the worst
possible system for justice imaginable. I don't think I could design a worse
system if I tried. Do you all just keep the system because it keeps so many
people employed following the pointless bureaucracy of it all?

The people making the decisions have no training in law at all, yet they have
to decide if the law was broken. They get a brief spoken explanation of the
law, but only after they have been given the testimony. Why would you not have
someone trained in the law decide if the law was broken? Why would you not
allow the jury to interrogate the witnesses when they must bear the
responsibility of the decision? The idea seems to be that random people off
the street will somehow be more willing to consider all angles and if they
disagree, you get another random sampling and try again. Try enough times and
eventually you'll get a bunch of people who are annoyed enough by being forced
into jury duty to just agree so they can go home. Real justice right there.

You might say that the jury system allows for a justice even if the judge is
compromised. But obviously it doesn't - the judge controls what information
can be fed to the jury and the jury must make the decision based off that
evidence. If the judge is biased, the jury will be forced into a particular
decision anyway. Why not just have the judge do their job and have an appeals
system and punishments on the judge for bad decisions? And yes, that system
works fine. See the current Oscar Pistorius trial for a working system (imo).

~~~
_pmf_
> As a non American, the USA justice system honestly sounds like the worst
> possible system for justice imaginable.

You just have to love a justice system where the police chief, the district
attorney and the judge are political offices and must appeal to the masses.

~~~
superuser2
Who would you rather they appeal to, and why is it more legitimate than the
will of the governed?

~~~
alextgordon
In the UK, the Crown Prosecution Service is supposed to act in the public
interest. Not indulge the public's every whim.

It's an imperfect system, but they do put a lot of care into weighing the
different factors, far more than I ever will. I'm happy it's their job and not
mine.

[https://www.cps.gov.uk/publications/docs/code_2013_accessibl...](https://www.cps.gov.uk/publications/docs/code_2013_accessible_english.pdf)

------
shiro
"I imagine what an inverse 12 Angry Men would be like, starting with 11 jurors
ready to acquit and Henry Fonda as the only one willing to convict. "

There's a Japanese film, 12 Tender Japaneses, which is exactly that---at the
beginning everybody casually votes to acquit except one who insists more
discussion. It's of course an homage to Reginald Rose, but it also depicts
very well how typical Japanese people behave when they face to make a
decision. (And there's a twist in plot so it's not just a reverse of 12 Angry
Men, anyway).

~~~
EdiX
> 12 Tender Japaneses

The only thing I can find googling this is a worldwar 2 aircraft carrier. Can
I have the original title in romanji I want to see if it has been dubbed or
subtitled.

~~~
ramchip
Looks like it's called Juninin no yasashii nihonjin:
[http://imdb.com/title/tt0104330/](http://imdb.com/title/tt0104330/)

~~~
shiro
Yes, that's it. Thanks. Like 12 Angry Men, the original is a stage play.

------
jvvw
I did jury service a couple of years ago in the UK - obviously a different
system to the US. I came away feeling although in many ways a jury is a
terrible way of deciding verdicts, that it is probably better than any of way
of making a decision - in the same way that democracy can be considered the
worst form of government apart from all the others that have been tried. Our
jury did feel like a good cross-section of people (even if many of them had
flawed ideas of logic) and that the value of the jury lay in the collective
decision-making not in a simple aggregation of the individual decisions.

~~~
rwmj
I think the solution is probably just to teach Logic in schools. It used to be
taught as a separate subject in Medieval times :-)

------
fengwick3
Despite the other negative comments, I actually find this a vicarious account
of the judicial system - a poignant reminder that behind any democratic system
lies humans.

~~~
jacobolus
Friendly note: I think you want some word other than “vicarious”, which
doesn’t make sense in context, the way the sentence is constructed. (I’m not
precisely sure what you were trying to say, so I won’t suggest alternate
words.)

~~~
coldtea
Why would you say "vicarious" doesn't make sense in that context? It IS a
second-hand account.

vicarious: "experienced in the imagination through the feelings or actions of
another person" \- synonyms: indirect, second-hand

~~~
surrealize
Pretty sure this is a first-hand account. The author experienced the judicial
system directly, as a juror. Then he wrote this first-hand account. If you
told someone else about it, that would be second-hand.

~~~
coldtea
Isn't it second-hand for the parent though, which I think is what he means?

~~~
jacobolus
The way he used the word “vicarious” is not idiomatically correct usage.

I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but I think he might have been trying
to say that the author’s description was so vivid that he could vicariously
experience the jury process through reading it.

------
jerf
A general comment on a lot of the comments here: You can make anything look
good by only considering the positives, you can make anything look bad by only
considering the negatives. Rather a lot of the latter going on here. To come
to a proper decision about what is better, you need to consider both the
negatives and the positives of multiple alternatives.

Before rushing to condemn jury trials, I'd also recommend considering that it
is a deliberate creation, and that you ought to consider the forces involved
in that creation and where it came from before rushing to condemn it. For
instance, many are suggesting we can just leave it to one judge, but if you
are, for instance, concerned about systemic racism, why would you leave the
entire decision to one possibly-racist judge? Wouldn't you be better off in a
process which makes it so that the prosecution has to collect 12 racists onto
the jury, procedurally battling the defense all the while, instead?

Part of the reason that the jury system exists is _precisely_ that the mental
model of a judge as a disinterested, literally inhuman arbiter of absolute
truth was _concretely, repeatedly disproved by history_. The reason we have a
"justice system" at all is precisely that we _don 't have access to perfect
humans_. If we did, there would be no problem to solve with "judges" or
"juries" or anything else in the first place; we'd just consult the perfect
humans! If your "better than a jury" model upon closer examination implicitly
contains perfect humans in it, throw it out; your model is already worse than
what we have, because at least what we have has the virtue of _existing_ , and
yours can't even reach that bar.

Look... at the risk of being a bit harsh... condeming jury trials, then
offering as an alternative a system that implicitly contains "perfect humans"
in it is frankly being every bit as irrational, unrealistic, and disconnected
from reality as the humans that just disappointed you in the jury trial
description you just read.

If that sucks... yeah, it sucks! But unfortunately, "it sucks" is not actually
a logical argument that "it" can't exist, nor is it any form of evidence that
there is anything better than "it". If you're going to produce evidence of a
better system, it's going to be a great deal harder than merely saying "this
system sucks", unfortunately.

~~~
4ad
Who condemns jury trials? Most people here complain about the _implementation_
of jury trials, not the _concept_ of jury trials.

------
MaysonL
And of course, even though this jury didn't convict the defendant, seemingly
correctly (at least from the author's perspective), it's entirely possible for
the prosecutor to move for a retrial, and this time keep all the black men off
the jury, and get a conviction. Or if the defendant isn't out on bail, or
maybe even if he is, to convince him to take a plea bargain to second degree
murder, or manslaughter.

------
cgm616
It's interesting to look at if this article is fiction or non-fiction. It is
certainly amazing writing with a strong message, but seems to be so strange to
be non-fiction.

Then again, I knew about some of this from the excellent Illustrated Guide to
Criminal Justice, so I wasn't totally surprised.

In the end, does it even matter if it happened?

~~~
aaronbrethorst

        In the end, does it even matter if it happened?
    

Yes, a man could have been sent to prison for a murder where reasonable doubt
exists about whether or not he did it.

~~~
puredemo
Gee, if only there was a signed confession. Oh wait.

------
masterponomo
When I sat on a jury in 1989, the main goal of most of the jury was to get the
decision over with in time to pick up their kids from school. We quickly found
for the plaintiff against the main defendant. There were a slew of co-
defendants, who aside from the reading of the charges had not been mentioned
at all during the trial. No evidence, no description of their supposed
involvement, nada. The foreman started to copy our verdict onto the forms for
them as well. I objected, pointing out that we had only discussed the one
defendant and needed to consider the others separately. Much protesting and
eye-rolling ensued, but the urge to leave won out and the jury agreed to find
all of the co-defendants not guilty. I was pleased with the outcome but
appalled by the process. I would hate to be judged so carelessly by my peers.
Yes, having 12 jurors does increase the odds of having someone put on the
brakes and insist on proper procedure, but it is by no means guaranteed.

------
facepalm
Non-American, don't know how the system works - how come they can eliminate
people from the jury pool? I would have expected the jury selection to be
completely random? There is no way the system can be fair if they get to
select the jury.

~~~
TheBeardKing
It's intended to eliminate people with preconceived biases, but attorney
motives for selecting jurors usually go far beyond that.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_selection](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_selection)

------
pc86
It is an absolute failure of voir dire that this person made it onto the jury.
A few select quotes:

> _The judge has already instructed us directly that we are not to do any
> research on the law while sitting on this jury. This is the first of several
> times I will violate those instructions._

> _a jury...is not quite about justice but instead about the direction of the
> tide._

> _I do believe in jury nullification. And I think the American carceral state
> is so corrupt that I’m starting to doubt if I could bring myself to render a
> guilty verdict under any circumstances._

To clarify the above, any mention of jury nullification is a sure-fire way to
get removed. And if you're not 100% sure you could render a guilty verdict
"under any circumstances," you have absolutely no business sitting on a jury.

> _I keep thinking of Walter Scott, whose uniformed murderer is seen on camera
> shooting him while he runs away, and who plants a weapon on his freshly
> killed corpse._

Blatantly false.

> _I don’t necessarily have a problem with ignoring the judge’s edict_

> _Outside of court, I tell everyone I can’t talk about the case. Then I
> usually talk about the case a little._

> _because [a coerced confession] was not presented by the defense, it’s
> merely a conspiracy theory and we can’t consider it. Secretly, I’m
> considering it too._

> _Henry and I splinter off from the others. Jurors aren’t supposed to talk
> about the case outside of deliberations. We talk about the case._

> _Again I violate the judge’s instructions_

> An accusation from another juror: _You lied during voir dire!_

------
powera
This guy seems like a terrible, terrible juror. Bragging about violating the
rules, annoyed because the judge is called "your honor", implying that a jury
with 6/12 people white is somehow a sign of massive racial bias?

What is supposed to be redeeming about this article? I'm not reading it all
unless there's something somebody says is worth reading.

EDIT: It gets more readable in the jury section, but I still don't get what if
anything this guy is trying to say, other than simply "it's like The Breakfast
Club".

~~~
aorloff
No, this guy seems like a real human being. Jurors are supposed to be humans,
first and foremost. That's why juries are made up of your peers and not a
bunch of legal professionals.

There's lots of "rules" in life, and our job as humans is figuring out which
ones matter.

~~~
wtallis
I agree. A juror who believes in following the rules for the sake of following
the rules is _terrifying_. The goal of our legal system is (or should be)
_justice_ rather than mere law enforcement, and it's never appropriate to
ignore the fact that every component of the system is fallible.

~~~
cat-dev-null
Agreed^million. Terrifying in a Stanford Prison meets Milgram way. I think all
jurors should be put through Milgram-like experiments as condition for
service, to determine if they're cowed by authority or possess their own moral
compasses.

------
powertower
A couple of things stand out for me here -

> Perhaps this was the time to mention that having witnessed the murders of
> Eric Garner and Walter Scott on video made personal experience unnecessary.

Eric Garner said "I can't breathe" 11 times.

Any person that has experienced a chokehold, knows that if you can't breath,
you can't move air in and out of your lungs and throat, you can't say
anything, not even "I can't breathe" 1 time. Certainly not 11 times - unless
it was a purely stationary-type hold.

Also, chokeholds which result in death leave physical damage, that was not
present in the autopsy (no damage to the windpipe or neckbones).

Eric Garner was not "murdered", he died in the ambulance from the situation
exacerbating his health complications.

Anyone who thinks he was literally "murdered" is racially motivated to see it
as such, not based on facts nor _common-sense_ , the later which the author
brings up multiple times.

Second, as this is written anonymously and rolls a "white-jury" racial
narrative from the start to the end, you have to consider that 9 out of the
last 10 racial incidences (of the national news proportion) ended up being
hoaxes done to validate someones need for there to be racism where there was
none. At some point you get tired of the lies. And there is absolutely nothing
in this story that allows the reader to verify it.

~~~
sethammons
An underlying health condition would not mean anything.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggshell_skull](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggshell_skull)

~~~
powertower
I don't understand what you are refuting?

We both know that the narrative was that a white cop choked a black man to
death - which was simply not true.

~~~
remarkEon
sethammons is saying (I believe) that the defense of "the choke hold didn't
literally kill the man" is not a defense in a criminal case. The action,
though not the direct cause of death, directly contributed to triggering the
underlying condition that precipitated the victim's death.

-> Any person that has experienced a chokehold, knows that if you can't breath, you can't move air, you can't say anything, not even "I can't breathe" 1 time.

This is also a little misleading. In a past life, I had to certify in
combatives training and you most definitely can pass out from a choke hold
(the kind applied in this case) and should the applier of the choke hold not
release they can, exogenous of intentions, kill the person. As mentioned, all
that doesn't matter though.

