Last January, I was on a jury for a murder trial: it was my job to determine if Bomani Hairston-Bassette murdered Charles Wright. You’re not supposed to sell your story for money for 90 days after the trial is over, but it’s been more than 90 days, so now I can tell you all about it. I’m going to first talk about the case, then about what it was like, then about how the experience affected my views about the justice system.
I don't agree with "It was clearly intended for stupid people whose research would discover sovereign citizen bullshit," for a few reasons. Firstly, if the jurors do their own research, that research can't be cross-examined; if someone is called upon to serve as an expert witness, the other side can cross-examine or provide their own expert witnesses to dispute. Secondly, doing your own research can lead you to people discussing the case, and for obvious reasons we don't want jurors influenced by outside sources. Thirdly, it can lead you to inadmissible evidence, which sort of defeats the purpose of having some evidence be inadmissible. Fourthly, even knowledgeable, intelligent people can be misled by finding one paper and being unaware of the papers on the other side of the specialized debate.
Ooh, ooh, I served on a jury! We heard a case, deliberated and returned a verdict, it took about a week. It happened back right after Obama was elected the first time.
Our case was like this.
A man's business model was borrowing a lot from banks to buy land to sell to to guys who build houses.
The market crashed and no one was buying the land.
He had no money because his family ended up with it.
The banks wanted their money back.
Bank case was, basically, that he realized things were about to go sour, gave the money away where it wouldn't be reachable, declared bankruptcy.
Rich guy case was, basically, just because I'm bad at business doesn't make my wife/trust for unborn child legally dubious. I'm allowed to be generous!
Facts that stick with me.
1. Everyone in the jury hated the rich guy and the banks. If there had been a way to make them both lose it would have been taken.
2. Most people on board (contrary to your experience) were not smart people. Large confusion about what money had been stolen, and from whom. Very 'Law and Order' expectations, for a boring and basic financial situation.
3. Both sides, during course of the trial, were exposed. Bankers had convos like 'we can string him along and get him to take out more loans', well past the point they were acting like guy should have known he was bust. Guy had convos like 'They can't get the money back if you have it, hehehe'.
4. One side called in an expert and then the other side objected that their expertise hadn't been established so they just turned around and left.
Final resolution was we figured out the first time he defaulted on a loan and reasoned that, after that had happened, any money he gave away was given away by a person who knew he was in financial peril and was thus likely hiding the money. So before that default, a ok, estate planning. After, sinister hiding of the banks rightful money.
No idea if this was a miscarriage of justice, we'd been there 4 days at this point. We had jobs to get back to.
Except, though, that even after the cutoff point there was one transfer we ruled was legit. It was the one to the trust for the unborn child. Two of the older ladies on the jury didn't want to take money away from a baby.
Both sides didn't expect the jury to come in with a verdict that day, they were still trying to patch things up in nightly meetings.
After the trial the banks lawyer mentioned that the idea of clawing back the money was a fantasy, the wife/cousins would have already spent/given it away by now, but that there was another objective to the lawsuit, it established something that would be evidence in some other case.
Left confused but overall hopeful. It felt like something approximately correct had occurred, though it firmed up my resolution not to end up in front of a jury.
Hm, I would expect the bank wouldn't want him to take out more loans if they're just losing money on it... wondering if this was a case of bad internal incentives where the particular bank employees benefited from this even though it caused the bank to lose money? Or what?
I wonder what the equation "money made from foreclosing on land" plus "money recouped from loan payments pre-bankruptcy" plus "average money recouped from defaulted loans" usually equals. That, or how fast the bank was selling loans to other banks/third parties.
> Neither the defense nor the prosecution struck the lawyers, even though I’d been told by a bunch of people that no one ever lets lawyers on a jury.
I've been told - but cannot confirm - that in recent years there's been an opposing trend, where people like having a lawyer or two on a jury, because it's helpful to have their procedural knowledge available to the other jurors or something.
> I was an intelligent, informed individual who had just mistakenly believed I would be able to Google “toolmark evidence untrustworthy Radley Balko” whenever I needed to.
It's weird how the things I pick up from my normal, mainstream news and politics then show up a bunch in the hyper-specific subculture I follow. I guess you don't need to be in a bubble in a structural sense to get most of the effect of one.
Unrelated, I feel like I didn't realize before this that you specifically consider yourself a Quaker. (I spent a good third of my time at LessOnline trying to get people to attend Quaker meetings in the future.)
I could see it. They were universalist way before anyone else--they prohibited owning slaves back in 1776. The pacifism isn't a perfect fit but in EA terms war probably kills more people than anything else. The lack of hierarchy fits EA too--anyone's supposed to be able to criticize. They were always at the extreme liberal end of Christianity when it came to women's rights and later LGBT issues. (Letting women 'preach' freaked out a lot of people in the 17th and 18th and 19th centuries.) Even the compassion for people in right-coded groups like straight men is kind of Quakerly in a way I can't describe.
Former attorney here - want to mention some stuff about jury trials, just for context. Keep in mind that I worked in a much more conservative state, and that there can be huge differences in the systems between states:
1) Almost every criminal case is pled out (as this one ultimately was) or a bench trial. Prosecutors want a bench trial most of the time because it lessens their workload and judges are predictable. Defense may opt for a jury trial if their client is especially sympathetic, or if there's no hope at a bench trial (i.e. it's a murder one case) and they might as well roll the dice. But usually it's better to go with a bench trial because judges are predictable. Nobody likes to gamble with 20 years of their life when they understand explicitly that's what they're doing. Per my other lawyer friends and your description here, a recent third reason might be that the jury pool has been tainted against police.
2) A lot of criminal defense is client management. Whatever number is in your head for "stupid crimes that could have been avoided if any of the participants weren't stupid," there's no way it's high enough. Criminals are almost exclusively young, impulsive men with low IQs. After being the kind of person who shoots a stranger over something so minor nobody understands what it was, they then have the right to direct their defense. Lawyers are advisors. They can advise, cajole, beg, threaten, etc., etc. But ultimately, if the defendant wants to tell his incoherent story, you can't stop them.
And *every* client wants to tell their incoherent story. I have literally had clients beg me to let them take the stand after I explained in detail how the story proved every element of the crime and would ensure their conviction. Even smart people think the job of a judge is to listen to both sides and decide who's right. They know there's something called "laws" but the idea that those laws also bind judges is at best an abstraction. This is another reason to do a jury trial. They tend to be multi-day affairs during which the client can see how their nonsense is playing out badly.
3) Yeah, sounds like there was an illegal car search. To be fair to the cop who searched the car, car search rules are wildly complex, and the car may have been searched illegally by accident instead of out of disregard for the law. To be less fair, police routinely bend car search rules and only occasionally get caught. This may have been the motive, but hard to say.
4) Almost always a plea will be reached before a verdict comes in. As I mentioned above, that's actually one reason to have a jury trial - to show to a party that's being unreasonable that the case is going to go as predicted. If I had to wildly speculate here, I'd say the dumb client in this straightforward case was offered a plea for manslaughter, thought his dumb story would get him exonerated, and that mostly y'all were just pawns to prove to him that he should take the plea.
5) One of the worst things TV has done to the criminal justice system is convince us every crime must have a clear and understandable motive. There's no legal requirement for motive and often the motive is so silly or personal that it won't make sense to anyone else. We expect a trial to give us a story, but usually it's just a collection of bizarre facts, and the job isn't to create a story out of them, it's to apply the law to them.
6) The rules against independent research are because if you use it as evidence, the opposition can't have that research challenged. It's the same reason they have to do the boring procedural stuff in front of you. Defendants have a right to challenge their accusers which means that if the prosecutor is using a police report as evidence, the defendant needs the ability to question the manner in which the report was produced. Practically this means a lot of very boring testimony (because both parties know what all the testimony is, and won't introduce evidence with contentious custody chains), but it's vital in the few cases it's not. And it's vital that both sides *know* that the jury will hear all the bad facts about a custody chain if they try to introduce a questionable document, even if that threat is never used in fact.
6) "Fun" fact! At common law one of the "utterances" that could get a murder knocked down to manslaughter was a man hitting on another man. This was not true of a man hitting on a woman or a woman hitting on a man.
Thank you for all this. Also a lawyer, and came here to say what you did: Ozy could not possibly estimate high enough how truly stupid most criminals are. I wonder why it is that he got the idea that all cops are bad etc? I really think that if the average person just spend a week in their local court listening to criminal bench trials and sentencing hearings, they would come away with such a profoundly different idea of whatever it is they've gotten from the media.
The vast, vast majority of them are obviously guilty, often repeat offenders, and have nothing to say for themselves or to explain themselves at all. It's crazy to me the country has gotten the idea that we regularly lock up people for no reason who are innocent. I mean, look I don't know know what went on in the South last century, and I'm sure it was extremely bad, but nowadays in the era of digital evidence and video everywhere and bodycams, this just isn't the reality, the reality is a lot of very stupid mostly men under 30, who absolutely did what they're charged with, are typically treated very fairly, and who lie their ass off at every opportunity. Perhaps the "educated elites" should've watched more COPS and less Netflix true-crime, because COPS at least used to show the standard reality of what they're dealing with.
The one thing that surprised me about this story is that the prosecutors gave zero information to humanize the victim at all. I realize they often leave that for sentencing, but I'm surprised NO information was given. To me the fact that they went between two cars seems pretty likely the intention was to make a transaction for drugs, and then something went wrong (perp tried to shortchange dealer, negotiated offensively, maybe tried to just steal the drugs, who knows but it doesn't need to be a good reason).
I'm not surprised Ozy wanted to get on the jury as I've been called up twice, both were for fairly juicy sex crimes, and was disappointed both times I wasn't chosen. Though in the second case, eventually I was relieved once I heard how bad the crime was, and committed against a prostitute, presumably with quite a harsh sentence attached, and I realized I absolutely did not want to have that level of life ruining power or moral culpality of my hands. Worrying about letting a murderer or violent rapist walk free or alternatively condemning someone incorrectly (even though I think that very, very, very rarely happens), would be terrifying.
I think we tend to filter things through our own perceptions. I'll agree on the facts here - the vast majority of defendants in criminal court are guilty (of something, generally not of everything they're charged with, because prosecutors routinely overcharge to force a plea), compulsively lie to people in positions of authority, and do stupid shit constantly. I also think there's some simplifying that takes place when you don't have firsthand experience with something. If we take the worst liberal writers, we get the impression that they think we're just locking up poor black kids for no reason, just like if we take the worst conservative writers we get the impression they think that black folks have some inherent inclination towards criminality and we should look them up just to be safe.
Here's what I'll say: I grew up in a fairly conservative household and have been consistently appalled at the conduct of the police. In one case, a cop approached me, the defense attorney, and explained (I was new at the time) that I really should get my (underage) client to plea to an adult felony charge because that way he'd never own a gun and be a danger to society. Never mind that for a person in his position, a felony conviction would ensure he had no option other than a life of crime, that this was his first offense, blah blah blah.
The crux here is that some people see this kind of thing as inevitable. Bad people do bad stuff and deserve punishment. And some people see this as an anomaly - we have so many poor kids (yes, many minorities), living in situations with no support other than older criminals, who will be more likely to re-offend if put into the system, and a prison system straining to hold more criminals than just about any other country on Earth. I do understand that if you think of crime in a "what does a criminal deserve?" way, emphasizing personal responsibility and treating the courts as society's retributive mechanism, there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, I think it's the more natural way to look at it. But if our goal is to, y'know, have a better society with less crime, I also see why a lot of people want to re-think that approach. I'm one of them.
Where I grew up everyone was white including the entire rather large underclass of criminals and many people in poverty, so I think that made it much easier to view things without having to worry about a racial angle. Cops were for the most part dicks to everyone, no one liked them, but also no one likes getting your window punched in and your house or car burglarized either. The biggest problems IMO tended to be small towns where some of the cops and or the sheriff is someone's relative or brother in law of the judge etc, that's where there is a big risk of massive corruption. But even still they generally were responding to real crimes, and frankly people DON'T get caught a lot more than they do. For every crime they actually get caught, you can assume many were committed and no one ever called the cops or no one was ever caught. How common is it for cops to actually solve a burglary or even big ticket item theft? It's gotta be less than 10%...every time I've had things stolen, or in one case actual breaking and entering and ransacking my home, the cops barely pretend to have any interest and blatantly tell you probably no one will be arrested, you almost have to harass them to even get them to write up a report and then never hear from them again.
Anyway, people have all kinds of different philosophies and intuitions regarding proper sentencing and retribution vs deterrence vs the many other theories of criminal law, but what they probably should NOT have is this idea that anything other than a tiny minority who gets convicted of things didn't actually do the crime, or that there was no one to try to help them. Public defenders are for the most part excellent and the most experienced people in the industry, and at least they get assigned one! If you're median middle class, you're probably looking at a much rougher road after arrest than you expect.
> The Kantian felt that, while it was more likely than not that Bomani Hairston-Bassette committed murder and not manslaughter, no one had asked the Kantian whether it was more likely than not. They had asked whether it was true beyond a reasonable doubt. And this motive was so mysterious that the Kantian felt he couldn’t know for really sure that Charles Wright hadn’t said something so outlandish that Bomani had flown into a fit of passion.
> This was, uh, really frustrating to argue with.
Isn't this the plot of 12 Angry Men with antagonist POV.
> "No one (except me) wants to be on a jury, but people are strangely unagentic about not being on the jury."
I was called for jury selection in a small county. So small, in fact, that 6 out of the 14 people placed in the jury box personally knew one of the parties to the case. So did roughly half of the 100+ potential jurors in the room. But the relationshipsn were things like, "I used to cut his wife's hair. No, I don't have any strong opinions about anyone involved."
But the judge was very, very smart, and had a firm grasp of social dynamics in a small town. Anyone in the room could have easily avoided being chosen for the jury. All they would have needed to do was stand up and claim that they were a biased asshole. And they would need to do this in front of 100+ people who were (1) fellow residents in a very small county, and (2) still in the jury pool. One guy transparently pretended to be biased, and 100+ people all gave him the stink eye. Nobody in that room missed what the asshole was doing. Nobody repeated his "successful" strategy.
And nobody involved had any objection to choosing lawyers or psychology professors for the jury. So apparently it's possible to get a jury where half the people know who you are, and at least one person has professional knowledge of eyewitness testimony.
I would up quite impressed with the system and with the juror pool. Except that one guy who lied to avoid being chosen. He's an asshole, and now everyone knows it.
> The auditory recordings established the duration of the shooting from the first shot to the last shot, which was (if I recall correctly) less than two seconds. The surveillance camera picked up a muzzle flash, which was the earliest possible time for the last shot. But the scuffle was more than two seconds after the last muzzle flash. The only way that Charles Wright could have shot Hairston-Bassette was if the sound didn’t get picked up by ShotSpotter or the Nest camera.
I'm confused by this timeline. Earlier you say that the scuffle was *before* any shootings started?
The scuffle was before Hairston-Bassette started shooting, but the defense claim is that Wright shot Hairston-Bassette during the scuffle. I don't think I said anywhere that the scuffle was before the shooting happened (as opposed to "before Hairston-Bassette was shooting"). I rewrote the paragraphs and tried to make them clearer.
My father taught me that if you're smart enough to commit a crime (or general breach of professional/ethical conduct) and get away with it, you're smart enough to solve your problem without committing a crime. In turn, if you can't think of a way to solve your problem without committing a crime, you are almost certainly not clever enough to escape the consequences. From these premises it can be concluded that most criminals are idiots, or *were* idiots at the time they committed their crimes.
You can also conclude that if you're thinking of solving one of your problems with crime, you are being stupid and should just take the consequences of ethical behavior in stride because it will probably be less bad than whatever you're planning.
You're right that smart people are less likely to go to jail...
...but we've actually seen cases where undoubtedly smart people have been indicted and convicted. Jeffrey Epstein didn't seem particularly stupid, secretly running an underage prostitution/blackmail ring for the rich and famous takes brains and organization. The master criminal of detective fiction is rare, but he does exist. Even outside of that you have guys like the math professor who got honeytrapped into laundering money by a woman who said she was in love with him--smart people are just as prone to the passions, etc. as anyone else.
But I should say you are overall correct: in general criminals aren't too smart, to the point if you are smart and go to jail they are more likely to beat you up and rape you in jail as a result of resentment (so everyone here should behave!). You could go back and forth about causality--our broadly IQ-based stratification system places dull people in poor positions where they are more likely to have to resort to crime to get by, for example--but the trend is clear.
Yeah, it's more of a general rule for the behavior of normal people.
He derived this idea from the time he was afraid of failing a class, cheated, and then got caught and was politely asked to leave for a different school. The point is not strictly that smart people never do bad things, but that when they do they're often acting out of a great fear (or in your case, love) that is not conducive to good planning, making them stupid at the time they are doing crimes. Ozy's posts on fraudsters capture this pattern quite well: as you say, the master criminal is rare and many white-collar criminals dig themselves into a hole out of desperation.
So if you're a clever person in a bind and you think you see a gap in enforcement you could escape through... it's probably best to just take your raps and move on with your life.
Well, the thing about "smart" is that intelligence can be spiky, and it is kind of famously often spiky in such a way that the spikes are very tall but are in areas other than, for lack of a better term, common sense.
Also, it's possible to be brainy yet suffer from emotional failings like hubris ("I have so many powerful friends, no one will ever dare punish me for sexually trafficking minor children!" "The investors in my wealth management fund will never suddenly all need to liquidate at once, thus exposing the fact that I'm not really making brilliant straddle trades but am instead running a giant Ponzi scheme!") or vanity ("There couldn't possibly be anything suspicious about a woman who claims to love me but wants me to do some very sketchy cash transactions in her behalf; how could anybody be lying about loving *me*?"). And on and on.
What you said about jail isn't true. Most criminals in jail are so unbelievably stupid that just being very minimally smart...and here I mean that you have read a whole book in your life voluntarily...will make you incredibly POPULAR in jail because you're so unusual. Many of them literally can't read or barely write. If you go to jail with actual intelligence and book smarts, you have a valuable resource right there and don't even need to acquire anything to barter. They will come to you to read and explain their legal notices to them, help them write letters, etc. The few nerds I've known who went to jail found out that it was actually the most popular they've ever been in their life, because they're almost like an alien.
Having read that review I was struck by how the idea that most violent crime is "stupid", a system-2 crime (probably with an addition of culture of honour social expectations in some subcultures or cultures) seemed so surprising and novel. Anyone who spent a couple of days in criminal court (in any country -- I'm not American but I do spend time in court now and then) surely would know that. Perhaps where the understanding crashes is on how easily a "normal fight" (something that's not even coded as "crime" on the first look by most people) might turns into GBH or homicide in certain circumstances.
Wow. What a fabulous post. Thank you for writing it!
A few very minor comments:
1) I would also like to be on a jury, and all my friends whom I've talked about this with would too. I don't think it's all that rare. (I've been called for jury duty a few times, actually showed up at the court (not called the morning of and told never mind) twice, and never gotten chosen.)
2) I really loved The City & The City. I bet I'm not the only one? Perhaps you underestimate your readership.
3) They say they don't like lawyers, and I have heard that they like law *professors* even less, but my late father (professor of law) was on juries *twice*. FWIW, he was also both times impressed by the dedication & seriousness of his fellow jurors. My sense is that is a common experience.
4) Which is why I think government by sortition is at least worth considering. My suggestion is that some state with a normal two-branch legislature make one by sortition. The other branch would make sure they didn't do anything *too* dumb & we'd get to see how it worked in practice.
5) Have you talked to Radley Balko about this? Radley, are you out there? Somebody send up a batsignal.
This was interesting, I'm glad you wrote it out. I especially found it good to know that there were lawyers and folks with that level of anti-police attitude on the jury; I too thought that basically never happened.
My one piece of frustration is where you said "I agree that Hairston-Bassette ought to be put away where he can’t hurt anyone until he grows up enough to think about his actions."
A casual google tells me he was around 25 when this happened, and earlier in the piece you said "I and several other jurors made the argument that it was not obvious that Hairston-Bassette had ever done anything with careful planning and deliberation in his life."
I'll believe people grow out of a propensity violence; the hormones change and so does your physical capacity to throw hands (although my uncle was still getting into dumb knife fights in bars well into his 60s). But it's hard for me to imagine someone's overall impulsivity and planning skills are going to wildly improve from where they're set by their mid-20s.
I'm sensing a certain desire to extend adolescence even further, here. Not sure if it was purposeful on your part, or just awkward phrasing.
data (age at time of arrest for violent crime is what I'm specifically thinking of) suggest that violent tendencies peak around 24-25 and then decline significantly, by 35 the rate is about half. whether someone specifically known to have been violent at 25 is all that likely to be less violent at 35 is a different question, but there's reason to accept it as a real possibility.
There have been studies on recidivism rates based on age at release from prison. For California, which measures conviction rates within three years following release, the age 35-39 bracket is about 80% as likely to be reconvicted as the age 20-24 bracket. The big decline seems to happen more in late middle age.
> No one (except me) wants to be on a jury, but people are strangely unagentic about not being on the jury.
This is how I ended up on a jury once. When I got called up, I had various thoughts about what I could (honestly) say to get dismissed. But then once they started questioning me, it felt very embarrassing to speak any of those thoughts out loud, so I didn't, and I ended up seeming normal enough to get picked.
I am pretty far on the disagreeableness spectrum, so I assume that however much pressure I felt to give agreeable answers, the average person feels even more pressure.
> Unfortunately, Googling afterward didn’t explain to me why Antoine Ford was so uncooperative.
I don't personally know any street dealers, but I *have* watched The Wire, which is obviously fictional but it's widely praised for its accuracy so I'm going to take it as accurate. The code of ethics of street dealers (and their associates, like bodyguards) is that you do not give testimony, even if doing so would help your side and hurt the other side, and if you do give testimony then that makes you A Rat and therefore The Worst Possible Person.
Have known some street dealers and others in the same general subculture, can confirm.
That doesn't mean they never snitch--any cop or lawyer, or indeed any criminal, can tell you that they do. But doing so entails significant lifestyle changes to put it mildly.
>I agree that the sentence for second-degree murder—fifteen years to life in prison—was far too long for this crime. Bomani was ultimately sentenced to ten years in prison, which seems right to me.
Why? Just because you think the odds of someone 35+ years old committing a major crime is slow?
Re: Quakers and oaths, my experience has been that none of us take it too seriously anymore. I try to affirm when I'm given the option, and I have been when serving on a town board. But also I don't really think that swearing an oath is wrong or anything because I am more committed to linguistic descriptivism than I am to my religion, I just stick with it because it's Quaker tradition. This seems to be roughly the attitude of most Quakers I know but eh I'm also sort of a bad Quaker.
"It’s impossible to imagine what the fuck a stranger could say to you over the course of twenty seconds that would cause you to fly into a rage that justifies a homicide."
The only things I can think of are to boast about about having killed or otherwise seriously harmed someone very close to them - their spouse, partner, child or close family member.
Not merely to confess, but to overtly boast about it. That at least could generate rage on that level.
Or really messed up stuff about strangers as well. I think many people could get that spun up really quickly, especially if it were on a topic that was horrible and the person hearing jt had some sort of prior experience with.
But I thought the point was the jury was operating under the assumption that they had no connections? Of course if it turns out they were connected in such a horrible way, then yes he could be provoked into killing him
I don't agree with "It was clearly intended for stupid people whose research would discover sovereign citizen bullshit," for a few reasons. Firstly, if the jurors do their own research, that research can't be cross-examined; if someone is called upon to serve as an expert witness, the other side can cross-examine or provide their own expert witnesses to dispute. Secondly, doing your own research can lead you to people discussing the case, and for obvious reasons we don't want jurors influenced by outside sources. Thirdly, it can lead you to inadmissible evidence, which sort of defeats the purpose of having some evidence be inadmissible. Fourthly, even knowledgeable, intelligent people can be misled by finding one paper and being unaware of the papers on the other side of the specialized debate.
Ooh, ooh, I served on a jury! We heard a case, deliberated and returned a verdict, it took about a week. It happened back right after Obama was elected the first time.
Our case was like this.
A man's business model was borrowing a lot from banks to buy land to sell to to guys who build houses.
The market crashed and no one was buying the land.
He had no money because his family ended up with it.
The banks wanted their money back.
Bank case was, basically, that he realized things were about to go sour, gave the money away where it wouldn't be reachable, declared bankruptcy.
Rich guy case was, basically, just because I'm bad at business doesn't make my wife/trust for unborn child legally dubious. I'm allowed to be generous!
Facts that stick with me.
1. Everyone in the jury hated the rich guy and the banks. If there had been a way to make them both lose it would have been taken.
2. Most people on board (contrary to your experience) were not smart people. Large confusion about what money had been stolen, and from whom. Very 'Law and Order' expectations, for a boring and basic financial situation.
3. Both sides, during course of the trial, were exposed. Bankers had convos like 'we can string him along and get him to take out more loans', well past the point they were acting like guy should have known he was bust. Guy had convos like 'They can't get the money back if you have it, hehehe'.
4. One side called in an expert and then the other side objected that their expertise hadn't been established so they just turned around and left.
Final resolution was we figured out the first time he defaulted on a loan and reasoned that, after that had happened, any money he gave away was given away by a person who knew he was in financial peril and was thus likely hiding the money. So before that default, a ok, estate planning. After, sinister hiding of the banks rightful money.
No idea if this was a miscarriage of justice, we'd been there 4 days at this point. We had jobs to get back to.
Except, though, that even after the cutoff point there was one transfer we ruled was legit. It was the one to the trust for the unborn child. Two of the older ladies on the jury didn't want to take money away from a baby.
Both sides didn't expect the jury to come in with a verdict that day, they were still trying to patch things up in nightly meetings.
After the trial the banks lawyer mentioned that the idea of clawing back the money was a fantasy, the wife/cousins would have already spent/given it away by now, but that there was another objective to the lawsuit, it established something that would be evidence in some other case.
Left confused but overall hopeful. It felt like something approximately correct had occurred, though it firmed up my resolution not to end up in front of a jury.
Hm, I would expect the bank wouldn't want him to take out more loans if they're just losing money on it... wondering if this was a case of bad internal incentives where the particular bank employees benefited from this even though it caused the bank to lose money? Or what?
I wonder what the equation "money made from foreclosing on land" plus "money recouped from loan payments pre-bankruptcy" plus "average money recouped from defaulted loans" usually equals. That, or how fast the bank was selling loans to other banks/third parties.
Loan-selling seems like an endless source of moral hazard.
> Neither the defense nor the prosecution struck the lawyers, even though I’d been told by a bunch of people that no one ever lets lawyers on a jury.
I've been told - but cannot confirm - that in recent years there's been an opposing trend, where people like having a lawyer or two on a jury, because it's helpful to have their procedural knowledge available to the other jurors or something.
> I was an intelligent, informed individual who had just mistakenly believed I would be able to Google “toolmark evidence untrustworthy Radley Balko” whenever I needed to.
It's weird how the things I pick up from my normal, mainstream news and politics then show up a bunch in the hyper-specific subculture I follow. I guess you don't need to be in a bubble in a structural sense to get most of the effect of one.
Unrelated, I feel like I didn't realize before this that you specifically consider yourself a Quaker. (I spent a good third of my time at LessOnline trying to get people to attend Quaker meetings in the future.)
The Quaker bit was a surprise to me too; I guess I just assume that everyone in the broader rationalist orbit is an atheist.
You don't really have to believe in God to be a Quaker, at least according to the two Quaker meetings I've attended.
I could see it. They were universalist way before anyone else--they prohibited owning slaves back in 1776. The pacifism isn't a perfect fit but in EA terms war probably kills more people than anything else. The lack of hierarchy fits EA too--anyone's supposed to be able to criticize. They were always at the extreme liberal end of Christianity when it came to women's rights and later LGBT issues. (Letting women 'preach' freaked out a lot of people in the 17th and 18th and 19th centuries.) Even the compassion for people in right-coded groups like straight men is kind of Quakerly in a way I can't describe.
So yeah, I didn't expect it, but it fits.
Former attorney here - want to mention some stuff about jury trials, just for context. Keep in mind that I worked in a much more conservative state, and that there can be huge differences in the systems between states:
1) Almost every criminal case is pled out (as this one ultimately was) or a bench trial. Prosecutors want a bench trial most of the time because it lessens their workload and judges are predictable. Defense may opt for a jury trial if their client is especially sympathetic, or if there's no hope at a bench trial (i.e. it's a murder one case) and they might as well roll the dice. But usually it's better to go with a bench trial because judges are predictable. Nobody likes to gamble with 20 years of their life when they understand explicitly that's what they're doing. Per my other lawyer friends and your description here, a recent third reason might be that the jury pool has been tainted against police.
2) A lot of criminal defense is client management. Whatever number is in your head for "stupid crimes that could have been avoided if any of the participants weren't stupid," there's no way it's high enough. Criminals are almost exclusively young, impulsive men with low IQs. After being the kind of person who shoots a stranger over something so minor nobody understands what it was, they then have the right to direct their defense. Lawyers are advisors. They can advise, cajole, beg, threaten, etc., etc. But ultimately, if the defendant wants to tell his incoherent story, you can't stop them.
And *every* client wants to tell their incoherent story. I have literally had clients beg me to let them take the stand after I explained in detail how the story proved every element of the crime and would ensure their conviction. Even smart people think the job of a judge is to listen to both sides and decide who's right. They know there's something called "laws" but the idea that those laws also bind judges is at best an abstraction. This is another reason to do a jury trial. They tend to be multi-day affairs during which the client can see how their nonsense is playing out badly.
3) Yeah, sounds like there was an illegal car search. To be fair to the cop who searched the car, car search rules are wildly complex, and the car may have been searched illegally by accident instead of out of disregard for the law. To be less fair, police routinely bend car search rules and only occasionally get caught. This may have been the motive, but hard to say.
4) Almost always a plea will be reached before a verdict comes in. As I mentioned above, that's actually one reason to have a jury trial - to show to a party that's being unreasonable that the case is going to go as predicted. If I had to wildly speculate here, I'd say the dumb client in this straightforward case was offered a plea for manslaughter, thought his dumb story would get him exonerated, and that mostly y'all were just pawns to prove to him that he should take the plea.
5) One of the worst things TV has done to the criminal justice system is convince us every crime must have a clear and understandable motive. There's no legal requirement for motive and often the motive is so silly or personal that it won't make sense to anyone else. We expect a trial to give us a story, but usually it's just a collection of bizarre facts, and the job isn't to create a story out of them, it's to apply the law to them.
6) The rules against independent research are because if you use it as evidence, the opposition can't have that research challenged. It's the same reason they have to do the boring procedural stuff in front of you. Defendants have a right to challenge their accusers which means that if the prosecutor is using a police report as evidence, the defendant needs the ability to question the manner in which the report was produced. Practically this means a lot of very boring testimony (because both parties know what all the testimony is, and won't introduce evidence with contentious custody chains), but it's vital in the few cases it's not. And it's vital that both sides *know* that the jury will hear all the bad facts about a custody chain if they try to introduce a questionable document, even if that threat is never used in fact.
6) "Fun" fact! At common law one of the "utterances" that could get a murder knocked down to manslaughter was a man hitting on another man. This was not true of a man hitting on a woman or a woman hitting on a man.
Thank you for all this. Also a lawyer, and came here to say what you did: Ozy could not possibly estimate high enough how truly stupid most criminals are. I wonder why it is that he got the idea that all cops are bad etc? I really think that if the average person just spend a week in their local court listening to criminal bench trials and sentencing hearings, they would come away with such a profoundly different idea of whatever it is they've gotten from the media.
The vast, vast majority of them are obviously guilty, often repeat offenders, and have nothing to say for themselves or to explain themselves at all. It's crazy to me the country has gotten the idea that we regularly lock up people for no reason who are innocent. I mean, look I don't know know what went on in the South last century, and I'm sure it was extremely bad, but nowadays in the era of digital evidence and video everywhere and bodycams, this just isn't the reality, the reality is a lot of very stupid mostly men under 30, who absolutely did what they're charged with, are typically treated very fairly, and who lie their ass off at every opportunity. Perhaps the "educated elites" should've watched more COPS and less Netflix true-crime, because COPS at least used to show the standard reality of what they're dealing with.
The one thing that surprised me about this story is that the prosecutors gave zero information to humanize the victim at all. I realize they often leave that for sentencing, but I'm surprised NO information was given. To me the fact that they went between two cars seems pretty likely the intention was to make a transaction for drugs, and then something went wrong (perp tried to shortchange dealer, negotiated offensively, maybe tried to just steal the drugs, who knows but it doesn't need to be a good reason).
I'm not surprised Ozy wanted to get on the jury as I've been called up twice, both were for fairly juicy sex crimes, and was disappointed both times I wasn't chosen. Though in the second case, eventually I was relieved once I heard how bad the crime was, and committed against a prostitute, presumably with quite a harsh sentence attached, and I realized I absolutely did not want to have that level of life ruining power or moral culpality of my hands. Worrying about letting a murderer or violent rapist walk free or alternatively condemning someone incorrectly (even though I think that very, very, very rarely happens), would be terrifying.
I think we tend to filter things through our own perceptions. I'll agree on the facts here - the vast majority of defendants in criminal court are guilty (of something, generally not of everything they're charged with, because prosecutors routinely overcharge to force a plea), compulsively lie to people in positions of authority, and do stupid shit constantly. I also think there's some simplifying that takes place when you don't have firsthand experience with something. If we take the worst liberal writers, we get the impression that they think we're just locking up poor black kids for no reason, just like if we take the worst conservative writers we get the impression they think that black folks have some inherent inclination towards criminality and we should look them up just to be safe.
Here's what I'll say: I grew up in a fairly conservative household and have been consistently appalled at the conduct of the police. In one case, a cop approached me, the defense attorney, and explained (I was new at the time) that I really should get my (underage) client to plea to an adult felony charge because that way he'd never own a gun and be a danger to society. Never mind that for a person in his position, a felony conviction would ensure he had no option other than a life of crime, that this was his first offense, blah blah blah.
The crux here is that some people see this kind of thing as inevitable. Bad people do bad stuff and deserve punishment. And some people see this as an anomaly - we have so many poor kids (yes, many minorities), living in situations with no support other than older criminals, who will be more likely to re-offend if put into the system, and a prison system straining to hold more criminals than just about any other country on Earth. I do understand that if you think of crime in a "what does a criminal deserve?" way, emphasizing personal responsibility and treating the courts as society's retributive mechanism, there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, I think it's the more natural way to look at it. But if our goal is to, y'know, have a better society with less crime, I also see why a lot of people want to re-think that approach. I'm one of them.
Where I grew up everyone was white including the entire rather large underclass of criminals and many people in poverty, so I think that made it much easier to view things without having to worry about a racial angle. Cops were for the most part dicks to everyone, no one liked them, but also no one likes getting your window punched in and your house or car burglarized either. The biggest problems IMO tended to be small towns where some of the cops and or the sheriff is someone's relative or brother in law of the judge etc, that's where there is a big risk of massive corruption. But even still they generally were responding to real crimes, and frankly people DON'T get caught a lot more than they do. For every crime they actually get caught, you can assume many were committed and no one ever called the cops or no one was ever caught. How common is it for cops to actually solve a burglary or even big ticket item theft? It's gotta be less than 10%...every time I've had things stolen, or in one case actual breaking and entering and ransacking my home, the cops barely pretend to have any interest and blatantly tell you probably no one will be arrested, you almost have to harass them to even get them to write up a report and then never hear from them again.
Anyway, people have all kinds of different philosophies and intuitions regarding proper sentencing and retribution vs deterrence vs the many other theories of criminal law, but what they probably should NOT have is this idea that anything other than a tiny minority who gets convicted of things didn't actually do the crime, or that there was no one to try to help them. Public defenders are for the most part excellent and the most experienced people in the industry, and at least they get assigned one! If you're median middle class, you're probably looking at a much rougher road after arrest than you expect.
>One of the worst things TV has done to the criminal justice system is convince us every crime must have a clear and understandable motive.
I'm so glad an actual lawyer, or someone highly skilled at impersonating one, chimed in to point this out so I wouldn't have to.
Regarding 6, what about a woman hitting on a woman? I suppose the frequency of that coming up would have been basically zero.
I'm not sure. I suspect it was not, just due to my perception of this rule being partially men's assumed sexual aggressiveness. But that is a guess.
> The Kantian felt that, while it was more likely than not that Bomani Hairston-Bassette committed murder and not manslaughter, no one had asked the Kantian whether it was more likely than not. They had asked whether it was true beyond a reasonable doubt. And this motive was so mysterious that the Kantian felt he couldn’t know for really sure that Charles Wright hadn’t said something so outlandish that Bomani had flown into a fit of passion.
> This was, uh, really frustrating to argue with.
Isn't this the plot of 12 Angry Men with antagonist POV.
> "No one (except me) wants to be on a jury, but people are strangely unagentic about not being on the jury."
I was called for jury selection in a small county. So small, in fact, that 6 out of the 14 people placed in the jury box personally knew one of the parties to the case. So did roughly half of the 100+ potential jurors in the room. But the relationshipsn were things like, "I used to cut his wife's hair. No, I don't have any strong opinions about anyone involved."
But the judge was very, very smart, and had a firm grasp of social dynamics in a small town. Anyone in the room could have easily avoided being chosen for the jury. All they would have needed to do was stand up and claim that they were a biased asshole. And they would need to do this in front of 100+ people who were (1) fellow residents in a very small county, and (2) still in the jury pool. One guy transparently pretended to be biased, and 100+ people all gave him the stink eye. Nobody in that room missed what the asshole was doing. Nobody repeated his "successful" strategy.
And nobody involved had any objection to choosing lawyers or psychology professors for the jury. So apparently it's possible to get a jury where half the people know who you are, and at least one person has professional knowledge of eyewitness testimony.
I would up quite impressed with the system and with the juror pool. Except that one guy who lied to avoid being chosen. He's an asshole, and now everyone knows it.
> The auditory recordings established the duration of the shooting from the first shot to the last shot, which was (if I recall correctly) less than two seconds. The surveillance camera picked up a muzzle flash, which was the earliest possible time for the last shot. But the scuffle was more than two seconds after the last muzzle flash. The only way that Charles Wright could have shot Hairston-Bassette was if the sound didn’t get picked up by ShotSpotter or the Nest camera.
I'm confused by this timeline. Earlier you say that the scuffle was *before* any shootings started?
The scuffle was before Hairston-Bassette started shooting, but the defense claim is that Wright shot Hairston-Bassette during the scuffle. I don't think I said anywhere that the scuffle was before the shooting happened (as opposed to "before Hairston-Bassette was shooting"). I rewrote the paragraphs and tried to make them clearer.
My father taught me that if you're smart enough to commit a crime (or general breach of professional/ethical conduct) and get away with it, you're smart enough to solve your problem without committing a crime. In turn, if you can't think of a way to solve your problem without committing a crime, you are almost certainly not clever enough to escape the consequences. From these premises it can be concluded that most criminals are idiots, or *were* idiots at the time they committed their crimes.
You can also conclude that if you're thinking of solving one of your problems with crime, you are being stupid and should just take the consequences of ethical behavior in stride because it will probably be less bad than whatever you're planning.
You're right that smart people are less likely to go to jail...
...but we've actually seen cases where undoubtedly smart people have been indicted and convicted. Jeffrey Epstein didn't seem particularly stupid, secretly running an underage prostitution/blackmail ring for the rich and famous takes brains and organization. The master criminal of detective fiction is rare, but he does exist. Even outside of that you have guys like the math professor who got honeytrapped into laundering money by a woman who said she was in love with him--smart people are just as prone to the passions, etc. as anyone else.
But I should say you are overall correct: in general criminals aren't too smart, to the point if you are smart and go to jail they are more likely to beat you up and rape you in jail as a result of resentment (so everyone here should behave!). You could go back and forth about causality--our broadly IQ-based stratification system places dull people in poor positions where they are more likely to have to resort to crime to get by, for example--but the trend is clear.
Yeah, it's more of a general rule for the behavior of normal people.
He derived this idea from the time he was afraid of failing a class, cheated, and then got caught and was politely asked to leave for a different school. The point is not strictly that smart people never do bad things, but that when they do they're often acting out of a great fear (or in your case, love) that is not conducive to good planning, making them stupid at the time they are doing crimes. Ozy's posts on fraudsters capture this pattern quite well: as you say, the master criminal is rare and many white-collar criminals dig themselves into a hole out of desperation.
So if you're a clever person in a bind and you think you see a gap in enforcement you could escape through... it's probably best to just take your raps and move on with your life.
Well, the thing about "smart" is that intelligence can be spiky, and it is kind of famously often spiky in such a way that the spikes are very tall but are in areas other than, for lack of a better term, common sense.
Also, it's possible to be brainy yet suffer from emotional failings like hubris ("I have so many powerful friends, no one will ever dare punish me for sexually trafficking minor children!" "The investors in my wealth management fund will never suddenly all need to liquidate at once, thus exposing the fact that I'm not really making brilliant straddle trades but am instead running a giant Ponzi scheme!") or vanity ("There couldn't possibly be anything suspicious about a woman who claims to love me but wants me to do some very sketchy cash transactions in her behalf; how could anybody be lying about loving *me*?"). And on and on.
What you said about jail isn't true. Most criminals in jail are so unbelievably stupid that just being very minimally smart...and here I mean that you have read a whole book in your life voluntarily...will make you incredibly POPULAR in jail because you're so unusual. Many of them literally can't read or barely write. If you go to jail with actual intelligence and book smarts, you have a valuable resource right there and don't even need to acquire anything to barter. They will come to you to read and explain their legal notices to them, help them write letters, etc. The few nerds I've known who went to jail found out that it was actually the most popular they've ever been in their life, because they're almost like an alien.
brilliant account, thanks for this!
>>I don’t know how many crimes are stupid. I haven’t seen any data.
Apparently for violent crime, more than two-thirds, iirc.
Relevant:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/09/unforgiving-places-jens-ludwig-book-review
Having read that review I was struck by how the idea that most violent crime is "stupid", a system-2 crime (probably with an addition of culture of honour social expectations in some subcultures or cultures) seemed so surprising and novel. Anyone who spent a couple of days in criminal court (in any country -- I'm not American but I do spend time in court now and then) surely would know that. Perhaps where the understanding crashes is on how easily a "normal fight" (something that's not even coded as "crime" on the first look by most people) might turns into GBH or homicide in certain circumstances.
Depending on mutual combat laws, it might not even be a crime.
And in others it may be a crime but basically not enforced unless someone is badly hurt.
Wow. What a fabulous post. Thank you for writing it!
A few very minor comments:
1) I would also like to be on a jury, and all my friends whom I've talked about this with would too. I don't think it's all that rare. (I've been called for jury duty a few times, actually showed up at the court (not called the morning of and told never mind) twice, and never gotten chosen.)
2) I really loved The City & The City. I bet I'm not the only one? Perhaps you underestimate your readership.
3) They say they don't like lawyers, and I have heard that they like law *professors* even less, but my late father (professor of law) was on juries *twice*. FWIW, he was also both times impressed by the dedication & seriousness of his fellow jurors. My sense is that is a common experience.
4) Which is why I think government by sortition is at least worth considering. My suggestion is that some state with a normal two-branch legislature make one by sortition. The other branch would make sure they didn't do anything *too* dumb & we'd get to see how it worked in practice.
5) Have you talked to Radley Balko about this? Radley, are you out there? Somebody send up a batsignal.
A citizen’s legislature! This has been something I’ve personally been a fan of for quite a while.
This was interesting, I'm glad you wrote it out. I especially found it good to know that there were lawyers and folks with that level of anti-police attitude on the jury; I too thought that basically never happened.
My one piece of frustration is where you said "I agree that Hairston-Bassette ought to be put away where he can’t hurt anyone until he grows up enough to think about his actions."
A casual google tells me he was around 25 when this happened, and earlier in the piece you said "I and several other jurors made the argument that it was not obvious that Hairston-Bassette had ever done anything with careful planning and deliberation in his life."
I'll believe people grow out of a propensity violence; the hormones change and so does your physical capacity to throw hands (although my uncle was still getting into dumb knife fights in bars well into his 60s). But it's hard for me to imagine someone's overall impulsivity and planning skills are going to wildly improve from where they're set by their mid-20s.
I'm sensing a certain desire to extend adolescence even further, here. Not sure if it was purposeful on your part, or just awkward phrasing.
data (age at time of arrest for violent crime is what I'm specifically thinking of) suggest that violent tendencies peak around 24-25 and then decline significantly, by 35 the rate is about half. whether someone specifically known to have been violent at 25 is all that likely to be less violent at 35 is a different question, but there's reason to accept it as a real possibility.
There have been studies on recidivism rates based on age at release from prison. For California, which measures conviction rates within three years following release, the age 35-39 bracket is about 80% as likely to be reconvicted as the age 20-24 bracket. The big decline seems to happen more in late middle age.
See Appendix D here:
https://www.cdcr.ca.gov/research/wp-content/uploads/sites/174/2025/04/Statewide-Recidivism-Report-for-Individuals-Released-in-Fiscal-Year-2019-20.pdf
> my uncle was still getting into dumb knife fights in bars
This implies the existence of *smart* knife fights in bars. Citation needed.
"Pitt the Elder." "Lord Palmerston!" "Pitt the Elder!" "LORD PALMERSTON!"
> No one (except me) wants to be on a jury, but people are strangely unagentic about not being on the jury.
This is how I ended up on a jury once. When I got called up, I had various thoughts about what I could (honestly) say to get dismissed. But then once they started questioning me, it felt very embarrassing to speak any of those thoughts out loud, so I didn't, and I ended up seeming normal enough to get picked.
I am pretty far on the disagreeableness spectrum, so I assume that however much pressure I felt to give agreeable answers, the average person feels even more pressure.
> Unfortunately, Googling afterward didn’t explain to me why Antoine Ford was so uncooperative.
I don't personally know any street dealers, but I *have* watched The Wire, which is obviously fictional but it's widely praised for its accuracy so I'm going to take it as accurate. The code of ethics of street dealers (and their associates, like bodyguards) is that you do not give testimony, even if doing so would help your side and hurt the other side, and if you do give testimony then that makes you A Rat and therefore The Worst Possible Person.
Have known some street dealers and others in the same general subculture, can confirm.
That doesn't mean they never snitch--any cop or lawyer, or indeed any criminal, can tell you that they do. But doing so entails significant lifestyle changes to put it mildly.
>I agree that the sentence for second-degree murder—fifteen years to life in prison—was far too long for this crime. Bomani was ultimately sentenced to ten years in prison, which seems right to me.
Why? Just because you think the odds of someone 35+ years old committing a major crime is slow?
Re: Quakers and oaths, my experience has been that none of us take it too seriously anymore. I try to affirm when I'm given the option, and I have been when serving on a town board. But also I don't really think that swearing an oath is wrong or anything because I am more committed to linguistic descriptivism than I am to my religion, I just stick with it because it's Quaker tradition. This seems to be roughly the attitude of most Quakers I know but eh I'm also sort of a bad Quaker.
> toolmark evidence untrustworthy Radley Balko
Apparently Google has banned this search query in BC, which just makes me more curious...
https://radleybalko.substack.com/p/devil-in-the-grooves-the-case-against
"It’s impossible to imagine what the fuck a stranger could say to you over the course of twenty seconds that would cause you to fly into a rage that justifies a homicide."
The only things I can think of are to boast about about having killed or otherwise seriously harmed someone very close to them - their spouse, partner, child or close family member.
Not merely to confess, but to overtly boast about it. That at least could generate rage on that level.
Or really messed up stuff about strangers as well. I think many people could get that spun up really quickly, especially if it were on a topic that was horrible and the person hearing jt had some sort of prior experience with.
But I thought the point was the jury was operating under the assumption that they had no connections? Of course if it turns out they were connected in such a horrible way, then yes he could be provoked into killing him
And? You could say something like that without a connection.
How could you say that you killed their spouse or child without a connection to them?
Lie?