juries
I served on a jury once. Something like an 8-4 decision to find the guy liable for the car accident but nothing more. You win your damages owed, but quit crying about it was the message, I guess.
On Trump. I ponder whether I would land on a jury. Probably not, but if you are rolling through some stray internet ramblings, I do say Kyle Rittenhouse will be acquitted as he should be — which I see here and there makes me a white supremacist. (Also proffer unsolicitated advice that if he is serious about a nursing career, probably stick to rural “red” enclaves and above all get the hell out of politics). That should signal I am able to give an acquittal to someone I think is a jackass. Probably the defense and prosecution doesn’t have the time or patience to get that far though. At best the prosecution could argue against dropping me from a jury in pointing to an anti-anti Trump response on a New Yorker article on why Trump’s diet habit matters with an “It really doesn’t matter”. Because beyond that you land in an “uh. Yeah”. I suppose at this point you would have a better chance with a batch of liberals to reach a deadlock than a batch of maga devotees — the political desire to not be political, remain impartial, able to defend Nazis so to speak — possibly to the bending over backwards to do so. I almost think that is what Representative Bryon Donalds — one time speaker hopeless hopeful — intuitively understood when making comments to the effect of reaching the just verdict “no matter what they think of Trump”, and that university’s Trump formula is one where he gets off and it is all rigged if he does not.
On the list of political affiliations for the jury survey which skip about Proud Boys and 3 percenters and the like, “antifa” gets tossed in at the end. Or. The group that vandalized and ransacked the Multnomah Democratic party headquarters shortly after the 2020 elections. The chaos bias works whatever manner.
From what I see of the case, the prosecution has him dead for rights. Which doesn’t matter too much — the Fox News hosts become very defense oriented, not a deference they give Joe Blow accused of a crime. A deadlock is as likely as a guilty verdict. I would like to think that the whininess that Trump exhibits right now would permeate and maybe it has — not like the man has sky-high approval ratings. I do cynically think the cry out “think of this as election interference case” is a strain — like, yeah that is what a campaign works to do — get rid of unwanted information from public view. It was blatantly obvious the National Enquirer was in the tank for Trump through 2015 and 2016, though I can never understand what that means for the public at large. It is like hearing the other explanation on Trump’s need to suppress Stormy Daniel’s affair — it interfered with the image he wanted to cultivate, “Family Values”. I throw my hands up in the air.