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The Cat in the Hat Comes to Court
WSJ Article on cultural and political strife in jury rooms
(Note: I tried to archive(dot)is the link, but it kept failing. If one of you internet wizards could post a non-paywalled link, I'd
move to dismiss all chargesappreciate it).The article does the best that journalism can do today; it begins with a pretty fucking cringe anecdote (more on that below), then generalizes, then backs up the generalization with some "stats" on jury surveys. In weaves in the beginning anecdote throughout the piece to keep the reader engaged. It isn't deliberately misleading or negligently undereported, it's just sort of ... meatless.
The TLDR is that the post-COVID cultural / political situation is making it difficult for juries to come to agreements when, ostensibly, the should be or previously were able. The plural of "anecdote" isn't data and, thanks to the many law-pilled Mottizens, it's plain to see how, if one wants to, it's easy to cherry pick cases (and jury conduct, I would presume) that are absolutely wild. Does that mean it's a real trend? Perhaps, perhaps not. Some of the "experts" quoted kind of gesture in that direction, but the article fails to make a definitive case.
Back to the fuckery
The opening of the article details how a grown-ass jury forewoman decided to make halloween costumes for herself and other jurors and then, with the help of a Boomer Karen, hen-pecked everyone into showing up in red/black shirts and then posing for a group photo in the "costumes":
The triggering thing here, with those who have eyes to see, isn't some sort of pearl clutching around the "sanctity of being entrusted as jurors." It is that a cross-generational alliance of the worst kinds of women guilt-forced everyone else to perform a MANDATORY FUN TIME kafabe.
This is the same character as HR-led corporate initiatives like "dress up as your favorite supreme court justice! (Note: all costumes must be Ruth Bader-Ginsberg)" or "Office pajama day!" or, of course, the LGTBQ+ month. No, they don't actually force you to take part (unless, you know, they fucking do) but if you don't the passive-agressive, begging-the-question bullying becomes its own special torment. This is the infamous office space "pieces of flair" absurdity transformed into a political purity test.
When posters like @faceh directly and others (....me) indirectly assert that "women aren't the problem, but the problem is with women" this is what we mean. This is jury duty. These people are strangers to one another. That these two women would find no qualms in trying to enforce their own personal tastes and attitudes onto strangers is exactly the kind of hyper-entitlement, women-are-wonderful thinking that seems to be creating serious issues in societal competency and functioning.
I wonder how much of this dynamic infects actual jury rulings. How many "unanimous" rulings have happened because one or two Karens made up their minds and then hen-pecked everyone else into agreeing with them using social tactics instead of logic and reason?
I often compare women's social power to men's physical power. Imagine if a couple of burly men had physically intimidated all of the women into dressing in bikinis or slutty cleavage suits. Would people think it was cute and quirky then? Would people believe that it was a fair and impartial jury behind closed doors?
That's how juries are supposed to work.
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Many of them, and it's understood to be just fine and part of the process. Jacobson v. Henderson, 765 F. 2d 12 (2nd.Cir 1985) on why post-trial juror statements aren't admissible to attack a verdict:
Anderson v. Miller, 346 F. 3d 315 (2nd.Cir 2003) is a fun read on how far such behavior can go and still not result in a reversal:
There's a difference between something legal and something being good/moral/commendable/encouragement-worthy. The law can't place restrictions on jury-making procedures barring the most clear cut and unambiguous abuses (like actual violence) without slippery sloping itself into corruption and self-masturbatory feedback loops.
I am not the law. I can judge people for being bad and making bad decisions and suggest they are bad people who should be mocked and discouraged from behaving the way they behave. And discourage people from listening to them, because their power is anti-memetic. If obnoxious Karens are actually distorting the law in significant quantities, and people were made aware of this, then people could oppose it by being extra stubborn and stick to their principles when facing obnoxious Karens, with more confidence that their resistance is helping the law and not making them be the bad person the Karen says they are.
I don't think we should make Karen behavior illegal. The law isn't flexible or precise enough to diagnose it and curtail it without horrible overreach. I think we, as people, should call it out and shame it when we find it, across all of society.
Unfortunately Karens, by definition, are the arbiters of shame.
Karens are a particular type of people with particular types of shaming tactics. Trying to shame people does not tautologically cause you to become a Karen. There are countering forces, they're just weaker due to things like having less free time or more libertarian attitudes on behavior and so devote less time and effort to shaming people who actually need it.
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Isn't this dynamic just the plot of Twelve Angry Men? It's not strictly bad in the context it's played in, nor is it necessarily gendered.
MathWizard's comment is correct. I first encountered the film in a logic class I took in middle school, as a way to contrast the emotional thinking of most of the jury against the logical, evidence-based thinking of the protagonist who wins more and more jurors over by forcing skeptical analysis of the evidence and witnesses and their statements.
As a complete aside, I've had thoughts at various points over the past decade+ that a modern remake of 12 Angry Men, featuring 12 women on a rape case with a fratty white male defendant would be appropriate. There's a lot of kinks, like how an all-woman jury doesn't make sense like an all-man jury does in the 1950s, and obviously evidence and witnesses to a rape would be quite different from the ones for murder. Maybe in a few years, I'll be able to have Claude generate a script, and in a few more years, have Grok generate a feature-length film of it.
They could then wear CUTE group costumes together and take CUTE photos together without Problematic killjoys like Mr. Puig ruining their FUN! Yayyy!
Kinks, eh? That’s one way to get people to watch your movie with a cast of twelve women.
A movie called 12 Angry Women would likely cause some online women to be… displeased… even if it’s because the title format was inherited from its predecessor. Whatever it’s called won’t stop Chuds from referring to it as “Hoes Mad (x12),” though.
Accuser could be a black stripper/prostitute to tee-up the parallels to Duke Lacrosse. After a difficult Not Guilty verdict, twist would be that the fratty white male was guilty all along, but got off due to him having the 1) privilege of hiring an expensive, amoral defense lawyer and 2) the just, goodhearted ladies of the jury, under the trickery and manipulations of the toxic defense lawyer, not wanting to risk sending an innocent man to prison. Fade to a black screen with factoids such as “one in four college women are raped every year” before rolling the credits.
Starring Meryl Streep, Anne Hatheway, Lupita Nyong’o, Florence Pugh, Rosamund Pike, Jennifer Lawrence, Zoe Saldana, Sandra Oh, Marisa Tomei, Ana de Armas, Sydney Sweeney, and Zendaya as the jurors. Jacob Elordi as the defendant and Robert Downey Junior as his lawyer. Cynthia Eviro as the accuser/victim.
That's the porn parody, at least if this film turns out to be well-received enough to deserve one.
Another aside: there's a clip of Ken Jennings on Jeopardy that goes viral every once in a while, where he gets a "question" wrong, for the "answer" of something like "this word for a gardening tool can also refer to a sexually promiscuous person," and he gets it wrong for saying "what is a hoe?" Of course, the correct "question" was "what is a rake?" This confuses a lot of people right now, especially young people, who believe that both should be correct (and/or don't even know that "rake" would be correct). Back when that episode of Jeopardy was being recorded, the proper spelling of the slang term for "whore" was actually "ho," but it was almost immediately after that that "hoe" also became a correct spelling due to social media blowing up and people typing such words out much more often than before and naturally going for "hoe" as a familiar word (and possibly spellcheck). I'm just reminded of this anytime I see the term "hoe" these days, not referring to the gardening tool.
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The plot of Twelve angry men is almost entirely logic-based and not emotion based. They spend the entire movie logically dismantling, or at least calling into doubt, every piece of the prosecution's case. Jury members are supposed to attempt to convince the others of their view in order to establish a unanimous verdict, but this convincing should be based on the logic of the case. A battle guided by the beauty of our weapons. Charismatic and socially manipulative people are disproportionately convincing relative to the truthiness of their words. So are people who threaten others with their fists. In general, but doubly so in a jury, these tactics should be discouraged so that people will be persuaded by arguments proportional to their truthiness instead of the charisma of person speaking with random opinions.
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Yes, and it’s why that movie is dumb. The final recalcitrant juror is induced to change his mind not by the others successfully convincing him, but by the others socially ostracising and refusing to talk to him. Tell me your movie was written by a woman without telling me it was written by a woman…
(*Disclaimer: Twelve Angry Men was written not by a woman but by a communist nu-male)
You are misremembering.
The racist juror is turned by social ostracism, but is not the last to be convinced. (Although I think you could make the case that he realized how ridiculous and unreasonable he was being as the evidence for the defendant's innocence was building up, and his strong priors for guilt based on the defendant's race prevented him from proper Bayesian updates until the ostracism.)
The final juror is convinced when he realizes he emotionally needed the defendant to be guilty, because he reminded him too much of his son or something.
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Huh? Doesn't the movie start with one dissenting "not guilty" and spend the next 90 or so minutes convincing everyone with arguments?
It does but the final thing is shaming the last guy for doing a hecking racism. From a legal POV the movie is absolute shlock.
The final guy wasn't shamed for racism. That was a different, old man. And the shaming and ostracism was in support of logic and evidence, because his rationale for finding the defendant guilty was just racism, in the face of the logic and evidence that they had gone over the movie up to that point. I also don't recall anyone shaming him for his guilty vote, in order to change it; it was his terrible logic they were shaming him for, since the defendant's race couldn't possibly have anything to do with his guilt.
The actual last guy had some personal trauma from his son disavowing him, and the defendant was on trial for the murder of his father. His sticking with the guilty vote due to this, too, was irrational, because his personal history couldn't possibly have anything to do with the unrelated defendant's guilt.
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This is just reality. Argument rarely convinces anyone, unless you count the argument from authority and argument from force.
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I feel like there's a Russell Conjugation to be had here: "I stand by my convictions in the name of justice, you are irritatingly stubborn, he is a bullying Karen subverting the justice process."
Although I will add that 12 Angry Men did indeed involve logic and reason as well as stubbornness and emotion, but I'd imagine very few people think of their own behavior or a verdict they agree with as ever not being logical.
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