people in the notes suggesting it was “improper” for the juror to do this or that it “introduced bias” to the court proceeding 🙄 the ice agent in question accused a moc of assaulting him / resisting arrest. how is the agent being a white supremacist not relevant. what universe are you living in
As a member of the world’s SECOND oldest profession, I assure you this is just one of many ways the justice system is systematically fucked up.
For anyone who wants to know how to fact check something you are told while on jury duty without getting fined:
First, you need to understand that the rule that jurors can’t just google things is coming from a good place. Like imagine that you are on a jury that’s considering, say, a medical malpractice lawsuit and one of your fellow jurors comes into the jury room and says to you, “I think the victim’s expert was lying because WebMD totally contradicts everything they said.”
And you might be like, “But WebMD is notoriously unreliable website and the expert you’re talking about is a researcher from Mayo Clinic.” But this person cannot be swayed.
Like, we can all agree that would be bad.
So even though these rulescan contribute to unjust outcomes as in the case above (and seriously, the fact that the defense attorney didn’t fact check that is probably grounds for legal malpractice), they also prevent jurors from just looking up bullshit online and taking it more seriously than the actual experts the court has put on. And I think in the era of anti-vaxxers/QAnon/COVID denial/etc., we can all understand why it’s a bad idea to trust that people can tell fact from bullshit online.
So in light of this, how do you as a juror fact check something?
The key here is that you have to ask the court for information. Jurors can ask questions of the court during deliberations, so if something you said sounds off to you, you can ask for more information.
The key term you want to use here is “credibility.”
The job of a jury is to decide what are called “questions of fact.” Long before the trial even starts, lawyers will have hashed out all the “questions of law” — like, what the statute of limitations is; what laws, exactly, were allegedly broken; whether the court you’re in even has jurisdiction; stuff like that. Jurors are responsible for deciding which side’s version of the facts has more credibility.
For instance, if the prosecution’s witness says X and the defense’s witness says Y, the jury is responsible for deciding which is true, X or Y. And you do this by weighing which one is more credible.
So in this case, if the juror had known to, he could have told the judge, “In order to properly assess the ICE agent’s credibility, I need more information about his tattoo. I have doubts about whether he was telling the truth about it, which would impact how credible I would find his testimony. Can the agent please provide evidence that it really is what he says it is?”
There are a lot of problems with our legal system, and I think one of the biggest is that jurors aren’t educated about what they can and can’t do. Juries have a lot of power, if (and only if) they know how to use it.
Reblogging for that last post, because frankly, “what to do as a juror” is one of those things the schools should really be teaching us. Serving on a jury is one of the most powerful rights of citizenship and everyone should be educated in how to exercise it correctly.
It’s crazy how homophobes/transphobes are always like “I don’t think gay and trans people should exist in public. How do I explain them to my child?” and gay and trans people are like “Oh okay, I can do it for you. Sometimes boys like other boys and girls like other girls. Sometimes people are told they’re a girl as a child but realize they’re actually a boy or something in between a boy and a girl or no gender at all and vise versa.” and then they ban the books explaining these extremely simple concepts in child friendly terms.
Imagine that one day as you’re walking on a hot sunny path, your hat jumps off your head and lands into a muddy ditch. And you look at your muddy hat and ask it: “What did you do that for?”
“I don’t want to be a burden anymore”, your hat answers. “You are always carrying me around, and I can’t carry you. That’s not fair.”
“I don’t mind carrying you, little idiot”, you tell your hat, “you hardly weight anything at all, and you shelter me from the sun.”
“But that’s different”, your hat protests. “I don’t mind the sun scorching on me. That happens anyway. It’s literally no trouble for me to shade you too.”
“Just the same it’s no trouble for me to carry you. But now, because you wanted to stop inconveniencing and bothering me, I am now hatless and you are in the dirt.”
hello Aesop; how’s the underworld been?
Every day I wake up and Hades kicks me in the nuts.
“I’m just a girl☺️🥰💖💞💅🌺🌷🦄” when you were eight and the teacher said she needed some strong boys to carry something you used to be furious, and when you convinced them to let you help, you carried twice as many chairs as the boys with the righteous anger of a girl who knew she was just as capable as them. Where did that go?
the postal service names their shit exactly like how a 16 y.o. names angsty fanfic
Explain.
try and tell me literally any one of these would not fit above a short story about two wholly random men from the MCU fingering each other, or possibly 12 chapters of one or more characters from a CW show being in high school while having a photogenic but terminal kind of cancer. try.
ok so i want to say in hindsight i think i could probably have been clearer
