I was called for a juror pool for a criminal case. I was juror number 3, which means that unless an attorney found a reason to kick me off, I was going to be on the jury. It wasn’t going to be a terribly long case, so I could have made it work. But I wasn’t exactly happy about it.

So we get to the part where the prosecuting attorney is asking questions of the prospective jurors, and he asks this question that was full of blatant logical fallacies dressed up in pretty words. I raise my hand because I have a response, and he calls on me. And so I deconstruct the question that he asked, and ask which of the three logical paths he actually wanted us to follow because at least one of them was misleading.

I saw a prosecuting attorney make a very panicked face, and try to backpedal by using fancier words. On an English teacher, with a vocabulary that is greater than 99.99% of English speakers. But no, I was very curious, what did he mean by that? Of course I could think of other possibilities, and in fact, the one that he proposed as the most likely in his hypothetical situation was not.

Friends, I got eliminated from that jury as the prosecuting attorney’s first at will elimination. And I am proud of this fact. Because now that entire jury is watching him. I got a room of fifty people nodding along to my questions.