One juror, a 65-year-old retiree, admitted his family told him to use his partial deafness to get out of jury selection. He didn’t. He did admit he believed the shooting “was the fault of both sides,” but he said he could serve on the jury.
“I could play golf but this is much more interesting,” he said with a smile.
Because sometimes (or most of the time) the jury of your peers is not and it can be downright scary the quality of people who have the rest of your life in your hands.
My peers do not vote for obama……. 🙁
and probably won’t be in your jury either…. scary thought
I served on a jury a number of years ago and will never again trust the process, 10 reasonable people stopped by 2 idiots. I’m now a physician, which almost automatically disqualifies me, because apparently my degree confirms I have a brain and this might influence others if I were allowed to serve again. Having experience analyzing evidence and making important decisions based on that evidence is not a skill they are interested in 🙁
I wonder if they’d have the same problem with me and my “IT Help Desk” background. I’ll be the first to admit that the human body is far more complex than most-if-not-all computer systems, but root cause system analysis based on the “user’s” response to specific questions and limited diagnostic testing data, culminating in an accurate diagnosis and effective remedial action(s), seems to be a common thread we share.
When the “justice” system determines that your education and experience make you “too smart” to serve on a jury, it’s a sad day indeed. 🙁
I was illuminated from jury selection on a murder case in Oakland Ca. because because I was a NRA and S.A.S.S. member. (knew too much about guns)
Professional jurors are used in Europe and elsewhere I understand. Now, very little coming out of the EU is worthy of emulation, but maybe this is. We get people who as terms of their employment do not watch or read the news, are invested in the trials because they are getting paid a decent amount, who quickly learn the trial system (and so do not need to be inefficiently educated about it each time) and can detect the tricks and non-sense that both sides use. If used we can get a big jury pool of these professionals on tap and then how would we not get representative samples for juries?
That’s the same theory that gave us our unbiased, professional civil service.
No thanks. I’ll take a random pool of mouth-breathers over a selected pool of fascists.
Point taken. It is harder to corrupt the system as it is structured now.