for no reason whatsoever here’s a reminder that if you consider yourself a leftist/punk/abolitionist/anarchist/radical in any sort of way and get called into jury duty, you are to become the most square person on earth during the jury questionnaire!!!
don’t be that guy who says fuck the police in the jury questionnaire! that just gets you sent home! if you want to generate change, interact with the case and use your jury vote for good! ESPECIALLY if it’s a high profile case!
Remember, when you're on the jury, a good "that cop's story didn't add up" will sway a lot more Chads and Karens than "fuck the police."
Had jury duty, can confirm!
An innocent man is home with his family instead of spending his kids' whole childhoods in jail for "resisting arrest" when none of the cops could agree on why he was being arrested in the first place. (But it definitely had nothing to do with him being a Black man in a nice car, honest! 🙄)
And it still took like two hours of delibration after we'd heard all the evidence because one lady was so gung ho about believing everything the cops said, even when not a single goddamn one could agree with their own testimony, let alone their colleagues'.
Pointing out all the inconsistencies and admitted misconduct and letting people slowly come to their own conclusions as the trial played out was fucking hard, I won't lie. I can be patient, but it doesn't come naturally to me.
But. Yelling about how this was obviously a bs case would have shut everyone down and made them stop listening. Asking questions and letting people discuss how the cops tried to make xyz sound suspicious but it was totally normal, or about how if things played out the way the cops said then logically events should have proceeded in a totally different direction, and positing different theories that actually lined up with the evidence presented?
That got people thinking, and everyone realized that for a variety of reasons we all had reasonable doubts that the defendent had committed any of the crimes of which he was accused.
Being able to raise reasonable doubt among a jury of one's peers saves lives. If you get the chance, take it.
"Jury Room / The Holdout" (1959) by Norman Rockwell. One of my favorites of his. Particularly the gendered dynamic he depicts here.
Highly recommend watching the McCarthy Era legal drama 12 Angry Men (1957). It holds up like Roman concrete. 12 white Ben on a jury must decide the fate of a Spanish American kid accused of killing his father. It seems open and shut until one juror votes not guilty because to him the facts don’t add up and he has reasonable doubt. And in making everyone go over all the evidence and pick it apart, they start having to confront (and reject) the biases that made the cops sound believable.
This film is 69 years old and still hits at what is rotten at the heart of the US (in)justice system, what is aspirational, and what actually works to persuade people.
The defense and the prosecution have rested and the jury is filing into the jury room to decide if a young Spanish-American is guilty or inn
