Jolene

First, you need to understand that the rule that jurors can’t just google things is coming from a good place. Like imagine that you are on a jury that’s considering, say, a medical malpractice lawsuit and one of your fellow jurors comes into the jury room and says to you, “I think the victim’s expert was lying because WebMD totally contradicts everything they said.”

And you might be like, “But WebMD is notoriously unreliable website and the expert you’re talking about is a researcher from Mayo Clinic.” But this person cannot be swayed.

Like, we can all agree that would be bad.

So even though these rules can contribute to unjust outcomes as in the case above (and seriously, the fact that the defense attorney didn’t fact check that is probably grounds for legal malpractice), they also prevent jurors from just looking up bullshit online and taking it more seriously than the actual experts the court has put on. And I think in the era of anti-vaxxers/QAnon/COVID denial/etc., we can all understand why it’s a bad idea to trust that people can tell fact from bullshit online.

So in light of this, how do you as a juror fact check something?

The key here is that you have to ask the court for information. Jurors can ask questions of the court during deliberations, so if something you said sounds off to you, you can ask for more information.

The key term you want to use here is “credibility.”

The job of a jury is to decide what are called “questions of fact.” Long before the trial even starts, lawyers will have hashed out all the “questions of law” --- like, what the statute of limitations is; what laws, exactly, were allegedly broken; whether the court you’re in even has jurisdiction; stuff like that. Jurors are responsible for deciding which side’s version of the facts has more credibility.

For instance, if the prosecution’s witness says X and the defense’s witness says Y, the jury is responsible for deciding which is true, X or Y. And you do this by weighing which one is more credible.

So in this case, if the juror had known to, he could have told the judge, “In order to properly assess the ICE agent’s credibility, I need more information about his tattoo. I have doubts about whether he was telling the truth about it, which would impact how credible I would find his testimony. Can the agent please provide evidence that it really is what he says it is?”

like, you see certain friend groups/cliques and you notice they're exclusively poc, and so you're like "hey i wanna join them" but they think you have some form of racist intentions.

and then trying to find any features about yourself that are ethnic. like my mother's side of the family is super pale (some of them are a bit tan), but then you see [the sperm donor]'s side of the family and it's like... "yeah there's no way these people are white".

and even worse: not being connected to your culture. it sucks when you literally have to trace back your roots with no help but the internet because you didn't know that side of the family well.

I'm begging you people to stop seeing absolutes where there aren't any. Fat liberation is largely about dismantling the absolutes.

When we say "fat people can be perfectly healthy", some of you hear "all fat people are perfectly healthy" when the point is simply that weight and health aren't synonymous. It's more complex.

When we say that health looks different for everyone some of you hear "health is completely meaningless" when the point is actually just that it's more complex than either/or. YES, intentional weight loss can be the right path for someone! Look, I Have Said it! The problem is, there's a widespread myth saying it's the right path for everyone. That's not the case.

When we say health status does not indicate your intrinsic worth and should be irrelevant to how you're treated, some of you apparently hear "there's no reason to care about your own health", which is just bananas. Learn better reading comprehension.

Fat liberation is a political movement based on no absolute claims about health. Literally the point is that fat people deserve social equality regardless of health status. "Health is complex and individual" is a full on fact, but ultimately it's also beside the point.