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The Case against Democracy: The Average Juror
I’m not sure if this is really more of a memoir of my experiences, a thesis on something profound, or just a heaping pile of drama for everyone’s vicarious enjoyment. I’m also not sure if it belongs in the culture war thread, but it has fragrances of memetic-hazards.
We recently had a OP on Jury Trials in the American Justice System. By happenstance of fate, I was summoned to be apart of a jury this week. Now, I actually wanted to serve on a jury, and even after all of it, I still do. I think of it as a small duty to my country as a citizen, and look in askance to any of my fellow citizens that want to shirk their duty. Being a citizen comes with duties, in exchange for privileges, and I have been converging on the idea that a lack of desire to serve your duty should at least strip you of voting rights. Now I recognize I am somewhat financially privileged in this. I am an ML Engineer. My company pays for jury duty time like its holiday time. My time on the jury had no financial consequences for me, and really only impacted some deadlines on projects I run. That’s not the same for everyone, but that is adding to my inchoate theory, that if you can’t afford to perform jury duty because of the financial hardship, maybe you shouldn’t be allowed to vote but also be excused from jury duty.
I won’t really dig into the process because I imagine its roughly the same everywhere, you show up, they give you a number, there’s a subsample to a pool, then a further subsample to the actual jurors on the case, Voir Dire is the term for the second subsample. Voir Dire was actually pretty interesting from my perspective, and also where I think this case ultimately was decided. I think the context of the case is required, so I’m going to chronologically jump around a bit.
The TLDR of the case is: Becky meets Chad, Chad is a hot man-child with a room temperature IQ, he needs someone to pretty much run his life because he has zero internal sense of accountability. Becky dates Chad, has a child with him out of wedlock. Chad eventually breaks up with her because “she’s controlling”. Becky files civil suit for damages for a bunch of big-ticket items (hospital bills for the kid, his divorce from his previous ex, forwarded financial funds, credit card charges he made on her card, and his share of the lease that they needed to void after he broke up with her).
The Details: Enter right stage: Chad, not his real name but shockingly close to his actual name, which is one of the Chad-like names pill-folk use, is a Marine Corps Gunnery Sergeant, about mid 30s. His face is somehow permanently stuck in a Derek Zoolander duck face look. He is the defendant in the case. He is ethnically hispanic, but has a very white surname, in case any of our resident “race realists” feel the need to let their theories run wild. He has 4 children from two other women, and eventually 2 more children from the plaintiff. When he met and dated the plaintiff he was still married but legally separated from the last woman. From left stage: the Plaintiff, Becky, is a hispanic woman, sorta attractive, but not a knockout like Chad is. Her age was never stated but probably late 20s early 30s. She brings 1 kid from a previous relationship.
Chad and Becky meet, have a whirlwind relationship in the beginning, within ~6-ish months of meeting, Becky moves into Chad’s leased apartment, he pays the rent, she covers groceries and utilities. They are in “love”. In January of 2024 Becky get pregnant with Chad’s child, she wanted to start a family with him. Problem 1: He’s still legally married to his ex. He’s also broke, chronically bad with money. He stated all his past wives and girlfriends pretty much ran the financials of his life, he brought home the “bacon” and they gave him an allowance. Shortly after moving in together, he gives her access/control of both his personal bank account and the joint checking account he sets up. His pay check is split between child support, rent, and these two accounts. The split was never stated. Since he’s broke, they will “figure something out”, she ends up forwarding 7k through out the next year-ish in unevenly distributed sums as legal fees for the divorce. He never asked and states it was a gift, however he says “the benefit will be returned back 4x, 5x, 10x fold”*. After the relationship she contends it wasn’t a gift and he should pay her back.
Moving on, through out this relationship, she keeps forwarding money to him from her personal account. Sum total of about 10k. She provided evidence to the jury of these transactions but also labelled a bunch of them as to him, when they were actually to the joint account. His account likewise sent her a bunch of money, about 5k. I say “his account” because under oath he testified that he never transferred her money. Which is to say she went into his account and payed herself back. She also transferred a total of about 22k from the joint account to her personal account, as illustrated in the evidence. The evidence was super cherry-picked (it was her evidence, Chad provided zero evidence on anything) so the jury was never really shown what that 22k total was for. In one of the bigger mistakes (in my opinion) of the case, the defense attorney never asked her what this money was for or if it was her making herself whole. I really wanted to reach out of the box and smack the defense for what seemed to me as incompetence on that.
Eventually Chad gets deployed for 6-months. He loses his government travel card in a bar fight. Luckily he had her $500 limit credit card. He spends to the limit, calls her up and she refills it, sometimes multiple times a month. She’s asking him to stay on the boat but keeps refilling the card, He ends up spending about 5k over the 6 months. He promises he’ll pay her back once he gets his deployment per-diem. No evidence is ever presented to the jury that it happened or did not. All we have is the credit card statements.
Eventually, the baby is born, there are hospital bills, OBGYN bills, the works. Becky pays for it all, Chad agrees he’ll pay half of what his insurance doesn’t cover. However Tri-care does not cover the birth expenses because Becky and Chad are not yet married. Becky has barely any insurance and so Chad racks up a 7k bill for the child.
Finally Chad gets relocated to a different base, the happy couple (tho increasingly less happy) agrees to relocate and find a house together. This is about May/June of 2025. The divorce has gone through, Chad is free of the ex, he takes Becky ring shopping. She is unsure if she wants to marry him at this point because “they have a lot to work through”, he retorts “who else would you marry”. They start house shopping, he does pretty much none of the work, but vetos things. The comms get pretty murky as this part of the evidence is literally screenshots from Becky’s phone cherry picking texts, sometimes cutting off mid conversation. The inferred gist is that Becky signed Chad’s signature on the lease without his consent. Somewhere during this process Becky gets pregnant with baby number 2. Chad breaks up with Becky citing the reason is that “she is controlling, vengeful, and manipulative”. Becky terminates the lease but has to pay a bunch of penalties. Amounting to about 6k. If you’ve been keeping track the number comes out to about 35k. (Again ignoring her 22k withdrawal??) She sends Chad a bill for that amount. He refuses to pay. She takes him to court and here we are.
Chad if I haven’t been clear yet, is pretty much a lothario. He’s pretty, dumb, needs to date his mother to survive, is a fey-ish reckless crayon eater who just lives life in the moment, going from one desire to the next. Even myself, feeling actively repulsed by Becky’s weeping on the stand (and boy did she weep), I found Chad to be pretty much a reprehensible scumbag. Most of the testimony was Becky’s and a large part of it she spent crying or fighting with Chad’s lawyer. The lawyer actually said the famous words: “Permission to treat the witness as hostile”. I also 100% believe that she was very controlling, but that’s also the kind of woman Chad wanted to date. Becky submitted all the evidence and the defense attorney (Chad’s) seemed to be banking on the theory that the burden of proof was on her to prove everything, and thus submitted no evidence. Unfortunately, Chad cut a very unsympathetic figure and the jury makeup was such that emotion and female in-group bias seemed to be the prime motivation for a large part of the jury.
Jury Selection
Which brings us back to jury selection. This and the actual jury deliberations are to me the most culture war interweaved part of this. Fundamentally, when the chips are down, culture war facts matter. If you want to win a jury, you need to be willing to acknowledge some less than savory stereotypes that have a lot of evidence. The core arena in this case was the Male-Female Gender wars.
I really expected to be removed during jury sections. I’ve been told that in some cases, attorneys really dislike engineers on juries. Something about overly analytical, black and white thinking, and a propensity towards confidence in their knowledge that could lead a jury. I’m sure the few trial lawyers here will tell me I’m wrong and its actually because engineers are arrogant retards. However I on this case, the anti-engineer heuristic held it ground. I think on this case the plaintiff (Becky) was really going for emotional appeals. The plaintiffs attorney dismissed 3 software engineers before me. After the 3rd one was dismissed after stating his job, the judge called a recess and took counsel back to his chambers. I assume to read the plaintiffs counsel the riot act on making jury selection take all day. As such when I sat down, he was pretty docile, I got a few general questions about contracts, deals, relationships and any military ties I had. The strategies I inferred for each counsels was:
Plaintiff:
Defense:
I specifically think the defense lost this case during jury selection. Their questions where more vague and what they were selecting for was also not great. Too much defense. Their mistake was that the jury ended up with 8/12 jurors as women. 2 of those women were both massive karens. One was a stay at home military spouse of 32 years. She pretty much wanted to rake Chad over the coals. During deliberation she accused him of fraud for every incident, and wanted to tack on punitive damages even though nothing he did was deceptive (legally required for fraud). The other Karen was a massive menace and is in large part why the jury ended up awarding the plaintiff 20k of the 35k she asked for. She threatened the bailiff on me and the single conservative male juror. Me for not budging on letting her fuck the defendant over, and the conservative because he swore at her when she was being a piece of work. She justified it as she felt “unsafe” for not getting her way.
What was the most astounding to me was how much the women were just looking for any legal pretext to side with the plaintiff, almost to a T. Oh they hemmed and hawed and occasionally gave ground when the law did not exactly fit. But it was pretty much an uphill battle the whole way. I know I’ve gotten into arguments with plenty of the male-issue posters here but in actually I am pretty biased towards men, or at least biased against common female manipulation and herd solidarity behaviors. The real fact that the plaintiff had the burden of proof and actually failed to show much of it, particularly the lack of the defense paying her back (or realistically she paying herself back from his accounts) was pretty much dismissed. The the conclusion from the beginning was that she was going to get some money, we would just haggle over how much. And towards the end when I was standing by ground on dollar amounts or laws, then they switched to taking the amount she asked for as “truth” and started trying to assign a percentage of that “as general damages” irrespective of the actual documented damages. Justice was not in their minds, it was “how do we help a sister out” minus a “stupid tax” for being dumb enough to date this guy.
And while they were bad, what was worse was the sellouts, the people who just didn’t want to be there and agreed with whatever the consensus was because they wanted to leave. Like lets fuck someone over so you can leave? Zero ability to think of a future where they might be in court and the jury just wants to fuck them over so it can leave. That really boiled my blood. And even worse, I let myself be swayed on some items, I tried to compromise on dollar amounts, but it was like that famous gun rights meme, I’d compromise and then they wanted me to compromise some more, and more, until they barely moved and I’d be 85% away from my original stance. And when I ended up standing my ground, oh the anger, the petty insults, the backhanded insinuations, it was ridiculous.
I’ve been laying awake these past few nights wondering if I should have just flexed my financial privileges, hung the jury, forced everyone to spend 8 hours a day with me in a room, day after day until they just agreed to my position or the compromised version: the 7k for the hospital (breach of contract), 3.5k out of 7k of the legal fees from the divorce (unjust enrichment), and about half of the new moving fees: 2k (breach of contract). Summing to about 12k. No fraud charges or punitive damages. I can't imagine I would have made many friends but I'm not sure I ever want to see any of these people ever again.
Inchoate Thesis
As I lie awake, looking over my crappy post, struggling for a thesis, the one that keeps popping up is that the average juror sucks. It's similar to the apocryphally famous Churchill quote: "The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." Now replace democracy -> general jury pools, and average voter -> average juror. A jurors inability to put aside innate bias should be disqualifying. Make them take an innate bias and only select them for pools orthogonal to their biases. Remove from the pool people who can't spend 3-5 days in the jury without financial hardship. America is not an economic zone, if you can't make commitments to serve a small duty to your country, you shouldn't be a citizen with voting power, or the power to decide what is justice for your fellow citizens. The actual recognition of the ingroup bias for women should be basic reading for all lawyers. The preconceived conclusion that the plaintiff was going to get money and we were just haggling over how much feels like such a miscarriage of justice that I feel actually icky for having participated in it.
I appreciate this look into the inner workings of a jury on a non-famous case. I've never been on a jury myself, but always suspected it would be something of a mess like this. I've always favored replacing random-citizen juries with pools of professional jurors that have law degrees. I don't see the point in having a complex trial with all sorts of legal rules and precedent, if it's all going to get throw away when the jury goes behind closed doors and does whatever the hell it wants.
I think that would be a big mistake. The constraints imposed on the legal system by needing to convince a jury of peers are critical to maintaining legitimacy and buy-in.
Without the need to convince a jury of normal people there's fewer limits on how incomprehensible or unjust the legal system can get for the average person, and the legal system depends on average people trusting it and engaging with it. As things are I think there should already be a lot more concern about the current low level of understanding and trust in the legal system.
Well, in his story it seems like not a matter of "convincing a jury of normal people," but simply convincing 1 or 2 highly emotional women, who then browbeat the rest of the jury into going along with them because they're all under financial pressure to get out of there and get back to their real job as fast as possible. The standard advice I've always heard is to avoid jury trials as much as possible and take a plea deal or arbitration instead, because juries are just so random you never know what's going to happen. So yes, there's a very low level of understanding and trust in the legal system right now.
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I’d be in favor of only net-tax payers being allowed to vote and serve on jury duty.
Here’s how I’d award the amounts:
It indeed sounds like a gift. Without further context, “benefit” doesn’t necessarily imply “financial” benefit, so it’s not a promise of investment returns. However, given the ambiguity, I'll still award half of the amount, 3.5k from Chad to Becky.
Also sounds like a series of gifts and her possibly committing perjury. No money awarded from Chad to Becky.
Likely criminal theft or wire fraud. 5k awarded from Becky to Chad.
While she was technically a legal user this also has the whiff of theft/fraud. I’ll split the difference and award 11k from Becky to Chad.
2.5K awarded from Chad to Becky to make Becky whole on the agreement. It’d be 5K if not for the lack of evidence it was paid or not.
7k awarded from Chad to Becky to make Becky whole on the agreement, assuming she paid for the bill.
Becky likely committed criminal forgery in the first place. No money awarded to Becky from Chad.
Total: $3.0K awarded from Becky to Chad.
Punitive damages for wasting people’s time with this nonsense and for inflicting more versions of themselves upon the country: $400,000 for Chad, $300,000 for Becky (one for each kid).
Problem is that we were strictly instructed that we could not charge the plaintiff with anything. There was a legal form we had to fill out. It's strictly Chad -> Becky damages and charges affecting Chad only. I agree that Becky probably committed criminal forgery but based on our instructions there was nothing we could charge her with. He'd have to counter sue, which I don't think would be our jury.
Not if she was listed on the personal account and given access with his permission would be my guess. Don't give people your bank accounts sounds like a pretty basic common sense idea.
This was actually my stance. The "benefit" bit he said under oath sounded suspiciously like something you get tithing church members to say. They don't believe God/Church will literally under contract pay them back, but the good deed of doing this act with benefit them. I wanted to award her half, I think she benefited from the divorce, I think he did too, sounds like a fair split. This was a very contentious argument, the karens wanted to give her 100% and refused to compromise on 75% at all.
I was able to talk them into this. but once they circled back to giving her a flat percentage of what she was asking for it essentially abrogated this.
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This was a garbage case. By that I mean Chad is obviously broke and Becky's attorney is being paid by the hour. Neither has any motivation to spend the money necessary to try the case properly, and each is obstinate enough to persist and refuse settlement. Both parties balk at the prospect of paying for discovery, or paying a mediator hundreds of dollars an hour to help them reach a resolution, so they end up spending more money on legal fees so they can have a trial. Becky will soon find that she is going to have to pay her attorney even more money to enforce the judgment.
The downstream consequences of this are that the attorneys didn't have much to work with. For example, you write:
No, this is probably one of the more competent things his attorney did. This would be a great question to ask in a deposition. Unfortunately Mr. Chad probably didn't want to pay for a deposition, so the only opportunity he has to ask it is at trial, where he runs the risk of a jury hearing it at the same time he does. If she provides a reasonable explanation for the transfers that have nothing to do with the money he owes her, then that's it. If he leaves it alone, then the jury might assume that she used it to pay herself back. It appears he was correct on this point, as at least one member of the jury—you—was willing to reach this conclusion.
In the absence of other evidence this is a totally reasonable conclusion to reach given that you're forced to make a decision, but it's not based in anything other than your own intuitive read on the case. The women whom you complain about have the right to reach a different conclusion, and they aren't required to make the same inferences you do. You spend a lot of time on how the evidence is all based on her word and that the texts are all cherry-picked and the defense didn't present any evidence. The judge's job is to determine whether evidence is admissible, and the jury's job is to determine the weight and credibility of that evidence. It seems to me that your beef is that other members of the jury found Becky's testimony more credible than you did. It also seems to me that you're making an inference that since the Plaintiff has relied on her testimony and "cherry-picking", that there is other evidence out there that would be favorable to the defendant.
I don't want to make any rash statements about a case that I know next to nothing about, but as a civil defense attorney, I can't imagine keeping out evidence that might help my client. It's a different story if the evidence is irrelevant, or is a double-edged sword. That the Plaintiff didn't want the jury to see certain evidence doesn't necessarily mean that it makes the defendant look good; it could be that it just makes both parties look bad. More likely is that it doesn't move the needle one way or the other and the Plaintiff wants to keep things as simple as possible, which means admitting as little evidence as possible. I've seen enough text conversations of arguments over the years to know that it takes a certain amount of intellectual energy to follow them, especially as they tend to make references to people and events that aren't in the immediate chain, and trying to explain all that to a jury would be tedious and time-consuming. Including more than is necessary doesn't help anyone.
It sounds to me like she presented sufficient evidence to make a case for the $35,000, you just think that the $22,000 she took from his account was to compensate for that loss, even though you're basing this on an inference and not any explicit evidence. You also seem to think that the Plaintiff has credibility problems. Both of these are fine, and you're within your rights to make these inferences. Where I disagree is with your characterization that the two "Karens" on the jury were somehow acting objectively incorrectly, which I don't think they were. You're also claiming that they were biased in favor of the Plaintiff, which is probably true, but everyone is biased to some degree. And you weren't even as far apart as you make it sound; you were at least willing to give her something, and they weren't willing to give her everything, so find a number in the middle and call it a day.
This actually help assuage my consciousness that I had participated in some small injustice for failing to hold my ground. I can easily recognize that I have my own internal biases towards people displaying overt emotion in situations that construe to me as manipulative, which i think occurred in this case. And following the bank statements towards the 22k + seeing her as manipulative likely lead me to the conclusion I did.
I think its useful to get context that the lack of evidence might have been a strategy from the defense attorney to try and hang heavily on the burden of proof being on the plaintiff. I just think the plaintiff cut a far more sympathetic figure to large swaths of the jury, and the defense needed something more to push the needle.
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Last year I got called for jury duty. I showed up to Frank Crowley courtbuilding, went to the assigned courtroom and checked in. The defense began its voir dire by explaining the definition of statutory rape and continuous sexual abuse of a child, and then asked if I would consider mitigating circumstances.
My answer was something along the lines of 'either this guy did it, and needs to go to jail for a long time, or he didn't, and needs to go free, I don't have the evidence to say. But I'm not sure what the mitigating factors are for sexual abuse.' When the jury was finally selected it was made up of all men, and one black woman who didn't use the words 'white women be lyin', but it was pretty clear she did not consider the sisterhood to encompass white girls. I don't know how the case turned out, I got dismissed for saying there wasn't a mitigating circumstance for having sex with a thirteen year old.
Was anyone else asked the mitigating circumstances question? How did they respond?
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The only time I remember hearing this phrase was that one scene in The Dark Knight. What does it actually mean, in practice?
I for some reason remember it as a line from A Few Good Men. But apparently thats a Mandela effect, it was never actually said. The other jury members said it showed up in legal dramas.
We all found it amusing, and it was pretty apt. The plaintiff was actively arguing with the defendant's lawyer while on the stand and avoiding answering his questions.
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If you call a witness to testify for your side of the case, you can't lead the witness; in other words, the question can't suggest the answer. For example, in a car accident case, if I'm representing the defendant and he's testifying, I can't ask "Were you going about 35 mph at the time of the accident?" The reason is because this effectively amounts to the attorney testifying instead of the witness. If I want to show that the witness was going 35 mph all I have to do is get him to agree with me, which he probably will because we're on the same side of the case. Instead, if I want to show how fast he was going, I would ask something like "How fast were you going at the time of the accident." This isn't enforced that strictly, especially when it comes to general background information that would take forever to elicit by asking non-leading questions, but if it involves anything important counsel will object.
This prohibition doesn't apply when the parties are adversarial to one another. The traditional method of cross-examination is stating facts that are already in evidence and asking the witness to agree or disagree with them in order to create a narrative. Sometimes, however, a party will have to call an adversarial witness. A good example is in a civil trial when the plaintiff calls the defendant to testify. In these cases, it's assumed that since, due to the adversarial nature, the witness won't agree with everything the attorney implies, that the attorney is allowed to ask leading questions. Usually you have to ask a few questions to establish that the witness is hostile, then ask the judge permission to treat them as such.
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I realise this isn't particularly relevant to the post, but I'm curious, and useless American ethnic labels always nerd-snipe me.
Are we talking a mestizo guy called Smith, or a 100% European Spanish guy like Marco Rubio? Because 'he's Hispanic, but has a white name' doesn't make much sense in a world where the royal family of Spain look like this.
The Spanish royal family, like other European royal families, is not ethnically Spanish.
And thank goodness for that. Can you imagine?
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I was trying to head off HBD assertions that this is just Black underclass behavior 101. He was from Miami. He had quite dark skin, not very white. His last name was (and I checked that this wouldn't dox him) Albert.
Despite your preemptive protection of blacks, latinos being mired in reproductive, familial, and financial instability doesn't exactly head off any HBD assertions or beat any allegations either. Becky being conscientious enough to take a civil suit to trial (as low of a bar that is), believing Chad isn't completely judgment proof, and Chad having been married before already provided Bayesian suggestions away from it being black underclass behavior 101.
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You don't have to worry about doxxing him. The suit is a matter of public record. Whether this doxxes yourself is another question (unlikely because jurors' names aren't public), but I wouldn't worry about him.
There has been much debate regarding the acceptability of "signal boosting" information that is technically public but practically obscure. 1 2 3
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The Spanish royal family has not been genetically Spanish in any meaningful sense since the House of Trastamara died out. However, they are still not white, as they married into the House of Savoy and are therefore Italian.
I can't tell if you're joking, but I'll humour you. What does 'white' mean if not European?
Yeah, "Italians aren't white" is a common joke.
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Normal people think italians are White. The social justice'd think everyone who isn't black is White. Racists think everyone who isn't White is black. And the other kind of social justice'd think White means "everyone who doesn't worship odin, but, like, in an anarcho-progressive way." Those are the most fun.
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See the first eleven seconds of this Shoe0nHead video for the joke.
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Much of southern Italy was ruled by Arabs for an extended period of time, so southern Italians sometimes are not considered white. (See also Spain and Greece.) Savoy is in northern Italy, but the sentiment sometimes is extended to cover all of Italy, especially in jokes.
We talked about North vs South Italy here a few months ago.
https://www.themotte.org/post/3726/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/439931?context=8#context
Actually, I strongly disagree with your take - southern Italy, and particularly Sicily, was the most advanced place in the Christian Mediterranean and the cradle of the Renaissance under the Hohenstaufens. Southern Italy reintroduced Roman ideals into the otherwise Germanic Empire, leapfrogged the comparable Norman administration in England, and gave us Thomas Aquinas. It's not biology, and it's not Guns Germs and Steel (it's never Guns Germs and Steel). It's the Sp*nish. It's honestly astonishing to me how bad Spain was at ruling her dominions in the Early Modern period; they had empire handed to them on a silver platter and they managed to turn everywhere they ruled into a fucked-up backwater permanently. I recommend Denis Mack Smith on the topic.
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While I do not like MKC's snarky rebuttal, I have to agree that you seem to be doing a reverse-karen: "This poor guy got screwed because all the ladies were on Team Woman and too stupid or emotional to consider evidence." But the evidence is that this guy is dumb, irresponsible, and basically handed over his paycheck to his girlfriend to run his life, was terrible with money, the relationship imploded predictably (after they had two children!) and guess what, he's now responsible for the aftermath of that. We could quibble over the specific dollar amounts she should or should not be entitled to, but yeah, the case really was quibbling over how much he owed. Like, my dude, you have two kids with a woman you couldn't be bothered to marry to hook up with almost-free medical coverage? Yeah, that's gonna cost you. On deployment, you go out and drink like a sailor (because, duh) and ask her to pay for your bar tabs? Yeah, you're gonna owe her for that.
Agreed that fraud should not have entered the discussion, and it sounds like Chad's lawyer was terrible (are we surprised that Chad is as good at picking lawyers as he is at picking baby-mommas?), and I don't doubt the chicks were biased, but you have to be pretty much on Team Pump-And-Dump-The-Bitches-Deserve-It to think Chad should have escaped responsibility here.
Yes, Chad needed to get a bill. It does sound like the $22k she helped herself to ought to be deducted and the karens on the jury weren't willing to consider that?
More to the point, this is a real ESH. Chad is an irresponsible manchild degenerate. Becky, uh, should've known this going in- it doesn't sound like he's hiding anything.
I'm currently considering suing a certain company for fraudulent inducement and was astonished when my attorney told me their likely defense would be that I should have known better than to trust them in the first place. Apparently that's a real defense that works.
This might make me sound more dumb than I am; the context is that I kept providing services to them as they got later and later on payment. I didn't buy a bridge or anything.
So the idea is that given their track record of not paying on time or in some cases at all, it's on me for continuing to move forward in good faith no matter how many new agreements we signed.
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For every action I guess there must be an equal and opposite reaction. The rise of the Male-Karen is upon us. Woe be to non-men! I'll take that into consideration. To be clear I did not like the defendant at all. Morally I think he should have to pay 100%. Legally though, I think the plaintiff really failed to demonstrate that she never took money from his account to make herself whole, and that the relationship was setup in such a way that it was transactional, so that every payment she made was part of an implied contact.
The legal charges were:
BoC pretty much requires and offer, acceptance, and mutual agreement on terms. There was not a lot of offering being made, and it was not an implied contract. UE, requires that the plaintiff expect to paid back at the time of the payments, it was very unclear. Fraud required deceit which was never even demonstrated.
Notably they were also in child court for much of the other stuff, she was also just concurrently suing him in civil court for what appeared to be a vindictive last attempt at controlling him. That's why my stance is that she was entitled to 35k - 22k = 12k roughly. That's not escaping responsibility but its not also punishing him for her equally bad decisions.
Breach of Contract in this context sounds like the old-fashioned breach of promise, which seems to have been done away with as a civil offence. Becky seems to have been getting cold feet (rather too late into the relationship) but it was Chad who dumped her, after promising marriage, going ring-shopping, and entering into a lease for a house with her.
Unjust Enrichment doesn't seem to apply here, but IANAL.
Fraud - well, I guess does "pay my fees for the divorce, baby" on the implicit understanding this clears the legal path to marriage count as fraud, if he ends up not marrying her and not repaying the fees? Then again, did she take the money for this out of his account in the $22 grand withdrawals? Tough job trying to parse this one out, with the entangled finances and Chad handing over control of his money to Becky in the first place.
Weeeeelll... guy has demonstrated he has the sense of personal responsibility and reliability of a wet paper bag, so was that a vindictive last attempt at controlling him or last resort to get the damn finances sorted out, you bastard, after you stiffed me on the lease penalties?
Specifically for Unjust Enrichment it is called Quantum Merit in NC, @ToaKraka has a link to the jury instructions here, this looks slightly similar to the instructions we received for Quantum Merit. It was only applied for the divorce funds
I can't seem to find the Breach of Contract instructions, but it wasn't applied to the whole relationship but to individual elements. Essentially sets of offers and agreements. Like the hospital/birth costs, there was an offer of "paying half" and agreement to do so with both testifying under oath that they agreed to it. The terms were never specified but the jury instructions had a statement about a reasonable repayment schedule. Sorta the same for the credit card on deployment. He got sunk because his own testimony had him saying that she'd be paid back, realistically she didn't provide evidence that he did/didn't do so, especially when she had access to his accounts... but most of the jury went with the idea that he didn't and had agreed to do so.
Here's my response to the fraud, looks like its just a misc tort.
I think a bunch of this case rested on the fact that nobody on the jury (including me) had a good opinion of the defendant and no one thought he actually followed through on his commitments. He was demonstrably a man-child. Unfortunately not all of the jury considered the the plaintiff might not be telling the truth 100% and might be omitting the fact that she repaid herself from his accounts, with his implied consent, and was now just suing him for extra.
No disagreement.
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First of, let me sincerely congratulate you on wanting to do your civic duty and holding the view that citizens do have duties and responsibilities as well as rights.
Six kids (that you know of) and he's not even forty yet? Chad is definitely doing his bit for the TFR!
Okay, that's the only funny part of this whole mess. The kids are definitely never going to have Dad in their lives, much less ever get to know their half-siblings. Misery all round there.
"They are in “love”."
I'm glad to see you share my cynicism around "being in love". Seeing the likes of many such cases and people going "but I love him!!!" (more rarely, "her"), this is the stupidest damn reason to blow up your life (and the lives of any kids), and I'd love to destroy with fire the entire romantic fantasy industry that has convinced people that Romantic/Erotic Love is the greatest and most important thing ever.
"Shortly after moving in together, he gives her access/control of both his personal bank account and the joint checking account he sets up."
And this is why commingling of finances is such a pain in the neck for divorce cases, because people when they're coupled up think of it as "our money" and then when they split up, it suddenly and bitterly becomes "my money". Though for working class/lower middle class people of older generations, this kind of arrangement isn't unusual; man brings home wages, hands them over to wife who runs the household budget, she reserves the money for the standard recurring bills and running the house and hands him back the remainder as an allowance to spend as he likes. This works when it's a married couple and neither are selfish or dumb (e.g. he would spend the rent money on booze or, today, party fun drugs; she squanders the housekeeping on treating herself).
But they weren't married, and that's the big problem here, and frankly Becky was an idiot. She was paying for his divorce? That says (a) you are the other woman in an affair, and they rarely end up married to the guy and (b) he was in no damn hurry to sort out his affairs. Why should he be? Ex-wife can waste her time chasing him through the courts, new squeeze is handling everything for him, he can go out and get into bar fights to his heart's content.
Absolutely right the defence lawyer should have gone after "what was this 22k you took out of his account?" Either they were extremely incompetent or they knew it would make their client look even worse if they revealed the details of what precisely these payments were for, maybe it was Becky getting money back that Chad had promised "just lend me X grand to cover this bill, baby, you know I'm good for it when my pay is deposited, yeah go ahead and take it out, you don't need me to sign anything". Can't say the guy was cheated or defrauded when it turns out he was a total idiot who gave blanket permission for her to do exactly this.
And then after all that, when she has paid his legal fees for the divorce and set up house with him and had two kids by him, all under the presumption that "once he's free we'll get married", he dumps her. For being controlling, which means "asking him to grow the fuck up and take accountability and responsibility for his life". I am not surprised she went after him in court, it's just a pity the light had not dawned on her before the first baby.
I think you are not taking into account that being a military spouse of 32 years, she might be way more familiar with the Chads of this world and how that shakes out when they join the armed forces than you 😁 If the guy is a sergeant and he gets deployed, then on active service either he can get it together and be responsible, which doesn't let him off the hook for how he handled civilian life, or worse he is this slapdash and pushes responsibility off onto others, and that kind of carelessness gets people killed.
I think your conclusion is broadly correct: $35k that Becky paid into their joint finances less the $22k she transferred over leaves around $11k Chad owes her back. That lines up with the $12k you would have gone for.
I think the idea of punitive damages was some faint hope that this might make Chad grow up, but I imagine that he's already moved on to Partner Number Four and may be repeating the same old cycle all over again. Paying child support for three sets of kids by three different women is going to leave him even more broke, but since he clearly doesn't care about whether or not the new broad he's with gets knocked up, and there is always a new broad willing to run his life for him and pay his way, I have no reason to think that Baby Number Seven isn't on the way.
Unfortunately I would not be willing to bet against you on this. What I expect a normal person to see as a wake up call, probably went over his head. I imagine woman #4 will help pay for his legal fees against woman #3 (this one), until at which point he is living the barracks again because all of his money is going to a recursive loop of legal expenses and child support.
I am amused to read this article on Tumblr today. From 1885, Chad and Becky have long antecedents!
"She knew I was married" "No, I did not!"
Gave her money for the wedding dress, showed her a furnished house he said was where they would live after the wedding, then the morning of the wedding called it off by telegram.
Jury awarded damages of £75 which, considering he claimed his income was £2 per week, was a hefty fine. I think there may have been some proto-Karens on the jury, but then again the jury at that time was probably all men? 😁
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Agree that becky was very stupid and chad was reprehensible. But what bias would you expect a woman who got the exact deal becky thought she was offered to have?
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The other jurors are probably correct here, the standard of evidence for a civil trial is not beyond reasonable doubt but instead "more likely" (preponderance of the evidence) and when one side is bringing evidence and the other is a known scumbag who only uses words, it tilts likelyhood pretty hard. I think his defense was just incompetent, either through bad luck with the lawyer or because the defendant himself is garbage and both made the bad call to go with a jury trial to begin with and demanded this bad defense strategy against counsel (more common than you mignt think, lots of people refuse to trust the lawyers for some reason).
Add in the possibility that your framing might be missing any more details in her favor too, and it seems like siding with Becky with here is quite reasonable.
Why would a civil trial jury bring fraud charges? Criminal charges is a really odd thing to bring up multiple times in a civil suit in the US and inconsistencies like this points to you either being really confused about what was going on (likewise with not knowing the difference in evidentiary standard) or perhaps the story itself is fabricated.
"More likely than not" that the plaintiff had to prove, which she seemed to fail to submit evidence to do so. Meaning the lack of evidence would fall on her, giving a default judgement to the defendant.
Partial, very cherry picked evidence. For example we did not get raw bank statements, we got an excel spreadsheet with her claims of the transactions (which conflicted with the following) + a heavily filtered set of bank statements that only showed transfers from 4 places: Her account -> Joint, His -> Her, Her -> His, Joint -> Her, for a set time period which was not the full relationship length. We got screenshots from another camera looking at the screen of the phone with cropping applied. We got a credit card statement with plenty of charges that she made (due to the location, he was in Turkye and Europe) but the final amount was stated as what he owed her.
So I guess if your stance is that bad biased evidence is more believable than no evidence, thats definitely a stance, though I'm not sure you'd like that applied to your interlocutors in the future.
North Carolina allows for civil fraud. Not sure what to tell you. If you want to type it into an LLM it will tell you the exact same thing. I tried to find the exact statue but ChatGPT seems to suck at that for some reason (probably indexing the page). All I can say is that I got instructions from the judge with the rest of the jury and fraud was one of the charges we were to consider.
What's my motivation for writing out a 3 page essay on my jury trial experiences when I hate writing, and I hate looking at my writing. Skepticism is never an unfounded trait on the internet, but if you are banking on your layman-legal knowledge as the critical support pillar, then I think you should recalibrate how much you think you actually know.
It's not enough in your opinion.
I doubt the defense felt further evidence would have helped their case, given they did not seek it in discovery. In this situation it's likely as another comment already explained to you, they submitted enough that they felt was convincing without having to expose the two parties even further than necessary.
No, you don't get to acknowledge you used the wrong terminology in another comment and then do this game here. I am well aware civil fraud is a thing, but what you said was fraud charges. That is incorrect.
As I explained in the other reply, this was because there was only two options. Either you were mistaken or you were lying. I didn't know which one, just that one of them had to be the case.
You were mistaken and therefore I was right. It was either of the two, and it ended up being one of them. If you do not understand the concept of "either or" and take one of the options as a direct accusation, then that is on you.
I acknowledged that I could be using less precise terminology, because I'm not an asshole. You seem to want to be seen as one instead.
I'm not mistaken, I'm just not pedantic af about syntax. Which apparently you are. Good to know.
If you're not mistaken when saying the civil court was handling fraud charges, then the other option must apply and you would be lying instead because as I established, civil courts would not handle that.
"You are mistaken" is the nice explanation for the false claim you made. We have an known to be incorrect claim and two possible explanations, choose one.
The difference is between fraud charges and fraud claims is pedantic and not how I think. I reject your dichotomy as I reject most dichotomies. This could have been an informative post with you correcting me and explaining the difference. Instead you decided to be an ass as your the default. I suppose that is good evidence against future behavior that you do. MKC's default behavior is to find any disagreement and try to be right no matter what, without helping anyone learn anything.
And yet the difference between criminal charges and not exists regardless.
I was illustrating how in your argument against democracy, where you essentially propose yourself as an enlightened individual unlike those Karens, you failed to understand some very basic concepts and terms. It's a great irony. Had you not approached with the ego that you were better than the rest there, perhaps you would not need to be humbled when you messed up such simple parts.
Right, so this is actually the real reason. You want to humble me. You took 1 word, mentioned 1 time in my 2,485 word train-of-thought pseudo-diary entry, submitted without proof-reading, spell-check, or LLM-proofing, after midnight because I couldn't sleep as I was brooding about the preceding several days, and decided to raise a massive stink about it. You might want to do some soul searching to determine if you are really the arrogant one, and this is all just a massive amount of projection.
Yes because being a pedantic wordcell is the height of enlightenment. Of course! How did I not know in whose steps I needed to tread. I'm sure being a great lawyer or english teacher results in the best governance!
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The free table of contents for this book from the North Carolina Bar Association lists "constructive fraud" as a civil "cause of action" (basis for lawsuit). This lawyer webpage indicates that constructive fraud is different from actual fraud. The idea of a civil action is laid out in NC General Statutes ch. 1 § 1-2—but I can't actually find the list of civil causes of action anywhere, though I would expect it to be in chapter 1 or in chapter 1A.
This page has the standard jury instruction for constructive fraud (§ 800.06) under torts (part IV), so I guess it's nonstatutory common law.
You have a very dependable ability to find details. The 800.00 was the instruction set we received with some added formatting. Link. This is just listed as Fraud in NC and is from the civil courts. It looks like it's different than 800.005: Constructive Fraud.
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I (as a mod) do not appreciate the low-key insinuations that the OP is lying, and while I'd have let "your framing might be missing any more details in her favor" go (because yes, that is certainly possible), you have no reason to be accusing him of outright making up this entire story. Do people make up stories to post here? Yes, I'm sure they do, though less frequently than on reddit - I have certainly raised my eyebrows at a few implausible just-so stories posted here - but "maybe this is all made up" is a shitty thing to say just by way of disagreement with the thesis.
There is a specific reason that I gave, a jury trial would not be deciding if they give him criminal charges or not. It is possible he misspoke or misunderstood something, but the story as it sounds right now is not true, because the civil jury would not be deciding against fraud charges as it would not have the ability to do that to begin with. That was never a potential thing.
And it's not even some weird special super unique jurisdiction thing as I checked that with the bots
He either completely misunderstood what the jury was empowered to deliberate there (he might have meant civil liability fraud) or it's fake. But it could not have been fraud charges. When someone says they've seen a flying unicorn the response is "you either mistook something else for that or you're lying".
Well, I checked with the bots is there such a thing as civil fraud - "what is the difference between civil fraud and criminal fraud?" - and they told me yes there is and linked me to legal advice and everything:
Civil liability fraud is not referred to by "fraud charges", charges are brought by a prosecutor.
Okay, so the prosecutor wasn't bringing criminal fraud charges, the plaintiff was bringing a civil fraud case. Happy now? Look, just admit you got hung up on the terminology and shouldn't have claimed OP was making it all up. No harm, no foul.
It's a great irony to be pointed out when someone speaks as if they're smarter and better than the unwashed Karens of the jury they served with, only to fail at understanding some of the basics is it not?
I didn't claim that, it was one of the possibilities. Either they misunderstood or they were lying. Your defense of "they misunderstood" is literally saying I was correct.
Dude, any time someone says something that is (arguably) wrong, the options basically boil down to "You're mistaken" or "You're lying." But it is quite belligerent to follow "I think you're wrong about this" with "So did you misunderstand or are you a liar"? I find your argumentation in this thread very obnoxious because you're doubling down on "Well, either he's stupid and doesn't know what he's talking about or he's making the whole thing up." Neither of those framings are charitable or conducive to good discussion, and you do not seem to actually be interested in fostering good discussion, but rather, seeing how much you can needle people. I've told you once and I am now underlining it: stop this. I don't mean stop being pedantic about exactly what "fraud charge" means- by all means, be pedantic and argue whether that was an appropriate term to use. I mean stop using fangs over word choices and pedantic details.
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There was no prosecutor, I never said there was. It was a plaintiff (Becky) suing the Defendant (Chad), the charges/accusations/laws-broken what ever you want to call it were: Breach of Contract, Unjust Enrichment, and Fraud. If your first response to improper legal terminology is accuse me of fabrication, I think the internet has ruined your mind.
Except that wasn't my first response, the very start of the sentence was actually saying you didn't know what you were talking about and were showing a misunderstanding about what the jury would have been adjudicating.
A civil jury would not be deciding criminal charges for fraud, thus we have the two options.
Those are the only two options, given that the claim itself is known to be incorrect (unless my knowledge and the double check was wrong and there is a weird jurisdiction thing going on, but it would be an incredibly strange thing in the US system).
As we have confirmed right now when you said "improper legal terminology", I was right. That is option 1, you were mistaken. You have admitted to this yourself right there in that comment. You are complaining about my factually sound conclusion proven to be correct.
You are just wrong, it was you who claimed fraud can only be criminal. I never claimed such, I claimed the charge was fraud in civil court. Go read the link in this comment, NC allows Fraud under a Miscellaneous Tort in civil court.
Edit: if you want to be super pedantic about the use of "charge" vs "accuse" then sure, have your bagel. Everyone else seemed to understand what I meant colloquially, so I guess you can pick bullshit fights without being clear. But you are strictly wrong that fraud is not also a civil court tort.
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You are the only person here who does that, to the point where it gives you away when you use other names.
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"Fraud" can mean punitive damages for being deceptive, which is not technically "fraud" as a criminal charge but is something juries are allowed to take into account in a civil trial. You could have accused him of being imprecise rather than going to "You are making this up."
But I did accuse him of that as a possibility! I said
So it's either he didn't understand (or at least failed to properly explain his understanding) what is going on (as they weren't deliberating fraud charges, they would have been deliberating civil liability fraud) or the story was fake.
I listed the possibilities out. We know it's one of those two, but I can't say which one.
Or maybe you don't really know as much as you think you do. And/or are not understanding what was going on.
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Yeah, not questioning the financial transfers either is incompetence (and do we think Chad would put any time, effort, or consideration into hiring a lawyer?) or the reality was so bad, bringing it up would have made their client look even worse ("what was this withdrawal for?" "uh, I dunno, she handled all that shit" "did you know she was taking money out of your account?" "yeah, sure, I told her to do what she liked, saved bothering me about going to the bank and withdrawing it and paying her and shit" "have you any idea of the state of your finances?" "I get paid the end of every month?").
I'm pretty sure he hired the same firm that did his divorce. The Plaintiff alleged it and had this really annoying habit of calling the defense attorney by his first name with a lot of attitude whenever he (the attorney) didn't let her off easy. She was fighting with the attorney on the stand.
He pretty much said this. And that was sort of my problem. She was clearly doing what she liked. I really find it hard to believe that she didn't withdraw money from his account to make herself whole. Was she expecting him to directly transfer it with a note? I struggle to think if this man could open up an internet browser.
Of course he did 🤦♀️
So Chad hired the same guys who handled his divorce - and who got paid at least in part by the plaintiff in this case for divorce fees - to handle this case. No wonder the lawyer sat down and shut up. He already knew what a dumpster fire his client was.
You said he was a gunnery sergeant. I know there are jokes about Marines being crayon eaters, but this guy was being sent on deployment for active service, and unless he was a desk wallah in the quartermaster's stores or something, he has to have some technical knowledge. Especially if he's in the stores, he would need to know how to open up a browser.
I was probably being a bit exasperated. He probably knows how to open a browser. He just seemed to make really stupid decisions one after the other without any seeming idea that they were stupid.
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A lawyer almost certainly has someone on hand who can help a client access financial records, no?
Given that the guy gets into bar fights and loses his government card so he has to borrow money off his girlfriend to pay for flights and lodging and meals while on deployment, maybe the court would be better off (for his case) not knowing where his pay/allowance went. Does this sound like a guy who possibly might have "hookers and blow" on a credit card or not? 🤣
Now, she too was dumb to give him a pre-paid card which he promptly uses to run up expenses, but love makes us do strange things (you. It makes you do strange things. I retain my sanity in that department).
The worst part is she could have just easily paused the card, we had a juror with the same exact card going on and on about it.
Definitely she could have and should have, but of course he was full of excuses as to why he needed money and she was just throwing good money after bad because he was her baby daddy and gonna marry her soon as he came back. Everybody is an idiot in this case.
Yeah you'll love this, her response to part under questioning was "I love him and I didn't want him to suffer!!!". As if being forced to stay on the boat and be served 3 meals a day was suffering.
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Yes, yes it does. But a pre-paid card seems like how you’d handle giving money to someone who can’t control spending.
Problem was she kept topping it up, which is the Sunk Cost Fallacy in operation if ever it was.
Nobody said she was making good decisions in her long term direction(see: this woman's entire story), just better ones in specific details. That's why he was in a relationship with her.
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I assume you're referring to this comment.
See also Ozy's article from a year ago, discussed to a small extent here.
But of course that was a criminal trial for murder, not a civil trial for breach of contract.
Looks like juries can be fairly high variance then. I hope the next one I serve on is better, and I can just chalk this up to a bad combination of personalities.
Yes
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Honestly, I read your case expecting worse, but I don’t see the major injustice here. If I was on the jury I’d be one of the “sellouts”: ESH, some evidence is weak on its own but together it’s stronger, moreover yeah Chad is a scumbag in general, and the punishment is only a fine (that he‘ll probably convince some other girl to pay, rinse and repeat). The real losers in this story are the kids: assuming Becky has full custody I’d award her the full settlement for that alone, laws be damned, because (excluding something the defense should’ve mentioned) they deserve the money more than Chad, although I really wish she could be required to spend it on them in case she tries to bankroll another hot loser.
The real sad story of democracy is seeing how many people, faced with the smallest perceived injustices, want to tear it down. We have juries because judges can’t be unbiased, Chad could’ve elected for a judge but I’m skeptical he’d actually fare better.
There was an independent family court case so money for the children was not in our purview. We were strictly about the civil claims.
What's the limit? Would you "sell out" on a murder case, a million dollar lawsuit, a rape case. What is your line, where letting injustice happen rather than be personally inconvenienced for a couple days? Do you think if you are even in the court as a plaintiff or a defendant, you'd personally agree that it's good that half the jury is going to give you a harmful judgment because you've inconvenienced them? I guess I just find this opinion the equivalent of burning the commons for personal benefit in a way that is very short sighted.
I don't want to tear democracy down. I want to remove universal suffrage and try and find a better form of suffrage. I don't yet know if one exists, hence it's an inchoate thesis.
I'm not actually "selling out"; I barely care about staying on the jury longer, I just care about the outcome of this case less.
When there's actual injustice. Here the "punishment" is transferring money from someone who's already in debt and doesn't spend it well, to someone who spends it slightly better. It have some sympathy for Chad, but he's not going to prison, nor does this burn his net worth or financial prospects, since they're already ash.
That's the problem: everyone wants to remove suffrage from people they don't like, but how do you prevent your allies from being disenfranchised (or avoid bad decisions from them, despite being "allies", that were ironically negated by your "enemies")? Children don't have suffrage, because almost everyone grows up such that it has never been exploited. Some felons don't have suffrage, arguably this has been exploited, but it's mitigated because convicting someone isn't guaranteed, and convicting a sizeable fraction of the population would raise eyebrows from even some radicals.
Yeah, I understand that better than anything. People never want to restrict suffrage in a way that would hurt them or their allies, and always want to target their enemies. I said in another comment in this chain, that the problem is in exclusionary systems, a motivated set of agents will try to exploit the rules in a way that is always more detrimental to the system than exploits that are available to blanket systems. I'm unsure if it's a solvable problem, creating a strictly fair system of suffrage the isolates voting towards agents with a sense of duty to their fellow man and an intelligent long term view towards the prospering of the country and its people. Universal Suffrage is a lot like a market in this regard. It creates price signals for peoples political desires. Shockingly most of those signals are very self-serving, short term benefits, but not all, and its hard to parse the good from the bad.
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Oh, there's no reason to think a judge making a settlement rather than a jury trial would have gone any better. Judges like to be bleeding-hearts in some cases, particularly when they think state or government money is involved. Chad being a Marine Sergeant might even influence a judge against him, depending on the judge and their biases. But if we go by what we're told in the original post, any judge faced with a fuckup like Chad would probably hammer him just on general principles.
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Wouldn't she be able to get that money anyway in a separate child-support proceeding? If so, there's no need to take that into account here.
Good point, hopefully someone in the juror room would’ve explained that to me or I’d be a bad juror. Although I still think Chad paying isn’t really an injustice for the other reasons.
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My most unrealistic take is that we could probably solve half our problems with democracy by deliberately structuring it so that only around 30% of the population could do things like vote or serve on jury duty. My preferred solution would be to require an exam, military service, or a fuck ton of community service hours before you get these rights. The real intention is for the exam to be the filter. The military and community service operate as a release valve for people thinking the exam is too exclusionary.
Let me link an essay in defence of juries!
The problem with legal professionalism is that it has produced plea bargains, where an absolute scumbag can bargain their way out of deserved punishment because the courts are too full and the lawyers too cynical and burned-out to have a proper trial, so everything is tidied out of the way in order to free up the dockets. Even worse, someone can be condemned for a crime because they're advised "better take the bargain, if we go to trial there's no guarantee you'll win and the resulting sentence will be even worse than this offer".
That's not justice, either. We have decided that a man should be tried by a jury of his peers, and if his peers are fools, prejudiced, opinionated, or so secure in their self-esteem ("I'm an engineer, you know, I'm smart, I decide things out by reason and logic alone not emotion") as to be blind to their own biases then so be it. The ordinary man gets judged by the other ordinary men of the society.
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Sounds like the world of Heinlein's Starship Troopers. I would like to know more. The problem I have with it is that it is vulnerable to gerrymandering in a way that universal suffrage is not. Example: If you want right-wing governments forever you increase the difficulty of the community service or exam options.
Pretty much, the problem with lots of exclusionary systems is that a motivated set of agents can exploit them in a way that is more harmful than a blanket system approach. Someone is always looking to break your edge case for personal gain. I'm not sure what the best way to fix that problem is, I just am losing faith in the ability of universal suffrage to adequately allow governance in an increasingly polarized and mercenary society.
I think you have to inculcate a sense of duty and noblesse oblige in whomever you enfranchise. Doing this for a smaller number of people is obviously easier, and then the system can gain legitimacy if the fruits of good governance are visible to the people. A benevolent and enlightened ruler is then simplest, so why expand that power at all? Expanding the franchise is defense in depth against an one idiot or tyrant wielding power irresponsibly or ineffectively. But at some point the expected value of the marginal additional voter becomes negative; I think this is least controversially demonstrated by proposals to lower the voting age.
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Voting used to be limited to white landowning males, which worked fine, except that inevitably some of those men saw a political opportunity in expanding the franchise to other groups in exchange for the implicit promise that they would vote for them, and after a few iterations of that game, here we are.
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