"Jury duty gets a bad rap and for good reason: It’s time consuming, disruptive, and often means being away from seemingly more important things. But juries are critical to the American legal system and to the concept of justice in America. The problem? The people making up juries are dumb. They have little civics understanding. Injustice prevails with biased juries. Injustice prevails when qualified jurors are so disgusted with the system that they try to avoid serving. Injustice prevails with dumb juries.
"How important are impartial juries? Just ask any Jan. 6 protester spending years in prison for walking peacefully, at a police officer’s behest, through the Capitol. Is there a D.C. jury that would find any right-leaning defendant not guilty?
"Some of the problems with juries are pure cynical malice on the part of prosecutors. Some are set up by biased judges. All the problems with juries have, at their root, ignorance of basic civics and the cascading effect that bad judicial outcomes cause a nihilistic belief that serving doesn’t matter. It does matter, though.
"Last week, I went through the jury selection and then, shockingly, got seated on a jury for a felony case.
"There were multiple reasons why people were excused from the jury pool. Some felt that they could not presume the innocence of the man based on past convictions. Some felt that the allegations alone made the man guilty. They did not believe that the prosecution needed to make a case. They believed that the defendant needed to prove his innocence. But the slate-clearing reason why people disqualified themselves: If the defendant didn’t take the stand, then, obviously, he was guilty.
"A friend of mine said of the bandwagoning that happened when this issue came to the fore that the jurors just latched on because they didn’t want to be on the jury. That might have been true of a few. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the 40 or so who disqualified themselves gave long, vehement explanations about how people who are innocent will defend themselves and want to testify.
"As I sat there, I could think of 40 reasons not to testify.
"The judge in this case dismissed them all. That left a small pool to choose from, and I was one of them. The remaining jurors were intelligent, attentive, and sincere. It was a brutal case with heart-rending evidence scrupulously compiled by a crack team of prosecutors. They made the jury’s job easy and proved their case beyond a shadow of a doubt, never mind beyond reasonable doubt. This was a case where justice prevailed.
"Leaving the courtroom, though, the responses of these jurors and the clear injustice being meted out in courtrooms across America because of dumb jurors brought disturbing thoughts." . . .
