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.
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.
Regard 2, I've heard defence lawyers complain about this before. It goes something like:
"They say they want to make a speech to the court. You tell them not to. They tell you their speech will be really good. You say you have been doing this for 20 years and speeches always make everything worse. You tell them it would be a very, very bad idea. They say they understand and agree not to make a speech.
"Then, once back in court, they get up, make a speech, and quadruple their sentence in the process."
This is pretty explicable just based on the fundamental attribution error. Everyone thinks that their circumstances are special, that they had a good reason, and that they deserve special consideration as a result. Sometimes (not often) they're even right. And studies show that people who address the court and tell their stories feel that their treatment was more fair, even though they get longer sentences on average. The rationale is that at least the judge got to hear their side, even if they decided a different way.
But the justice system cannot and should not work that way - we want the law to behave somewhat predictably. So the judge isn't weighing your words against the prosecutor's. We set a number of elements and an evidentiary standard for each of those elements. Trials are algorithmic. If you want to convict someone of illegal possession of a weapon, you have to prove:
1) They (i.e. the defendant is the person who did the thing)
2) Possessed (i.e. controlled)
3) A weapon (i.e. the item in their possession meets the definition of a weapon)
4) Illegally (i.e. there was some reason they weren't allowed to have a weapon)
5) On purpose (i.e. they knew they had the weapon and they knew they weren't allowed to have it)
The mostly fictional premise of the justice system is that if the evidence demonstrates all those things beyond a reasonable doubt, you're guilty. Not "the judge will decide you're guilty," you are guilty. Unless the law specifically calls out an exception, your reasons don't matter.
People don't naturally think this way. This seems wildly divorced from concepts like fairness and justice that we associate with criminal law. Most humans are far more comfortable with an authority figure exercising unrestrained judgment than this kind of checklist justice. An otherwise awful show, The Good Fight, has an arc about this that really really drills down into why that's a bad idea.
I think you're right about fundamental attribution error. Plus movies, probably. People expect an appeal to emotions to be a) sympathetic when it's them doing it and b) effective in the face of evidence of guilt.
The idea that people who get to make a speech feel their treatment is MORE fair, despite sterner sentencing, is interesting. I suppose they're less likely to sit there saying things like "If the judge had just realised that-" and "If they'd just let me explain-". Actually, I think I link this to how I felt about being disciplined as a child. It was much more frustrating if you felt you hadn't even gotten to tell your side of the story.
> 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.
> 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.
> "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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> They walked between a pair of parked cars. There was a one-frame scuffle. In the next frame, Hairston-Bassette had a gun and was shooting at Wright, who was running away.
So there was at least one shot after the scuffle. So the muzzle flash, which you claim occurred *before* the scuffle, could not have been the last shot. These are directly contradictory. You say "this is a conservative assumption", but I don't understand the purpose of making conservative assumptions that are known to be wrong with >99.9% probability; Antoine Ford is known to have shot Hairston-Bassette much later, therefore the muzzle flash >30 seconds earlier could absolutely not have been the last shot. So I feel like I must be missing something here but I can't figure out what.
The muzzle flash occurring before the scuffle also means that it had to be 30 seconds before, since otherwise the camera would not have seen both, but you then claim that Hairston-Bassette and Antoine Ford both shoot after the scuffle, thus more than 30 seconds after the first muzzle flash, but this contradicts your claim that less than two seconds elapsed between the first shot and the last shot.
And if there was a muzzle flash before the scuffle, doesn't that *prove* that someone shot prior to the footage of Hairston-Bassette shooting at a running-away Charles Wright? It could have been either Hairston-Bassette or Wright doing the shooting, but either way that seems quite relevant, so I'm further confused why the story you present at the beginning doesn't mention this at all. The fact that they were still scuffling 30 seconds after a shot implies that the shot likely missed, and raises questions about why it took Antoine Ford so long to come to the defense of his friend.
I've gone over it like 5 times now and I can't figure out a way of interpreting the story you've presented that makes any sense.
> 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.
Probably what happened is after Ford got busted with the gun, he got offered a plea deal to testify in the murder case, and then he got cold feet. If he hadn't taken a deal, they would not have called him to the stand, but they would have spoken to him and taken a sworn statement previously and would have basically been expecting him to repeat that statement and be cross-examined on it.
And, yeah, he probably got cold feet because he's at least somewhat in the life and he remembered that being a snitch is a mortal sin for which you lose incredible amounts of face and sometimes skin. It is at a minimum a questionable career choice for someone in that line of work.
Oh: For getting cold feet, the prosecution is going to do their best to make an example of him on the gun case to scare all their other witnesses so they don't get cold feet too. They always do.
>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?
I also had this thought. Isn't protecting the rest of society from "stupid, impulsive" people a good reason for longer sentences? It is not like there's an alternate system which would make them less stupid and more thoughtful.
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
If I told you "Ive killed your wife muhahahaha", that wont be very effective unless you have a wife whos been murdered by an unknown person (or youd have to believe I did it since the last time you saw her).
True, but "raped" might be more effective, especially as there are plenty of women who have been rape victims without having told their husbands/partners.
I'm surprised you didn't bring up as a point of entertainment that etymologically "juror" literally means "person who has sworn an oath". Arguably you're definitionally an oath-taker the moment you agree to be on a jury!
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.
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.
Regard 2, I've heard defence lawyers complain about this before. It goes something like:
"They say they want to make a speech to the court. You tell them not to. They tell you their speech will be really good. You say you have been doing this for 20 years and speeches always make everything worse. You tell them it would be a very, very bad idea. They say they understand and agree not to make a speech.
"Then, once back in court, they get up, make a speech, and quadruple their sentence in the process."
This is pretty explicable just based on the fundamental attribution error. Everyone thinks that their circumstances are special, that they had a good reason, and that they deserve special consideration as a result. Sometimes (not often) they're even right. And studies show that people who address the court and tell their stories feel that their treatment was more fair, even though they get longer sentences on average. The rationale is that at least the judge got to hear their side, even if they decided a different way.
But the justice system cannot and should not work that way - we want the law to behave somewhat predictably. So the judge isn't weighing your words against the prosecutor's. We set a number of elements and an evidentiary standard for each of those elements. Trials are algorithmic. If you want to convict someone of illegal possession of a weapon, you have to prove:
1) They (i.e. the defendant is the person who did the thing)
2) Possessed (i.e. controlled)
3) A weapon (i.e. the item in their possession meets the definition of a weapon)
4) Illegally (i.e. there was some reason they weren't allowed to have a weapon)
5) On purpose (i.e. they knew they had the weapon and they knew they weren't allowed to have it)
The mostly fictional premise of the justice system is that if the evidence demonstrates all those things beyond a reasonable doubt, you're guilty. Not "the judge will decide you're guilty," you are guilty. Unless the law specifically calls out an exception, your reasons don't matter.
People don't naturally think this way. This seems wildly divorced from concepts like fairness and justice that we associate with criminal law. Most humans are far more comfortable with an authority figure exercising unrestrained judgment than this kind of checklist justice. An otherwise awful show, The Good Fight, has an arc about this that really really drills down into why that's a bad idea.
I think you're right about fundamental attribution error. Plus movies, probably. People expect an appeal to emotions to be a) sympathetic when it's them doing it and b) effective in the face of evidence of guilt.
The idea that people who get to make a speech feel their treatment is MORE fair, despite sterner sentencing, is interesting. I suppose they're less likely to sit there saying things like "If the judge had just realised that-" and "If they'd just let me explain-". Actually, I think I link this to how I felt about being disciplined as a child. It was much more frustrating if you felt you hadn't even gotten to tell your side of the story.
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.
> 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.
> "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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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!"
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
> 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.
I'm still confused. You said:
> They walked between a pair of parked cars. There was a one-frame scuffle. In the next frame, Hairston-Bassette had a gun and was shooting at Wright, who was running away.
So there was at least one shot after the scuffle. So the muzzle flash, which you claim occurred *before* the scuffle, could not have been the last shot. These are directly contradictory. You say "this is a conservative assumption", but I don't understand the purpose of making conservative assumptions that are known to be wrong with >99.9% probability; Antoine Ford is known to have shot Hairston-Bassette much later, therefore the muzzle flash >30 seconds earlier could absolutely not have been the last shot. So I feel like I must be missing something here but I can't figure out what.
The muzzle flash occurring before the scuffle also means that it had to be 30 seconds before, since otherwise the camera would not have seen both, but you then claim that Hairston-Bassette and Antoine Ford both shoot after the scuffle, thus more than 30 seconds after the first muzzle flash, but this contradicts your claim that less than two seconds elapsed between the first shot and the last shot.
And if there was a muzzle flash before the scuffle, doesn't that *prove* that someone shot prior to the footage of Hairston-Bassette shooting at a running-away Charles Wright? It could have been either Hairston-Bassette or Wright doing the shooting, but either way that seems quite relevant, so I'm further confused why the story you present at the beginning doesn't mention this at all. The fact that they were still scuffling 30 seconds after a shot implies that the shot likely missed, and raises questions about why it took Antoine Ford so long to come to the defense of his friend.
I've gone over it like 5 times now and I can't figure out a way of interpreting the story you've presented that makes any sense.
OH I got my "after" and "before" mixed up and then failed to notice even on rereading, sorry.
Ah, that clears it up. Thanks!
> 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.
Probably what happened is after Ford got busted with the gun, he got offered a plea deal to testify in the murder case, and then he got cold feet. If he hadn't taken a deal, they would not have called him to the stand, but they would have spoken to him and taken a sworn statement previously and would have basically been expecting him to repeat that statement and be cross-examined on it.
And, yeah, he probably got cold feet because he's at least somewhat in the life and he remembered that being a snitch is a mortal sin for which you lose incredible amounts of face and sometimes skin. It is at a minimum a questionable career choice for someone in that line of work.
Oh: For getting cold feet, the prosecution is going to do their best to make an example of him on the gun case to scare all their other witnesses so they don't get cold feet too. They always do.
My respect for Kantians has gone WAY UP. True heroes.
>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?
I also had this thought. Isn't protecting the rest of society from "stupid, impulsive" people a good reason for longer sentences? It is not like there's an alternate system which would make them less stupid and more thoughtful.
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
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?
If I told you "Ive killed your wife muhahahaha", that wont be very effective unless you have a wife whos been murdered by an unknown person (or youd have to believe I did it since the last time you saw her).
True, but "raped" might be more effective, especially as there are plenty of women who have been rape victims without having told their husbands/partners.
I'm surprised you didn't bring up as a point of entertainment that etymologically "juror" literally means "person who has sworn an oath". Arguably you're definitionally an oath-taker the moment you agree to be on a jury!