FRIENDS, ROMANS, BESTIES: If they were at the stage of filling out jury questionnaires, that means the people involved were most likely only potential jurors, being polled to see if they were qualified to serve on the actual jury. So sure, maybe it seemed like a ballsy move to stand up and condemn the system, but odds are that trial is still going full speed ahead, anyway—except now it’s a dead cert that anime guy absolutely won’t be selected for its jury, because announcing your lack of impartiality to the court tends to get you automatically dismissed.

If they're able to sway the others, you're absolutely correct, but if they're not? Then you've got a hung jury

In the US that means a mistrial and the whole thing happens again, in the UK the judge would probably rule to accept a majority verdict. Either way, the outcome's the same (the people deciding are all the milquetoast white people who "aren't that political"), but the objections are sealed within the jury room rather than aired before the lawyers and judge to be entered into the record

I wouldn't underestimate the influence even just one informed juror can have on the outcome of a case. Maybe you won't convince everybody—true. But as a juror, you never know who else is on the fence until you voice your doubts and opinions. Some people are reluctant to speak out or deviate from the group, but will respond if somebody else is there to take the lead. Some people might even change a vote just to speed things along because they don't actually care about the outcome. You don't know what power you have until you try, and It's always worth trying.

According to FIJA (the Fully Informed Jury Association, which is a good resource for jury nullification information and support), a hung jury is functionally "far better for the defendant than a conviction. Undoing a conviction is very difficult. An appeal is not guaranteed in the first place. It may not be legally permitted, the defendant may no longer have the financial resources to mount an appeal, etc. Even when a defendant is able to appeal a conviction, that individual no longer enjoys the presumption of innocence." So if you can't nullify, hanging the jury is better than nothing!

Mistrials only mean the whole thing CAN happen again—not that it WILL. If a trial ends in a hung jury, the prosecution will usually review the strength of their case and weigh that against their existing caseload, budget, staffing, etc. to decide if it's in the state's best interest to call for a retrial (there may be some exceptions, but this is generally the case in both the USA and the United Kingdom). Sure, plenty of cases get retried. But in some instances, a mistrial from a hung jury can lead to the prosecution either offering up a more lenient plea deal, or—if they decide pursuing things is ultimately a waste of their time and resources—simply dropping the charges altogether (this is sadly common with sexual assault cases; they're more difficult to prove in a court of law, and while I'm obviously wary of false convictions overall, I do have tremendous sympathy for victims who end up with no recourse for justice once the state drops all charges). In short, you never know what the outcome of a hung jury will have on a case until it actually happens.

Even if the prosecutors do decide to bring a retrial, according to professional jury consultant Alan Turkheimer, "acquittal rates in criminal trials are significantly higher after hung juries than during original trials." So even if you can't nullify a jury, you might nudge things in the right direction overall.

#are ya KIDDIN me we celebrate hangs back at the office like the victories they are#a hung jury is a WIN. a hung jury means that the DA FAILED. it is a BIG BLARING SIGN to the DA#that hey...you SHOT YOUR SHOT....AND YOU MISSED.#think twice if you REEEEEALLLY want to try again!#if you reeeeeeally with all of our overwhelming caseloads want to spend your attorney's time and your office's budget#on RE-TRYING this case that wasn't good enough the first time around#and YEAH. YEAH. a potential juror walks in and starts giving Progressive Politics Seminars (TM) and i inwardly groan#bc that is the first juror that the DA is going to kick out of the pool - bye bye helpful progressive!#all the blue lives matter assholes somehow manage to keep their mouths shut and parrot 'i can be fair'#long enough to get a seat on the jury and convict our clients#WE DON'T WANT THE GOOD ONES TO SPEAK UP. WE WANT THE BAD ONES TO SPEAK UP#it isn't jury SELECTION it's jury DE-SELECTION

This is a pretty major letdown, ngl.

For example, I've had students ask me (in good faith) how it was possible for international medical bodies to report different counts of COVID-19 cases during the early years of the pandemic. And one of the answers is that you need to first define what you mean by a "COVID-19 case." Do you include self-reported incidences? Waste water data? Geo-fenced social media posts about people complaining about their coronavirus symptoms? Federal estimates? Hospital data? How do you compare countries/territories/substate entities with mandatory reporting mechanisms vs countries/territories/substate entities that rely only on voluntary self-reported cases? And what combination of these do you use? How you construct what you mean by "case" is going to impact the outcomes you report. These different counts of COVID-19 cases can all be true simultaneously, not because numbers are made up, but because they all come out of different methodologies that can be equally valid.

And this is true across all science, not just social science. Bill Clinton said it best lol: "it depends on what your definition of the word 'is' is." This feels obvious when you look at scientific research that uses "skull measurements" as their object of analysis - the concept itself is white supremacist, regardless of how "sound" the research is. But even something as apparently self-evident as a COVID-19 case still requires a definition, and how you define your variables is necessarily going to impact how the research goes and what conclusions are drawn.

These definitions are always embedded in political & social assumptions. And again, this does not mean that science is all made up or nonsense or whatever. There is a widespread fetishism of "objective knowledge" that is itself ideological - the idea that knowledge can be divorced from all historical and political contexts, that you can scrub bias from research and simply report the facts. Valuable, well-supported, well-constructed scientific research is always embedded in these contexts. Not just as a result of researcher assumptions, but of the material context it exists in - what research resources are available, how & what research gets funded, the academy's relationship to the state & non-government bodies that both provide data and use that research to inform policy, the historical relationships universities often have with settler-colonialism and imperialism that give them access to "foreign" research subjects, etc etc etc.