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/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

The other option is of course that the lawyer just wasn't that good.

May not be some legal issue or strategic reason...may just be that whatever overworked lawyer was in charge of handling that part of the testimony just didn't figure it out.

Hopefully that doesn't happen on some big multi-million dollar case, but it definitely happens on smaller dollar disputes.

I do think there's something to be said for a better process for allowing juries to ask questions. They usually CAN submit written questions, but the judge frequently denies them and given they have no real opportunity for follow-up, it is easy for a witness to give a non-answer or something that doesn't fully answer the jury's underlying request.

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u/wayoverpaid 15h ago

I was told that if I wanted to submit a question that both lawyers would have to review it, and we'd probably go through a full day process.

One of the ladies was delaying her chemotherapy treatment for this because she did not understand she needed to put that on the form for reason to not serve on a jury and thus was stuck on this for three days.

I could not feel good about doing something to delay things another day. I was getting paid full wage while I was on Jury Duty. A lot of people were not.

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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/Scaevus 12h ago

The judge's job is not to keep you comfortable.

The judge's job is to keep you in line and not ask illegal questions that taint the entire trial process. Being friendly often doesn't facilitate that job.

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u/knotallmen 12h ago

What an insufferable response. I didn't once say the judge must be friendly. "Illegal questions" what even is that? Questions in job interviews have been outlawed but in a court room by a juror? No I don't think that is the case and as some have stated questions are sometimes allowed.

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u/Scaevus 11h ago

"Illegal questions" what even is that?

Questions that taint the process and lead to a mistrial if answered. What was your question?

questions are sometimes allowed.

Very limited types of questions. If a judge tells you what the law is, that is the end of question time.

Do you understand why jury instructions are not given off the cuff, but are very carefully constructed documents compiled by judicial panels after decades?

the rules on juries are too prohibitive.

For a reason! We have hundreds of years of precedent going back to English common law to try and protect this flawed process, and your curiosity is not the priority.

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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/php30010 6h ago

To be fair, it is technically possible to have a domain name in the url bar and never have deployed it, either by editing your local hosts file to point to a service you're running locally, or by adding a dns record to your private dns server.

And for archives, archive.org doesn't archive everything. If the site was minor enough, it could've been unsearchable there.

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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/Prometheus720 17h ago

Oh my god. I hate this timeline

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u/RegorHK 16h ago

That sounds like some defense lawyers would be exited to have you, yet you can expect the persecution to shoot you down.

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u/pookiemook 11h ago

Why fake illness if they wouldn't take you on anyway?

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u/Vio_ 11h ago

No, I really was sick both times.

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u/pookiemook 11h ago

Ah, I did not get that (obviously). Thanks for clarifying

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u/turnitwayup 15h ago

Lol I have dual master degrees, works at the county & they did left me on the jury once I got anonymous sat. They didn’t ask me a single question after the introduction question list (age, occupation, education, hobbies etc…) At least I was able to use my employee badge to get in the courthouse. That door was closest to the jury elevator.

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u/HIM_Darling 13h ago

I also work at the county. Didn't get picked but was there an hour past close of business. We spent like 5 hours doing voir dire where the questions seemed to revolve around "what is the deeper hidden meaning of possession of a thing".

From what I could tell it was a "someone else shat in my pants" scenario where the drugs were in his pocket but he was arguing that didn't meet some philosophical definition of possession.

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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/smileonamonday 17h ago

The lawyers pick the juries

Not in all countries. In the UK the 12 jury members are picked at random out of everyone that got called up and that's the jury.

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u/eljefino 11h ago

Sometimes they only get like three dismissals each and have to deal with too many good bad jurors left in the pool.

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u/Prometheus720 17h ago

That lawyers pick the juries is actually frighteningly clear evidence that this is not a very democratic process.

Juries should have powers to resist the selection of lawyers. Give jury pools a veto on removal of candidates, perhaps. If the jury realizes they have a doctor and the case has medical stuff, let them vote to disallow them to remove the doctor. Etc.

This could be a horrible idea, which is why it should be run virtually in jury selection processes and studied first, but after a couple years of study it might work better or it might not. Would cost a couple million at most to check