Well, howdy there internet people, Lidsboo again. So today we are going to talk about jury

duty in the American legal system and how something happens because I got a message from Germany and it's one of those

things that is just apparently uniquely American that it needs to be explained.

So the person was like, hey, you know, I've started following more and more American news and I've started seeing more and

more stories about people who were convicted, went to prison,

and then years later are exonerated by some piece of physical evidence. How did this person end up in prison? Don't you

have a jury system? We do. We do have a jury system. There's a number of issues with the culture surrounding our

jury system and jury duty and the way people look at it.

For a long time it was a running gag to talk about how you would get out of jury duty, on sitcoms, on stand-up

comedians, specials, everything. So people started trying to do it more and more, which leaves you with a whole bunch of people

on the jury that weren't quick-witted enough to come up with a method of getting out of it.

You also have an issue where those people who are most skeptical of law enforcement, those people who would listen to the cops

testimony be like yeah I don't believe this person. They have a bad view of the criminal justice system.

Therefore, they don't want to participate in it.

And they try to get out of it,

or when they're being asked questions. they say something that gets them disqualified. By the time this is all said and

done, the bulk of people who end up on a jury are people who may not have the best

critical thinking skills and people who defer to law enforcement, people who basically

would trust the cops hunch, and this leads to a lot of wrongful convictions. It's not everybody on the

jury but I would say most probably fall into that, which means the two or three that are left, they have

nine people in the room, or however many people in the room, depending on the state, I guess,

saying guilty, and eventually they get worn down.

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