Juries: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

moving on our main story tonight concerns jury duty hey summons for which is one of the things you least want to find in the mail aside from maybe a bill or a human toe and please a pinky call me when you're serious enough to send a middle piggy then maybe we'll talk business complaining about jury duty has long been a beloved american pastime just watch this call us to a 90s local tv show delights the host with his whining they put us down in this holding pen they call it the jury assembly room yeah the jury the j-a-r the jar they stick you in this jar with like three or 300 other people for a whole week oh man and i figure it's like being in jail only jealous a whole lot better because joe's a lot cleaner and has much better lighting oh and we have to pay for our own food and we don't get to go outside we don't get free hbo we don't get to talk as much and we don't get health care and we don't get conjugal visits you don't get any of that stuff don't get any of that now he's actually right you don't get conjugal visits while waiting to be called at jury duty although judging from that call being at jury duty isn't that cool as primary obstacle in that department as for not getting hbo i don't know what he's complaining about there they don't even give me free hbo and i'm actively ruining it now that man greg was a regular caller to that show and i know that because we got curious about him after watching that clip and it turns out he's a lot for example greg has a website where you can find classic gregasms like environmentalism is evil or the baptists are the pin in the homo grenade incidentally greg isms isn't even a term i made up it's an actual section of his website we can honestly spend the rest of this show on greg but sadly we do have to move on because the important thing about jury duty is you know what just one more thing about greg he's been tweeting it's almost time to have a great hashtag weekend everyone who's with me every friday for the last very many fridays and read the room greg no one has great hashtag weekends anymore we're all sitting at home watching the days blur together in a miserable hashtag time soup but while it might sound cliche serving on a jury really is an essential civic duty the right to a trial by an impartial jury of your peers is enshrined in the sixth amendment of the constitution but the truth is while your peers are supposed to be chosen from a fair cross-section of society people of color are routinely excluded according to a study of 14 federal district courts under representation of the latino and african-american populations is ubiquitous which is a problem with huge implications for juries this social psychologist staged mock cases where some juries were all white and others were racially diverse and found that the diverse ones operated more fairly and deliberated more comprehensively in this study they they raised more facts from the trial they discuss a broader range of information they discuss the information more accurately actually in discussing the facts of the case they're more willing to have uncomfortable conversations about controversial issues like those involving race and racial profiling yeah it turns out juries are sort of like presidents of the spokane washington chapter of the naacp when they're entirely white things tend to go south fast and this is reflected in the real world researchers who examined felony trials in florida found juries formed from all white pools convict black defendants a full 16 percentage points more often than they do white defenders but that gap in conviction rate is entirely eliminated when the pool includes at least one black member and that's one of those facts that he probably assumed was true even though you wish it wasn't like the fact that dogs don't really enjoy music or that sean penn's new wife is a year younger than his daughter so tonight let's take a look at why juries are so often unrepresentative and what we can do about it and the whole process starts with what's called a jury wheel a pool of potential jurors in a community it used to be an actual wheel and for many years black people were explicitly excluded from them and even after the civil rights act of 1875 said you couldn't discriminate against jurors based on race many officials would still find ways to remove them like by printing their names on different colour paper so they could be avoided during the supposedly random drawings and while thankfully that doesn't happen anymore our current system has many flaws that can end up having a similar result for instance nowadays jury wheels are often computerized lists gathered from voter registration and driver's license records but there's a big problem there as this public defender in new orleans explains not everybody's registered to vote and not everybody owns a car you know has a driver's license the problem is when we use voter registration or dmv records we're probably excluding around 35 percent of new orleans right 35 of people are excluded there and being registered to vote and owning a car doesn't affect whether you're qualified to serve on a jury it just affects how much money you probably spend on bumper stickers bumper stickers think of them as traffic twitter that's not a compliment and the exclusions don't stop there most states ban people with felony convictions and withdraw pay being incredibly low lower income people can be unable to afford to take part both of which disproportionately exclude people of color so inherently the system is already biased and that's before you even get into the mistakes that jury summoning systems can make which to be fair can sometimes be pretty fun i got jerry duty i said what's jerry duty summon for jerry jury service if you're picked then you go up to the judge and then you say if they're guilty or not guilty yeah jacob got jerry duty and while i can't believe he found casey anthony not guilty that's what he and his gerry decided and we just need to live with that but some errors are significantly less fun for instance in connecticut it emerged that their jury selection computer program had accidentally read the d in hartford to mean deceased so for nearly three years it never summoned anyone from hartford or indeed new britain the second largest city in that district because their list of names had been accidentally misplaced and was never entered into the program and the thing is those two missing cities accounted for 63 of african americans in the district and 68 of the hispanic population which is horrible because if you're going to forget a town in connecticut why not forget danbury because and this is true dan berry from its charming railway museum to its historic half stone castle danbury connecticut can eat my whole ass i know exactly three things about danbury usa today ranked it the second best city to live in in 2015 it was once the center of the american hat industry and if you're from there you've got a standing invite to come get a thrashing from john oliver children included you now that harford error was made by the government's own system but many courts actually contract out their jury selection to companies like these who promise to run the process cheaper and more effectively but private companies can be surprisingly unreliable take what happened outside tulsa oklahoma where a black man was tried by an all-white jewelry drawn from a pool of 200 jurors without a single black person in it after the company handling jury selection accidentally excluded zip codes when 90 of its black residents lived then there's allen county indiana where this company had a system that was programmed to work through an alphabetical list of townships and stop when it reached 10 000 names unfortunately it turned out 75 of african americans in that county happen to live in wayne township towards the end of the alphabet meaning they had roughly half the chance of being included on a jury than a truly random system would have produced so yet again alphabetization fails us i've said this for years it's an abc supremacist system that disrespects the better end of the alphabet because think about it z has got all the hotties zayn zoe zendaya zac efron and of course zonkeys half donkey half zebra all sex now the extent of that indiana era only emerged when a man who'd been convicted there sued over the makeup of his jury and his lawyer pointed out to the state supreme court just how lax the design process had been it's not a glitch it's not a glitch or a computer bug it's programming determinations these were codes these were determinations that the programmer put into the program he didn't it didn't some gargles virus come and make the program go bad it was bad because he made these decisions and easily they could have been programmed another way this was a part-time college student that's true that county's jury system was originally designed by a college student whose previous job incidentally had been working at a head shop and look there are plenty of jobs that people with headshot experience are qualified to do for instance cleaning bong resin off an ikea couch cushion or going on a late night snack run to 7-eleven and only getting 40 of what everyone asked for i'm just not sure that programming a county's official jury list is one of those jobs and whether the errors in these programs were deliberate or just careless the result is the same and i'd love to tell you mistakes like these are rare but the truth is no one knows how common they are we only know about the examples that i've mentioned so far because of lawsuits that took years private vendors often won't reveal details about their systems claiming their algorithms are a trade secret and 39 out of 50 states provide no public access to jury data so your court system might have a massive problem and until a nine-year-old shows up for a murder trial no one would have any idea and all of this is before jurors even show up for selection at which point things can get even worse because prosecutors tend to exclude black jurors sometimes out of implicit bias but sometimes out of a bias that is pretty explicit just watch this philadelphia d.a addressing a room full of prosecutors in a leaked 1980s training video explaining which jurors they might want to avoid another factor i'll tell you if you know in in selecting blacks again you don't want the real educated ones again it's this goes across the board of all races you don't want smart people uh and again but if you if you're sitting down and you're going to take blacks you want older blacks in my experience black women young black women are very bad uh there's an antagonism i guess maybe because they're downtrodden on two respects they've got two minorities they're women and they're blacks and so they're downtrodden two areas and they somehow uh want to take it out on somebody and you don't want it to be you okay first any white people who use the word black as a noun and not an adjective are pretty suspicious throw in that mustache and suddenly it feels like a spike lee period piece and even putting aside the bigotry there the only time it's acceptable to say we don't want smart people is in a training manual for selling lularoe because if your business model is sell 5000 ugly leggings on facebook to the people who hated you in high school then yeah you're gonna want to weed out the smart people now we reached out to that prosecutor who was very upset saying everyone has tried to somehow make this racist even though he agreed that the best jury is by racial something slightly undercut by the fact that a you just heard him say young black women are very bad and b a later review of felony cases that he tried found he'd removed black jurors at such a high rate the odds of it happening by chance were won in a quadrillion and that guy is not a one-off recent studies in north carolina and louisiana found prosecutors striking black jurors at twice and three times the rate of white jurors and if you're wondering how they were able to do that it's probably worth knowing that in a trial lawyers have two ways to remove jurors the first is a so-called challenge for course that's where they can show that a juror can't be impartial because of some connection to the trial or because they were somehow unfit to serve the second is a peremptory challenge where they can remove a limited number of jurors with no explanation although since a 1986 supreme court ruling they can't exclude jurors purely based on race it's something that this hln host explains in a borderline aggressively literal way what happens is the prosecution and defense each have 10 jurors each that they can reject for any reason at all or for no reason unless they believe the other side is playing the race card and they can then challenge that preemptory challenge okay i've got a lot of questions and absolutely none of them are about preemptory challenges first why use the loaded term playing the race card at all uh second why imply it means acting in a racist fashion when it doesn't but most importantly how long did that man walk around with that race card in his suit pocket was it just for the show or does he always walk around with it on the off chance that he has to explain peremptory challenges to someone and if so does he ever go to pay for something accidentally pull out his race card and then say oops that's not my wallet that's my race card to the utter bewilderment of the cashier also how did he get that card did he make it himself because that'd be weird but it might actually be weirder if he'd ask someone else to make it for him that would mean he'd ask the producer hey can you make me a race card for my segment on jury selection to which she probably said what do you mean and he said you know like a physical card that says race card on it and then the producer said why and he said because i'm trying to explain lawyers playing the race card when striking jurors which the producer said but can't you just say the phrase playing the race card or you know not actually say it at all and he said absolutely not so a production assistant then had to spend 20 minutes printing the words race card on a red card is that how it came to exist and what happened to it after the show did he throw it away or did he put it on his desk just in case he ever needed it again and if so did someone ever walk by and say hey what the is that to which you replied oh that's just my race card as if that's a normal thing to say or to have and finally and i know this isn't the most important thing why does it say race card on it it's already a card shouldn't it just say race because isn't the thing he's actually holding up there technically a race card card and if so what the does that mean i've got so many questions about this and i know we don't have time but i guess my broader point is there are two ways for lawyers to strike jurors and hln is a deeply weird television network but what the supreme court said that you can't strike jurors based on race it turns out that's a pretty easy rule to get around all you have to do is just come up with some reason other than race to strike a juror and then do it anyway remember that lawyer that you saw earlier he was speaking after that ruling was handed down and was openly instructing prosecutors on how not to get caught let's say you strike three blacks to start with first three people and then it's like the defense attorney makes an objection saying that you're striking black well you're not going to be able to go back and say oh yeah make something up about why he did it write it down right then and there so sometimes under that line you may want to ask more questions of those people so it gives you more ammunition to making articulable reason as to why you're striking them and not for race wow it's pretty bizarre to see a government official so flagrantly teaching people how to do something illegal it's like if how to get away with murder was an educational series where viola davis explains how to literally get away with murder which he'd absolutely crush by the way i'd gladly watch multiple seasons of her describing in vivid detail how to dismember a corpse and dissolve the body parts in acid and look to this day prosecutors use a wide variety of reasons to strike black jurors some of which are just flat out ridiculous like saying jurors were too young too old single divorced religious or not religious lived in a poor part of town had a hyphenated last name displayed bad posture or was sullen disrespectful or talkative in fact just listen to this public defender describe a juror strike that he once saw i had a juror an african-american woman who was actually excluded because she was wearing what's called a puffy coat yeah she was excluded for wearing a puffy coat and a jacket should never be an acceptable reason to exclude someone from a jury unless it's the one that post malone wore to the american music awards he looks like he's supposed to jump out of a cake at a mariachi themed gender reveal party and if you want to see the lengths to which prosecutors are willing to go just look at the multiple murder trials of curtis flowers in mississippi his case made it all the way to the supreme court which decided that his prosecutor had repeatedly and blatantly tried to whitewash the jury and that opinion was written by maybe the last justice you'd expect justice brett kavanaugh wrote that a white mississippi prosecutor's goal was to have an all-white jury decide the fate of an african-american man accused of murder which is unconstitutional the court's newest justice said that district attorney doug evans waged a relentless determined effort to rid the jury of black individuals it was curtis flowers sixth trial for the same quadruple murder kavanaugh pointed to a pattern noting that evans had removed 41 of the 42 prospective black jurors over the six trials 41 of 42 jurors you know you're doing something wrong when it's so flagrant even brett kavanaugh has a problem with it a man who's done exactly two good things in his life this decision and making it acceptable to spend your entire job interview screaming and crying and it wasn't just how often that prosecutor struck black jurors it's how blatantly he did it because while on average he asked the whites jurors who were seated one question he asked the black jurors he struck 29 and how do you ask anyone that many questions about anything that is too many even for a first date who's desperately trying to keep the conversation going let's see i've asked about where you grew up what you do for work whether you like your job whether you have any siblings whether your siblings are older or younger what you'd like to do for fun what kind of music you like what else is there do you like rakes and a prospective juror in one of curtis flowers trials felt pretty clear about why she'd been struck they just told us they didn't need us i think they might have assumed that because i was black that i was going to agree with that he was innocent just by the color of his skin but i actually would have listened to the evidence and had an open ear i actually was looking forward to serving look it is ridiculous to assume that a juror will be biased just because the defendant is the same race of course a black person can be impartial when the defendant is black in the same way that i could be impartial if the defendant was an owl to suggest otherwise is extremely insulting not just to myself but to all owls and these decisions have consequences curtis flowers spent 20 years on death row and is currently out on bail awaiting a potential seventh trial so taken all together it's pretty clear that from how we decide who serves to how the list is administered through who we let lawyers select we are making a mockery of the phrase a jury of your peers because who exactly is the you there the defendant's peers or the prosecutor's peers that's a pretty big difference and as we've seen the impact of having people in a jury room who can speak to what being black in america is like and how that might affect your relationship with law enforcement can be hugely beneficial and yes that might make a prosecutor's job a bit more difficult but the role of a court is not to make it easy by having cases heard by only a group of white people or to use the proper collective noun for that a whole foods i'm serious try in a sentence look at that gaggle of geese flying over that whole foods of abigails so how do we fix this well there are four basic steps we could take one broaden jury list so they don't exclude large sections of the community some have suggested using income tax lists for instance to make that data public so we can see if there were errors in compiling potential jurors three increase juror pay so that people who miss work don't suffer financial hardship and finally reform the process behind preemptory challenges to make it more practically difficult to strike jurors by race and while yes this is a lot of work it is worth it because as we have discussed before on this show every gear in the criminal justice system is unfairly biased against people of color from policing to bail to the shortage of public defenders to punitive sentencing to incarceration to re-entry from prison and this is yet another to add to that depressing list because right now too often our current system would systematically weed out a qualified person who actually wants to serve and leave in someone who aggressively doesn't because he can't watch hbo and the jewelry box you

Channel: LastWeekTonight

Views: 7,096,916

Rating: 4.8138924 out of 5

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Id: 1f2iawp0y5Y

Length: 20min 37sec (1237 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 16 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/HeloRising]

The idea of mandatory jury duty still just baffles the shit out of me.

If you're on trial for your life or you're staring a decade long prison sentence in the face, do you want the people there whose job it is to decide if you should go free or not to be engaged and actively want to be there?

Tbh, I feel like we need to have a certification system for jurors. Give people a bonus on their tax refund for signing up for jury duty but not allow them to serve on juries at levels they haven't qualified for.

Pay people whatever their wages for that day would be if they're going to miss work.

[u/rattleandhum]

MIRROR:

https://streamable.com/0l6jbu

https://streamable.com/lfcmat

https://streamable.com/80jv7r

[u/djspericism]

I think it is interesting that I can often get more accurate information about political/social issues from a British-born comedian on HBO TV show than I do from The President of the United States of ‘Merica on any given day of the week.

[u/siemianonmyface]

In American the politicians are racists and they make racist laws and the laws get upheld by racist cops and and then justice theater is preformed in front of a racist judge and is prosecuted by a racist prosecutor who assembles racist juries from racist jury selection programs.

Now obviously not everytime is every single stage of the game racist, but a lot of them all frequently, because so much of their design were made by racists.

[u/scratchamaballs]

What was the Danbury rant all about?

[u/PrestigiousBarnacle]

When he said

“Every gear in the criminal justice system is unfairly biased against people of color.”

I cried a little.

[u/handmadeabyss]

Why would you make this unavailable in my country? It’s presented by a comedian you stole from here you cheeky bastards!

[u/whistnow]

I enjoy John Olivers's videos, but my god is he cringy. Even with the audience when he goes on his shouty 15 second rants I just wanna be like "simmer down man". Stick to the one liners. You're trying too hard.

[u/Drayger83]

Always love watching LWT, thanks for sharing