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
25.2k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

1.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

156

u/Equivalent-Resort-63 19h ago

Been on a couple of juries and their level of stupidity is frightening. These people (‘your peers’) hold your life in their hands.

4

u/philman132 18h ago edited 17h ago

Strong argument for why many Western countries got rid of jury trials decades ago.  They are not common in countries without British or commonwealth heritage at all.

24

u/Hotshot2k4 18h ago edited 18h ago

That's literally not something that happened, unless you consider South Africa alone to be "many Western countries". And the reason they got rid of them is very peculiar too.

7

u/AnonymityIsForChumps 17h ago

Jury trials aren't a common part of civil law systems, which is what most of the world uses. It's either just a judge or sometimes a mixed tribunal of judges and jurors. Basically the entire world except places with British heritage uses a civil law system.

Now, that doesn't mean that places are getting rid of jury trials (except South African which partially stopped using their British style common law system) but it does mean that most countries never had them in the first place.

2

u/philman132 17h ago

Most of Europe doesn't have jury trials

5

u/Hotshot2k4 16h ago

Indeed, but that's not because they "got rid of jury trials decades ago". In most of Europe, they never had jury trials in the same way they do in the US and the UK.

2

u/philman132 15h ago

It's a technicality, I've updated my original comment

2

u/Hotshot2k4 14h ago

I could say you no are no longer infected with genital warts, and if you responded that you never had it, then the distinction isn't really important. Is that about right?

1

u/philman132 13h ago

I feel the main point has gotten lost in wordy semantic weeds a bit here. The point was that jury trials are not a gold standard and in fact are not common across the world except in former British colonies. Whether that is because those countries never had them, or got rid of them doesn't really take away from that.

-1

u/Hotshot2k4 12h ago

If it was as you said, that a major institution in many western societies was abandoned, this would imply it was such a deeply problematic or flawed institution, that it was worth all the trouble it would take to change it. "We tried it, and it failed."

That would have been a much more searing indictment than "We never had that exact system in the first place." The distinction really isn't just semantics.

-1

u/donny_pots 17h ago

I mean you can request a bench trial in the US

2

u/wayoverpaid 18h ago

The only good argument I can make for a jury trial is that the people should be able to render a rare verdict of "To apply the law in this manner would itself be unjust"

I know we have jury nullification but I'd rather that be an explicit case, possibly to trigger a "Yo Congress what the fuck, fix this shit" response.

I don't see how that actually works in the USA but forcing Congress to affirmatively vote "Yeah this punitive law where you have to pay millions for downloading a movie or go to jail for non violent possession of drugs" every time a jury revolts would be the dream.

0

u/happytree23 17h ago

The fact that you're getting upvotes is terrifying lol