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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.
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.
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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