r/nottheonion • u/ArgentineBeauty • 19h ago

Reese Witherspoon Chosen as Jury Foreman After Jurors Thought She Went to Law School Because of Legally Blonde

https://www.fashiontimes.co.uk/reese-witherspoon-jury-duty-mix-1763528
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u/die5el23 19h ago

& those people are in charge of another persons life

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u/ldg25 19h ago

"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that"

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u/Zxvasdfthrowaway 18h ago

Reese went on to say that her fellow jurors were making decisions based on vibes, not the evidence presented. Yikes.

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u/wayoverpaid 18h ago edited 18h ago

That was 100% my jury experience.

Me: Look the instructions we got from the judge says that we assess damages based on how much unjust enrichment actually happen when this fucker stole the other guy's business.

Them: Yeah but the business wasn't actually worth that much, and he should have known not to trust a handshake deal.

Me: But we're here to assess damages. That they stole the business was decided already.

Them: I still don't think we should award that much.

And like, cool, I guess the jury does get to toss out the law if they think the law is dumb, but I never heard anyone taking that explicit stance. Just gut feeling, and a few "whatever it takes to get this done."

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u/ty_fighter84 18h ago

This is why I never instantly fault people for taking a deal.

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u/Sawses 18h ago

It's also why we have 12 jurors and for criminal cases they all have to agree. Even if 90% of people are completely incapable of making a reasonable decision, statistically you're still very likely to have at least one person who would rather hang the jury than convict somebody wrongfully.

Fun fact: Attorneys don't like scientists and engineers on the jury because their bar for "beyond reasonable doubt" is usually very high compared to the average person.

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u/RandomMandarin 18h ago

Until 2019, a criminal trial in Louisiana only needed 10 jurors out of 12 to obtain a conviction. Needless to say, the results were consistently unfair and racist.

https://www.vera.org/news/unanimous-juries-bring-21st-century-justice-to-louisiana

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u/TheGloomyWoodpecker 17h ago

lmao when discussing judicial fairness, Louisiana isn’t even on the map.

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u/CatsBye90 17h ago

If Louisiana were an independent nation, they would rank second, globally, in incarceration rate. Only El Salvador has a higher incarceration rate.

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u/mfb- 16h ago

Being fourth after El Salvador, Cuba and Rwanda isn't exactly a great thing for the US overall either.

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u/superxpro12 15h ago

gotta exploit post-13th amendment post-civil-rights indentured servitude laws somehow. How else do you think they're gonna maintain their slave-base?

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u/Northern23 16h ago

Does that take into account federal incarcerations made in Louisiana? If not, that might push the bar a bit higher

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u/Affordable_Z_Jobs 17h ago

I believe it's labeled as "thar be dragons".

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u/AlarmingAffect0 17h ago

It is on the map sadly.

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u/DirtyWriterDPP 8h ago

In the not that distant past they needed a map to even get close enough to see the map.

In all seriousness I don't think the people of Louisiana are any more racist than their deep south neighbors. Probably less so than Mississippi than Alabama IMO anecdotal experience. However, they have a long and deep history of blatant government corruption. That no doubt has led to thousands of unjust convictions.

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u/FUPAMagneto 15h ago

Careful, or you’ll have a bunch of Brits insisting that 10/12 jurors is completely fine to send somebody to prison for life

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u/Loggerdon 14h ago edited 6h ago

The off-topic but I was on a jury last year. A young policeman was accused of domestic violence and also of “Child Endangerment” (leaving his loaded service weapon on the playground in the back yard where his and the neighbor kids play daily). At first I thought the jury was going to be a typical cross section of the US, with at least 4 out of 12 people were imbeciles. I was not the jury foreman but I guess I was his right hand man. As it turned out when it came time to debate, EVERY SINGLE PERSON argued their points very vigorously. It was kind of reassuring because it seemed the system worked. Then we all reached a verdict to convict and I walked away feeling very proud of our group of 12 citizens.

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u/gsfgf 5h ago

That's actually the norm in criminal cases. There's a reason we keep using juries of ones peers, after all.

In civil cases, juries are fucking random. But that does provide a good incentive to settle.

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u/CobaltMnM 17h ago edited 16h ago

The number of jurors is location dependent. Florida it’s usually only 6.

Also bs on your fun fact. I was a prosecutor for years. I prayed for scientists and engineers. I prefer my cases being decided based on facts, not vibes. If I “lost”, so be it.

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u/Sawses 17h ago

Fair enough! I stand corrected. In your experience, do you think other attorneys generally shared your scruples?

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u/DustyRacoonDad 16h ago

As a fellow engineer who knows plenty of attorneys, they're going to agree with the prosecutor guy above.

They HATE when they have something legitimate, for or against, that's completely logical, and then the jury is still entirely illogical and dumb, running on vibes. I get to hear that gripe often.

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u/gsfgf 5h ago

Lawyer but not that kind of lawyer. I wouldn't necessarily consider that scruples. The problem is that engineers and scientists tend to make up outlandish scenarios that very clearly fall in the ambit of unreasonable doubt. Don't think Alan Grant; think a stereotypical redditor. Combined with often presenting as more intelligent, they can overly bias the jury. I'm about as defense minded as they come, but there are some people that do need to be put in cages in the interest of public safety.

A prosecutor should only bring a case to trial when they think the defendant is guilty, which is where scruples (at least should) come in. I wouldn't be surprised if /u/CobaltMnM wasn't the one that got to decide overarching trial strategy and had a boss that insisted on bringing iffy cases.

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u/hardolaf 15h ago

Where I lived in Florida for 3 years, the prosecutors didn't want us "liberal" engineers and scientists to get in the way of their bad evidence. Over in Orlando, it was the exact opposite.

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u/CobaltMnM 15h ago

Yikes.

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u/Man_with_the_Fedora 6h ago

Yawohl! Nicht mehr Judenphysik!

*Ahem* Yay! No more Woke Science!

/s

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u/greenzetsa 17h ago

Good for you! I feel like that isn't always the case though.

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u/CobaltMnM 17h ago

Thanks. I tried really hard to be “one of the good ones”.

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u/WHTDOG 13h ago

If true, then honestly, genuinely, thank you for your service to society and humanity.

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u/the_scarlett_ning 16h ago

Idk if that makes it bs though. I’m in Louisiana and I’ve certainly heard lawyers (usually the prosecutors) that don’t want people who are too educated on the jury and they never want people who might know the law.

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u/AlarmingAffect0 16h ago

If I “lost”, so be it.

You mean to tell me you weren't chasing the perfect conviction record and your career didn't depend on it? Or it did and you didn't care? If it's the second, my hat off to you. Sincerely. That is not what the system incentivizes AFAIK.

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u/CobaltMnM 16h ago

I was fortunate enough to have a boss who knew what our job was and had my back.

There is a great quote from a USSC case in 1935, Berger v. US, that I printed in large font and hung over my computer monitor while there to remind me what actually mattered:

"The [prosecutor] is the representative not of an ordinary party to a controversy, but of a sovereignty whose obligation to govern impartially is as compelling as its obligation to govern at all, and whose interest, therefore, in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done. As such, he is in a peculiar and very definite sense the servant of the law, the two-fold aim of which is that guilt shall not escape or innocence suffer. He may prosecute with earnestness and vigor -- indeed, he should do so. But, while he may strike hard blows, he is not at liberty to strike foul ones. It is as much his duty to refrain from improper methods calculated to produce a wrongful conviction as it is to use every legitimate means to bring about a just one."

https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/295/78/

A prosecutor is literally the only type of attorney who's "job" is not solely to "win" their cases.

(And sadly, I know there are plenty of bad apples out there.)

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u/AlarmingAffect0 12h ago

This is all excellent. I commend you and your boss. May your example spread.

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u/spakatieo 16h ago

The number of jurors who must agree to convict a defendant of a crime is dependent on the crime(s) with which the defendant is charged, in Florida and in most, if not all, other states in the U.S. Florida requires all 12 jurors to agree in order to convict a defendant of first degree murder.

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u/twitch1982 16h ago

LMAO

I prefer my cases being decided based on facts, not vibes.

You allow cops to testify?

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u/CobaltMnM 15h ago

Working that closely with them you’d get a good idea of which ones were good and which ones weren’t. Once they were on my shit list from any case, absolutely not. I’d drop cases if their testimony was required for a conviction.

Made a few enemies that way but such is life.

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u/Xminus6 14h ago

I was going through the Voir Dire process on a case once as a juror. I wasn’t trying to “get out of it” but I was answering truthfully as to my history with all of the subjects that that case dealt with. Yes I had experience with family ownership of a restaurant. Yes I invested money in securities and real estate. On and on. Surprisingly the defense still selected me. I asked him after the trial why he would select me since I had built-in biases based on my history. He just said he’s prefer someone with some bias who seemed reasonable than people with no bias who were ruled by emotion.

I thought that was interesting and counterintuitive.

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u/optifreebraun 12h ago

What about corporate transactional lawyers? Would you have wanted us on a jury?

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u/CobaltMnM 12h ago

I didn’t mind lawyers of any non-criminal kind. Defense attorneys I’d strike and the prosecution generally struck prosecutors.

I’d honestly prefer having a lawyer. Someone to help keep things on track from the legal perspective and applying the law to the facts that actually matter. Deputies would tell us some times about the bizarre things jurors would be heard through the door yelling at each other about and it was usually tangential stuff that had nothing to do with the crime in question.

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u/TheOutsideJoke 17h ago

Some states have changed or removed peremptory strikes, which means that attorneys can’t get rid of people without a reason anymore. I think that it has been good change overall in my state because certain groups of people are not automatically excluded from the process.

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u/Prometheus720 17h ago

They probably still are if your state uses voter rolls to find jury candidates

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u/RegulatoryCapture 17h ago

Fun fact: Attorneys don't like scientists and engineers on the jury because their bar for "beyond reasonable doubt" is usually very high compared to the average person.

Really depends on the case (and which side is challenging the juror).

There are certainly cases where attorneys desperately want someone logical and fact-oriented on the jury.

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u/Clovis69 14h ago

A case where I know neither side cared if there were engineers or scientists or coders was that Terry Childs taking SF's municipal fiber optic network hostage

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u/Rotten-Roses 18h ago

Yeah this kind of thing is why I'll probably never actually end up on a jury for better or worse. My whole job can be described as forensic statistics with "beyond a reasonable doubt" having a numerical threshold for certainty. I have cousins who are prosecutors and defense attorneys and the defense side loves it at least.

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u/legal_stylist 18h ago

So … defense attorneys presumably like them just fine, then?

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u/almoooo 17h ago

That’s funny you say that about the Engineer because when I had jury duty, one of the gentleman in the jury pool was an Engineer. He was really cool and super smart and every time he answered one of their questions, you could tell they felt some type of way about it. Especially when it came to evidence. He’s like “We’ll I can’t make an informed decision without all the data available to me, id have to know this or that or etc. I’d also need to know the EXACT definition of the law” And I’m giggling because I felt like I was watching a conversation with my husband and I as a 3rd person.

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u/Scaevus 13h ago

Fun fact: Attorneys don't like scientists and engineers on the jury because their bar for "beyond reasonable doubt" is usually very high compared to the average person.

Correct, this is how we were trained as prosecutors. The reasoning is also because these are professions where people look for problems and are inclined to be more skeptical than the public.

Other professions to avoid included attorneys (you don't want people to second guess what you're doing by thinking they could do a better job), and teachers (people whose job it is to grade other people).

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u/Nukemind 15h ago

It's also why we have 12 jurors and for criminal cases they all have to agree. Even if 90% of people are completely incapable of making a reasonable decision, statistically you're still very likely to have at least one person who would rather hang the jury than convict somebody wrongfully.

Ironically when I did criminal defense we didn't like them for the reverse reason: they often did exactly what you said, but were less emotional, and frankly it wasn't uncommon to have cases that relied on emotion more than susbtance (despite only being able to present facts). Sometimes cases were just stinkers.

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u/LordBeric 14h ago

Ha, I served on a jury a couple years ago and was elected the jury foreman. I kept insisting the other jurors that I was pretty certain the guy did it, but there were reasons that left me with a "reasonable doubt" so, as instructed, I thought we should find him not guilty.

I am an engineer.

Other anecdote that relates to dumb jurors: The trial was for if a guy committed 2nd Degree Robbery. We were instructed that this meant he assaulted someone while committing theft. We all agreed that him shoving his girlfriend amounted to assault, and most people agreed that he committed theft. One older lady that agreed with both of these findings insisted that she just couldn't call that a robbery. I repeatedly tried to explain to her that there is a difference between what we would conversationally call robbery and what is legally considered robbery, but she just refused to hear it.

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u/Barraco_Barmer 14h ago

What if jury panels had hundreds of people and you could vote with a button

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u/Money4Nothing2000 12h ago

I'm an engineer and during voir dire the attorneys never brought up that fact when they questioned me. They were just all on about whether I trusted a cop's testimony or not. When I said I don't trust cops, I was dismissed pretty quick.

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u/sighthoundman 18h ago

Take a look at r/insurance. "Of course the insurance company settled for $8000. It would cost more than that to defend and they still might lose." But the plaintiffs accepted $8000? Prima facia evidence of a fraudulent claim. (Counting "stretching the truth" as fraud, which is a whole other question.)

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u/brittneyacook 18h ago

My firm is settling a bullshit slip and fall case because it would cost waaaaay more to try it. They’re only asking for like $10k (versus the $50k+ a jury trial will cost, and that’s not including pretrial billing)

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u/Repulsive_Stock9400 13h ago

That surprises me. Slip and falls used to be easy money for personal injury lawyers but that dried up in most of the country decades ago. Juries just aren't as generous as they used to be, so assumption of risk and contributory negligence zero out a lot of PI claims that would have been cash money back in the day.

I say fight it!

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u/brittneyacook 13h ago

I don’t disagree, but ultimately it’s up to our client the insurer lol

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u/bradd_pit 17h ago

Settlement is not an admission of guilt

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u/Skill3rwhale 17h ago

The releases the insurance and attorneys have you sign explicitly state this.

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u/sighthoundman 17h ago

Settling a case for a small payout is an admission that you have a weak case.

As Mark Twain said, "It is incredibly difficult to convince someone of something when their entire salary depends on them not understanding it." It may not be the facts of the case or the law, but all sorts of non-legal things that make a case hard to prosecute.

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u/Rotten-Roses 18h ago

Yeah your alternative is being judged by "12 idiots too dumb to avoid jury duty" which is a terrifying sentiment, especially when a lot of the people you might want get specifically selected /against/ by the other side for obvious reasons.

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u/hairsprayking 18h ago

Where i live, Lawyers can't serve on a jury because they know the law too well lol

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u/20_mile 17h ago

I guess the jury does get to toss out the law if they think the law is dumb

My brother was on a jury for a POC accused of selling drugs. Upon arrest, the cops threw him into the back of the cop car and filled it with pepper spray and let the guy choke for twenty minutes.

My brother and a couple of other jurors were able to convince the rest of the members that, even if he was guilty of the crime, he had already served his sentence, and shouldn't have to be punished a second time.

Not Guilty.

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u/wayoverpaid 17h ago

Legit.

In an ideal world "excessive brutality imposed by police has tainted this entire attempt at justice" would be a thing lawmakers would have to deal with, and confirm or deny if the cruelty is acceptable. We know it's happening, but now we have a clear instance, so sign your fucking name to it! No? Then let it be forever enshrined in case law that anyone who gets pepper sprayed in the back of a vehicle can use that as credit.

This is a half baked idea and I can see potential problems with it... but that guy was basically lucky he had the jury he did, and that should be made consistent.

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u/Shazzbot1 17h ago

I believe this is called jury nullification. They agreed the dude the crime, but they don’t agree that it should be punished.

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u/_thisisvincent 16h ago

Ohhh fuck jury nullification mention on Reddit

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u/Clovis69 14h ago

Shshshssssshhhhh...we can't use the JN words cause that makes the lawyers get all defensive and the judges act like it'll end the world

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u/Justausername1234 11h ago

Well, it's because mentions of Jury Nullification make reasonable people wonder about the opposite... What if the jury finds guilt in a person who they thought was innocent...

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u/LeastCoordinatedJedi 15h ago

Based jury, thanks for the weirdly uplifting-depressing story.

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u/SkyShadowing 16h ago

Working on a novel where this concept is touched on, shouldn't any lawyer worth their salt be trying to argue this is Outrageous Government Conduct?

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u/Awkward_Pangolin3254 15h ago

the cops threw him into the back of the cop car and filled it with pepper spray and let the guy choke for twenty minutes.

That's stupid as fuck for a whole host of reasons. What happens next time the officer whose car that was is driving down the road with their hands on the steering wheel, when suddenly their eye itches?

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u/MurderMelon 14h ago edited 6h ago

forward thinking

...

cops

pick one

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u/Terramagi 14h ago edited 14h ago

They pull over and find another black person to brutalize.

Fire hot, water wet, bird fly, sun shine, cop beat

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u/Translycanthrope 18h ago

This is exactly why most legal proceedings are handled behind the scenes. You cannot predict what a jury will do and they are known to make some dumb decisions.

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u/c-9 16h ago

I've been on a few juries. People really don't take things that are their civic responsibility seriously.

And that's how we've gotten into the mess we are in.

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u/Maiyku 17h ago

I was lucky. We only had 1 juror going on “vibes” and another who was just too uncertain to say one way or the other.

The one going on vibes should’ve never been allowed on the jury in the first place. It was a gang related case and her mother had been in a gang involved shooting years prior.

She didn’t care what the laws were, she was actively looking for any little loophole she could to put our defendant away for life. Not because of the presumed crimes he committed (or didn’t) but because of a personal biases she held.

We were 10-2 not guilty and she refused to budge and is the reason the case was declared a mistrial. She refused to let go of her biases to the point that me and another juror actually took a stand and refused to change our votes so she couldn’t corrupt everyone to switching to her side and change the outcome of the case with her bias.

Thankfully, our stand didn’t matter and the other jurors didn’t budge either. Final vote was still 10-2 a full 3 days later.

The other vote wasn’t actually stopping us. She just wanted manslaughter, not murder.

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u/wayoverpaid 17h ago

That's lucky? Sounds awful.

Fortunately for me it was a difference in value and I suggested we all agreed damages were between X and Y, and we could all pick a number and average it.

The guy who was wronged did ok in the end, but I did the math and he got something like an inflation adjusted return on what would have happened if the defendants had just been honest anyway. Shoulda got more for his trouble.

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u/Maiyku 17h ago

Lucky in the sense that it was only one. So it’s not like it was a 50/50 split and we were warring in the jury room.

We were mostly arguing with HER. Trying to understand and see what she did. It was as she explained (by basically admitting her bias) that me and the other jury member locked eyes and just did a silent nod. We could not let her bias influence the outcome of the case.

Not only was she stating factually wrong things and grasping for straws that did not exist, but I also feared the defense could use her somehow. That the jury pool was tainted, etc because of her extreme biases, which would made retrial all that much more fun for them, might cause them to move districts, whatever.

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u/Obi-Tron_Kenobi 14h ago

because of personal biases she held.

This is why it bothers me when people online use their past victimhood to weigh in on what punishment they think an alleged criminal should get.

I see it so often when someone says "I was a victim of [blank] and think everyone who does [blank] should get life in prison/the death penalty/cruel and unusual punishment..." when there's an article on someone who "only" got X years in prison

They use it to act as an authority on the subject, but don't realize their biases are clouding their judgment and are judging the perpetrator more harshly than what might be fair or necessary for rehabilitation

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u/Scaevus 12h ago

The one going on vibes should’ve never been allowed on the jury in the first place.

Many attorneys aren't very good at jury selection. But that's also just an inherent danger of a jury pool. It's actually very difficult for people to let go of their biases, even if they're pointed out to them. If anything, that makes them defensive and hold onto those biases even harder.

I would never pick a jury trial if it were up to me.

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u/ShinyPatina 16h ago

Yup. Sat on a 1 1/2 week long murder trial where the evidence to convict just was not really there and there was SO much reasonable doubt that another person (who right before the trial began had been killed on the streets) could've also done the murder.

We were deadlocked for 3 days, 10-2, because two women jurors just kept saying, "We just FEEL he's guilty." The refused to engage with the rest of us pointing out lack of proof.

On the third day, after we told the judge we were deadlocked, he said, "I'll see you tomorrow and the next day and the day after that until you come to a unanimous decision. No one is going to hang this jury."

The next day we all came in a settled down with our books, and the two women huddled in a corner talking and finally came over to the rest of us and said, "FINE. We'll vote not guilty but we still FEEL he is but want to go home."

So we acquitted the guy and about 8-months later on a whim I looked him up and saw that he too had been gunned down on the streets and I thought, "Well, if we got it wrong that was the universe correcting us on that one."

But yeah, some people should not be jurors because they simply cannot look at the evidence or obey the judges' instructions and just want to go on what they feel or believe when that is not the job of a juror.

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u/Interesting_Tea5715 17h ago

Same. I was part of a jury where there was crazy amounts of evidence against the person, it was an obvious slam dunk case.

People were still saying, we don't know how this will affect the guy we should reconsider.... Bruh, dude was drunk as fuck and broke the law several times (endangering others) he lost his chance at forgiveness.

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u/wayoverpaid 17h ago

I said this elsewhere but this is where I wish juries could render a two part verdict of "yes as a decider of the facts, this happened" but also "the law here is super harsh and we have a problem with that."

If a jury protests the law (or maybe if enough juries protest) then make the lawmakers affirm the law stands as is.

As is people will bend the facts to fit their ideals.

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u/DustyRacoonDad 16h ago

I mean, yeah, the jury does get to toss out the law if they think the law is dumb. That's jury nullification, and sometimes it's a great thing.

The problem is that the jurors are dumb.

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u/Eyevis 17h ago

But we're here to assess damages. That they stole the business was decided already.

bruh why tf is a jury deciding that and not an accountant? USA is insane.

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u/wayoverpaid 17h ago

Well, which accountant?

To add more detail, after we were released I looked it up, turns out the case was originally decided about a decade ago. Liability was found but damages were very low because the forensic accountant for the guy suing was blocked from testifying.

So that went to the appeals court, and it was found that the accountant should not have been blocked, so we were remanded to a new trial to assess damages, but that meant more or less going over everything, and some jurors were unconvinced any wrongdoing had actually happened... long story but in short one person was gonna buy someone else's business, got their full client list in due diligence, backed out of the handshake deal, but used all the stuff they gathered to call old clients and say "oh we're your new provider now). Some shady shit.

So we got to listen to two accountants, one from each side, argue why the damage done was a LOT or a LITTLE, meanwhile the juries are like "Well if nothing was signed whats the problem" when that was not in the scope of what we were asked to decicide.

Yeah.

I also found out that the people being sued kept trying to dodge the process servers during the original case, which is a fact that absolutely would have prejudiced the shit out of me if I had looked it up during the trial.

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u/hippydippyshit 18h ago

I dunno, I think it was pretty smart of them to elect her to lead considering the other options

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u/Impressive_Ad_5201 18h ago

She had the practice to project confidence, annunciate, project her voice and keep a straight face in front of the court. She was probably the best choice available.

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u/-Supposably- 16h ago

Plus I heard she went to law school

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u/FakeRickHarrison 15h ago

Every teenager knows about the two well-known documentaries about her.

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u/MushroomSaute 6h ago

It's like a reverse Catch-22. If they all decide it should be her because they think she's been to law school, then it really should be her. But, if they're smart enough to know it wasn't real, they would make a better decision anyway.

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u/Brainpry 18h ago

Also for her role she had to know something about the law right? More than those people!

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u/bakedNebraska 18h ago

No. She had to learn lines that the writers felt were convincing enough as "the law" to fool watchers who know nothing about the law.

For what period of time was she learning those lines and reciting them? Like a year? I have no idea how long it takes to film a movie.

So the lines already had a tenuous connection to law at best, and she only spent a short time learning and using the lines.

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u/ebb_omega 16h ago

Filming is usually over a couple of months. Post-production can take a year or so. Usually when you're watching a movie, it was filmed typically at least a year prior.

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u/Wise-Funny5471 18h ago

Stephen Lambert, executive producer for The Traitors, has said that watching how contestants confidently pick the wrong people on little to no evidence has shaken his faith in the real-world jury system.

I haven't had the opportunity to sit one, but I can totally see what you and others in this thread are describing.

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u/MrBossFromTheHitTVSh 16h ago

Eh, on that show they're deliberately given little or confusing evidence, and encouraged to make something out of nothing. And like, no offense to the contestants but the majority of them I wouldn't trust to water a plant, let alone actually participate in a jury.

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u/airinato 14h ago

Congrats, you're just figuring out exactly what a jury does with the average idiots.

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u/24_August_1814 13h ago

My favourite part of that show is watching people at the Round Table go on about "the evidence" and it's literally always just feels. "Joe didn't say hi to me at breakfast, he's clearly a traitor!" Then Joe survives the vote, and the next day it's "Joe said hi to me at breakfast after not saying hi to me at breakfast!"

It's like the Money Python witch trial, but even stupider

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u/Lokarin 18h ago

Which goes to show she was the right choice to be foreperson

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u/MAGAHATESTHEUSA 18h ago

Tbf reese has more experience with legal issues than the average person considering her billion dollar empire she runs and having agents and multiple contracts to deal with per year and soonsorships and whatnot.

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u/20_mile 17h ago

soonsorships

They only ever gave me latersonships : (

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u/MAGAHATESTHEUSA 17h ago

Damn those Soonsors with their odd demands

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u/BabaYadaPoe 18h ago

every now and than r/all has the movie reenactment of Marianne Bachmeier who point blank shoot and killed the person who raped and murdered her 7 yo daughter, and I would dare to say, most people approved of what she did and if it was up to them she wouldn't server a day in prison (she was sentenced to 6 years, released after 3).

now this is an extreme case, but it just show how hard it is to actually judge solely on evidence and not be moved by "vibes", so to speak, aka, life are usually gray, rather than black and white.

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u/dubbleplusgood 17h ago

Wait until you find out how presidents are elected....

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u/Nairb131 16h ago

First jury I was ever on, two ladies were convinced the defendant was guilty, 'because she looked guilty'.

She wasn't.

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u/defcon_clown 16h ago

I served on a jury for a drunk driving case. The whole incident was on video, including the driver drunkenly asking the cops for directions. One older woman on the jury was against voting guilty because she didn't want the accused to be sad that he was convicted.

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u/Initial_E 15h ago

We have lost the ability to pay attention. I spend my days reading emails written by AI in response to other emails written by AI, and rely heavily on the AI generated summary to understand wtf is happening.

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u/HappycatAF 18h ago

I’ve been told by lawyers there are two types of jurors, ones who want to be there because being a juror is a better use of their time than their time spent in their usual life, and the second are people who are too dumb to avoid getting picked from the jury pool.

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u/Both_Examination9788 18h ago

They also select against people who are more likely to be wise to the lawyers’ tricks (other lawyers, psychologists, etc.)

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u/Hortos 18h ago

You mean ANY professional of above average intelligence?

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u/Both_Examination9788 18h ago edited 18h ago

I mean generally yeah lol. But particularly those who are more logic-driven. People in STEM are often disqualified.

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u/SunshineCat 17h ago

Seems kind of insane to specifically select for people who think in a reactionary/emotional way instead of at least allowing a group that actually represents the overall population.

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u/HappycatAF 17h ago

There is a saying in law, “If the facts are on your side, pound the facts. If the law is on your side, pound the law. If neither is on your side, pound the table.”

If the two sides are at the jury stage, they are usually at the table pounding side since if the law or facts were on their side it would have long settled.
So if it is that type of case, they want a jury that can be persuaded by emotion. There is also no shortage of them.

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u/Prometheus720 17h ago

This makes me angry.

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u/Awkward_Pangolin3254 14h ago

"You can't just have your characters announce how they feel! That makes me feel angry!"

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u/c-9 16h ago

I am in STEM and I've been on a few juries. I do it because I take the responsibility seriously. I try to be the person I'd want to be on the jury in case I was on trial. You pretty much have to keep your mouth shut during voir dire.

I was able to convince a jury to acquit a woman. Judging by appearances, she was probably guilty. But our justice system shouldn't operate on prejudice. The burden of proof is on the prosecutor and they didn't make a good case. Innocent until PROVEN guilty, at least beyond a reasonable doubt. Which the prosecution did not meet IMO.

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u/RegulatoryCapture 16h ago

FWIW, I'm a STEMmy person and I've been on a jury where someone from my specific profession actually testified as an expert.

The lawyers hung around to talk to the jury afterwards and I asked about it. The defense wanted me there--to my eye it was a pretty clear emotion vs facts personal injury lawsuit so I can understand why they wanted me. The plaintiffs didn't think I was worth burning a rejection over...figured if their facts were better, I'd side with them--I certainly wasn't some biased juror who would never side with their client and that's who they need to save their challenges for (e.g. someone who doesn't believe in offering pain and suffering damages at all).

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u/Scheissdrauf88 18h ago

I think you can't call yourself a justice system anymore when performance plays a bigger role than facts.

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u/firedmyass 18h ago

I’m semi-retired and would like to do my duty but I have a close relative who is a judge so I’m immediately stricken the second they see my orientation form. I get it though.

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u/magnus150 18h ago

I genuinely want to participate in the civil process at least once in my life and see how it works. Yet despite being called for jury duty 3 times, I was never picked.

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u/DMAW1990 18h ago

You're closer than me. I've never even been summoned. I want to sit on a jury once in my life so badly, I feel like it's an important part of being in our society. Meanwhile, I have a parent that has been summoned several times (always gets themself dismissed) and a grandparent who sat on a jury for a murder trial. They saved the newspaper clipping that announced the verdict and we found it after they passed.

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u/ShinyPatina 16h ago

I've been summoned 15 times in my life (in my city you get summoned pretty much every year) and I have been selected and served on 7 criminal jury trials (two murders, two attempted murders, one possession of a firearm, one rape, one arson) . It's not as fun as you may think it is although it is a very interesting experience the first time or two.

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u/mainman879 16h ago

What the heck how are they summoning you that often? Is there no cooldown for that? In my state you are exempt from jury duty for 4 to 8 years if you sit through a case.

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u/ShinyPatina 16h ago

No such luck, here in my city you can be called once a year for jury service if you served on a trial for fewer than five days, OR once every three years if you served on a longer trial. Womp womp.

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u/TjW0569 18h ago

My attitude is: "I'm willing to do what I can, as best I can, because that's what I'd want other people to do for me."
But I've never been selected. Pretty much as soon as I admit to being an engineer, I'm out the door.

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u/greenzetsa 17h ago

I have a theory (one that has been disproven multiple times, but I still believe it) that jurors are selected based on alphabetical order. My last name is in the second half of the alphabet. Literally everyone in my family has gotten jury summons multiple times and none of us have even made it to selection. We've called in the morning we're supposed to and were told the jury is full, no need to come in. My ex, whose last name was in the first half of the alphabet, was a jury twice. Most of the people I know in my area who did jury did had last names in the first half of the alphabet. I think they call people up in alphabetical order, and by the time it gets to like K, they're full.

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u/friareriner 16h ago

I'm in the back half of the alphabet, and I was in the back half of the jury pool line the last time I want in.

2 points is a line, theory confirmed.

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u/SicilianEggplant 15h ago

I love jury duty because we get regular paid time for it as a state employee, and the one time I was on a jury we rarely stayed a full day.

I think more people wouldn’t mind serving if it didn’t mean they’d lose money or risk losing their job.

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u/Comic_Book_Reader 18h ago

"People may die but stupidity lives forever."

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u/Caira_Ru 18h ago

I remember senior year of high school, there was a guy who was SO DAMN PROUD of being “on top of the bell curve” for grading. Like, shouting “BOO-YA, I beat you dorky nerds!” to the two kids with the highest scores.

I think of him every time Carlin comes up.

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u/Crippled2 18h ago

Stpud people vote

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u/firedmyass 17h ago

don’t you dare change that typo

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u/TheModWhoShaggedMe 18h ago edited 18h ago

It's not even just low IQs in a lot of cases, there's a general intellectual laziness trend wrought upon society by the device prompts, the filtered bubbles, "smart" phones (w/ dumber people\*) and AI/etcetera replacing thinking, exercising brains.

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u/mcmcc 18h ago

Jokes aside, truthiness is a real phenomenon. Many people live immersed in varying degrees of fantasy.

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u/SussySpecs 18h ago

A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.

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u/lordnacho666 18h ago

Yeah but there's 12 of them! You can't miss on all 12!

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u/JalapenoPopPoop 17h ago

The funny thing about this quote is no one who invokes it ever considers there's even a chance they're in the bottom half

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u/Ordinary_Pumpkin6224 18h ago

we, indeed, are living in Idiocracy

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u/winter-heart 17h ago

One of the smartest people I’d ever met was a prosecutor and he told me straight up that in jury selection, they don’t tend to pick free or critical thinkers. They need one natural leader, and 11 dumb people.

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u/youngarchivist 17h ago

This shit will haunt me to my death

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u/GenChadT 12h ago

Relevant scene from Let's Go To Prison (an excellent film)

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u/well_its_a_secret 17h ago

Nah- that’d be the median lol

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u/Orion14159 19h ago

Most of them vote too.

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u/Tooulogyh 18h ago

Oh we know! Trust me we can tell who voted.

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u/foo_fight3r 16h ago

Most of them vote too.

And ALL of them can be jurors. Decide someone's fate.

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u/breakupbydefault 15h ago

And that's how we ended up with Trump

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u/bluris 18h ago

Maybe democracy isn't our best option, shame it beats the others we came up with. 

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u/Orion14159 17h ago

Yeah we really are depending on people making good decisions and having literally any critical thinking skills.

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u/Human_Ad7946 18h ago

I was summoned for jury duty. We were given numbers, 1 through 20, and asked to line up sequentially. You would be shocked (or maybe not) at the number of adults who were unable to do this. Many also couldn't turn their phones off. The bailiff had to confiscate a bunch. One dude just stood in the middle of the court when we all filed in and were told to take a seat. He looked paralyzed by confusion. Luckily I was dismissed.

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u/BackgroundSummer5171 17h ago

Luckily I was dismissed.

You heard these stories.

You seem to have brain cells.

Wouldn't it be better that you are chosen? You know, to decide the fate of people and their lives.

Instead of leaving it up to those less mentally capable.

I know it puts a burden on you for a week or two or whatever. But still, I'd prefer to be chosen.

I was dismissed also last time I was called.

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u/Human_Ad7946 16h ago

Well, I wasn't chosen because of my profession. One, or both, attorneys didn't want a healthcare professional hearing the workmens comp case. I would have gladly served, though painfully I'm sure.

A coworker served on a federal jury for weeks. She said all of her fellow jurors were bright people. I think they are more discriminate in higher stakes cases.

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u/AndChewBubblegum 18h ago

I was also selected for jury duty. I won't pretend like we had a room full of Rhodes scholars. But given the instructions and limitations imposed on us by the court, I was surprised how well a few days off deliberation was able to converge on a conclusion that felt like it was appropriate.

Maybe my experience was unusual. But I also think the other extreme doesn't reflect the average experience.

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u/Money4Nothing2000 12h ago

I was summoned in July during the World Cup, and we had like 47 jurors for voir dire, and I was shocked when everyone was able to line up correctly, because the bailiff had like 4 different lines with some lines counting forward some counting backwards, starting at different numbers. I totally expected what you described to happen, but I guess we had a smart bunch that day because everyone got it right, and they even lined up correctly the second time around to go back in.

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u/knotallmen 18h ago

The lawyers pick the juries. I have a coworker who is great in her field and has many interests outside of her job including education like languages and musical instruments that would love to be on a jury and is always excited when she gets a jury notice. I don't think any lawyer would ever want her on a jury, or at least I don't think both sets of lawyers would both want her.

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u/wayoverpaid 18h ago

I was certain I was gonna get removed from a jury. Some aspects of the case hinged on "oops tee hee we lost all the data from our computer it overheated" and "that website was never deployed."

I'm a CTO.

Nope. I Juror #1. During the trial I noticed that the printout of the supposedly never deployed website had, clear as day, the URL it was printed from.

I wanted to scream "Can no one pull up an archive of that site?" as people were testifying, but I was prohibited from researching it per the instructions.

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u/RegulatoryCapture 16h ago edited 15h ago

I think that's the hardest part of being a smart person on a jury, especially on a low-budget trial.

You see things and you are like...how the fuck is that not knowable? I was on a jury for a minor vehicle accident (but involving a city bus so there was potentially lots of money at stake). Nobody could say how fast the bus was moving...despite having multiple angles of camera footage. WTF?

It is trivial to solve that. Speed = Distance/Time. Set a reference point like the edge of the side door window. Go to the site and measure some visible landmarks (there were plenty). Count the number of frames it takes to pass. Do it with several landmarks at various points to get bounds around the true speed at the point of impact. That's an easy task to hire an expert witness to testify to.

But then you get into the trial strategy and evidentiary issues. Maybe they DID do that calculation, but in pre-trial hearings, the judge limited how many experts they could present at trial and neither side thought it was worth putting forward a video analysis expert to determine speed because maybe they determined the vehicle wasn't speeding and the evidence wasn't useful. But since it isn't in the record, nobody can talk about speed.

Then maybe it becomes a useful question for the plaintiff to say "do you know if the bus was speeding?" (even if they've done the analysis to determine it wasn't) to make the defense crash damage expert witness look like he doesn't know what he is talking about (even though the court has ruled he can't talk about the speed since he's not a video analysis expert) and plant the seed of "speeding" in the jury's mind.

Or maybe you just don't have the budget. Video analysis guy is going to charge you a few grand to do the analysis and write a report, and then you'll have to pay his hourly rate for the other side to take his deposition. Then you pay his hourly rate for him to sit in court and eventually testify. Suddenly you've spent $10k+ to establish that the bus was going between 28.3 and 30.5 MPH. Is that fact worth it? Or is it better to just let the jury think people are idiots who can't figure out how fast the bus was moving?

I wanted to scream "Can no one pull up an archive of that site?"

So in your case...maybe someone DID pull up the archive of the site, but it wasn't helpful. Or there was some reason that evidence was excluded like it would have required a separate expert to go to Archive.org, testify that it was a reliable source and get the page admitted.

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u/wayoverpaid 15h ago

Fair, but given the entire printout was in evidence, saying "can you read this text on the bottom saying 'printed from www.somecompany.com/page/thing'" should be allowed?

There may have been a reason they couldn't do it but two of us could read it. It was small text and I would 100% have drawn attention to it given that denying the site went live was not a sudden reveal.

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u/RegulatoryCapture 15h ago

Similarly in my case, you could read between the lines of some of the objections and bench discussions and see that one of the plaintiffs definitely had several issues that weren't allowed to be discussed unless she brought them up herself in testimony (including an unrelated SERIOUS vehicle accident and a prescription opioid problem).

Some of those things slip out and the jury is told to disregard them...but it makes you wonder: how many other facts are the juries not told for various legal reasons?

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u/knotallmen 15h ago

My trial was a "slip and fall" because a community just refused to use their HOA money to repair a sidewalk. They had someone who was no longer on the HOA board there because I guess she was at the time sitting with the defense and the defense just kept bringing up the lady was on methadone. I have no clue how the trial ended cause I was the alternate and forgot to look up the case after the fact. The former HOA board lady was just shooting daggers the entire time. Repair your damn sidewalk...

Completely unrelated note my neighbor whined about "his" tax dollars being used to repair the sidewalk in our neighborhood which completely doesn't understand how taxes work and I should have remembered to say that myself, my spouse, my kid all have had pretty bad falls from the shitty sidewalk and every Halloween when we go out with my kids grandparents I'm terrified of them tripping.

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u/knotallmen 18h ago

Yup the rules on juries are too prohibitive. Like if a juror could write a question to the judge and have that question honored (oh the irony) that would be something, but the one trial I was on the judge was immediately hostile. Like a grumpy substitute teacher or like a boomber/genx director of the business I worked for who started a meeting with "I don't want to be told this cannot be done" like such an unnecessarily negative and baseless start of a conversation and relationship.

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u/wayoverpaid 18h ago

I wanted to know what the business with the "Rule 213" was.

Judge could have said "Testimony needs to be disclosed ahead of time."

Judge instead said "You do not need to concern yourself with that."

I looked it up after. Made perfect sense.

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u/LostWoodsInTheField 16h ago

I was watching low level trials on youtube the other day, and I wasn't sure what state they were in, but the judge would go 'does the jury have any questions for this witness' and I thought that was the smartest thing in the world to do.

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u/UnluckyAssist9416 18h ago

How did the jury room go?

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u/wayoverpaid 17h ago

I talked about it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/nottheonion/comments/1w6aw5s/comment/p7lobrz

I did manage to convince people for higher damages based on the sketchiness of "oh we never deployed that website that advertised us as the new business" but I shouldn't have had to, there were far more law-grounded ways to go.

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u/Vio_ 18h ago

Every time I've had jury duty, I've been horribly sick.

Not "cough cough I'm dying pa from the black lung" excuse.

First time I had walking pneumonia.

Second time, I had the three-month influenza.

Anyway, I have a master's degree in forensic anthropology in international genetics where I researched forensic abuse, corruption, and incompetence.

They'll never take me as a juror lol.

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u/GreenIvyLace 18h ago

That’s a badass sounding degree and if you don’t mind sharing, I’d love to hear more about your work.

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u/matjoeman 18h ago

The lawyers are limited in how many people they can throw out and how much time they have for voir dire. I got on a jury when only being asked "will you hold it against the defendant if they don't testify" and I said "no". They didn't have time to ask me anything else.

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u/knotallmen 17h ago

I had something similar happen. It was long enough ago that there was a radio show Bill Handel on the Law which is now a podcast where people would just mention saying the listened to it as a code word for Jury nullification to get kicked off the jury without risking contempt of court, but by the time they got to me there wasn't any time left and I was made an alternate so I sat through the trial, took notes cause that's what I do, and never made a decision.

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u/grexl 17h ago

The numbers depend on jurisdiction, but yeah. I was on a jury in a criminal case involving an area of law that a relatively large proportion of the public has had some experience in.

Both counsels dismissed the maximum number of jurors allowed. Based on their questions it seemed like they were ranking us based on how much experience we had in that area. "How many of you have been involved with X?" Neither side asked questions toward me or anyone else who did not raise their hand.

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u/bicyclecat 15h ago

High profile and major cases have intensive jury selection with multiple dismissals but the large majority of cases don’t. She’d have no problem getting seated on a typical case. I’ve known judges who get seated on juries. A few years ago I was seated on a jury for a personal injury case. Another juror was a doctor who tried to get dismissed by saying he’d trust his own expert opinion of the medical claim over the testimonial evidence. Didn’t work, he was seated. The vibe was you were only getting off that jury if you had a personal connection to one of the parties.

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u/knotallmen 15h ago

Hope that doctor didn't try to muck up the process. You are right and she'd prefer to be on a civil case. I have a friend who was on a murder case and he was haunted. Like it was a robbery and the guy just decided to shoot the young woman in the face at the register. No demands. Nothing.

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u/big_sugi 18h ago

We don't actually have any of those other jurors talking about this, though. Maybe it's just one person who was confused, or maybe they were joking, or maybe she was joking, or maybe she misunderstood and the person actually meant that studying for her role in Legally Blonde was the closest any of them had come to law school.

It's a perfect demonstration as to why hearsay is inadmissible.

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u/brakeb 18h ago

probably the "Halo effect"... "She's someone famous, we will give her the role of most import"

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u/PrincessPause 17h ago

I would absolutely 100% vote her as the foreman just for shits and giggles and tell her it was because I loved Legally Blonde

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u/atleastitsnotgoofy 18h ago

Exactly. I don’t believe this story. I’m sure part of it is true, but something is missing.

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u/liberty 17h ago

It could also just be completely made up...maybe other than certain verifiable/falsifiable facts, like that she served on a jury and was made the foreperson. Or perhaps even including those "facts" - because who's checking, and who'd even believe you or listen to you if you did?

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u/donkeytime 18h ago

Those are your peers.

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u/jxj24 18h ago

Only in the broadest, most generous sense of the word.

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u/FromFluffToBuff 18h ago

First thing I thought of. Oh dear God was George Carlin EVER right lol

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u/AnatidaephobiaAnon 18h ago

What a lot of people don't understand is when they think of your average dumb person, there are people who are even dumber than that.

My ex wife would believe something like this. There was an Ask Reddit thread a few days ago about how can you tell if someone is dumb and she checked off 90% of the comments. We were watching The Walking Dead she thought the show was genuinely happening down south. She thought that when it was night time here that it was dark all over the world. She thinks when actors who are straight perform as a gay character, that they were hired because they were bi or secretly gay. She thinks sex scenes during movies is actual sex and can't understand how the actors SOs are okay with it.....

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u/Munstrom 18h ago

My ex wife

Brother she must have been something else to look at because there's no way on this earth I could be with someone who thought the walking dead was a documentary.

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u/AnatidaephobiaAnon 12h ago

She eventually stopped randomly saying things because of how genuinely stupid they were and how my reaction was, so it made things a bit easier. Problem was, she was also dumb but thought she knew it all and would argue about things she didn't know about. There's a good reason our 9 year old daughter outsmarts her.

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u/VictoryMotel 18h ago

These are unfortunately the perspectives of a young child.

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u/ChangeForAParadigm 18h ago

Everybody look at this guy with the smoking hot wife.

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u/magseven 17h ago

She must have been unbelievably hot.

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u/Repulsive_Stock9400 13h ago

I'm a lawyer and I volunteer a lot of legal aid in prisons, which are like little laboratories of stupidity.

A lot of inmates are really cognitively lacking; they're the dumbest of the dumb, just a hair smarter than the people who can't be held legally liable for their behavior because their cognitive function qualifies as a disability.

It's hard to communicate with these guys, because they just don't get so many things that everybody else gets automatically, without it being an issue at all. And it's very sad; we glorify criminals in pop culture and there are plenty of criminals who are kind of slick, but most of them are just really sad sacks who have no other way to navigate the world except doing things that are illegal, because they're too dumb to slot in otherwise.

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u/Scaevus 13h ago

A lot of people criticize plea bargains, but show them this story and ask them if they still want to put their freedom in the hands of a jury.

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u/ukexpat 18h ago

and they vote.

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u/Radiant_Jedi 16h ago

The scary thing is that the alternative is a bench trial with just a judge and no jury, and shocking amount of judges either don't know the law themselves, are biased, or are on just a fucking power trip.

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u/skincava 18h ago

Uhh it was a case about a dog bite.

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u/Training-Republic301 18h ago

We can hope that Reese is actually educated and could make proper decisions. So maybe their choice wasn't so bad overall being that the rest of the jury might be dumb as bricks

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u/Choochoonaynay 18h ago

They also vote!

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u/ItsSpaghettiLee2112 18h ago

At one point, Witherspoon remembered a juror expressing an opinion about the defendant based on the way she looked. The experience prompted her to reflect on the importance of understanding the law and taking jury service seriously. 'I started realising... people don't know much about the law,' Witherspoon said, describing some of the deliberations as troubling.

I've never served. Is it possible to talk to the judge privately? I would have told the judge bluntly that these jurors are really stupid.

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u/FullOption3126 17h ago

If you asked the judge for a private conversation they’d laugh you out of court

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u/Self_Owned_Tree 18h ago

And presumably all registered to vote, too.

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u/der_innkeeper 18h ago

"If you're innocent, take the bench trial. If you're guilty, take the jury trial."

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u/a-rooster-illusion 17h ago

Yep.

The trial I was on was for terrorism. Attempted murder. Firebombings. All the good stuff.

We had to deliberate for 3 days because 2 of the jurors just kept saying “boys will be boys!!” And had a hard time understanding that your personal beliefs don’t factor into a legal situation. Did the state prove they did this? Yes? Okay. Then guilty. They were going “yep state proved it but I can’t check off guilty because it was just a dude having fun”

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u/WinkyWinkyBums 17h ago

Yeah “jury of your peers” is a stretch.

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u/melissaphobia 17h ago

I remember my mom was called for jury duty but was almost sure she wasn’t going to be chosen for the jury cause she was like the last person in pool. But then she heard the other potential jurors answers to the screening questions and realized holy shit I’m definitely going to end up on this jury because almost everyone else here is an idiot. And she was.

Like defendant was out on parole and thus had a prior conviction. The number of potential jurors who said that they thought he was guilty of this crime (before the trial had begun) because he was convicted with some other unrelated crime was crazy. The number of people who said since he has lots of tattoos he must have bad judgment and must have done this crime (again, before the trial had begun and any evidence given) also crazy.

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u/Darmok47 15h ago

Reminds of the Sebastian Maniscalco bit about jury duty.

"Some of these people are one step away from being defendants themselves."

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u/Karekter_Nem 12h ago

Considering that, she may actually be the best choice.

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