by tzs | 2025-07-14 22:54:53+00:00
Totally OT except that it includes the words "Adolf Hitler", but some might find this amusing.

Sometime around the mid '80s I had jury duty in Los Angeles. This involved spending a couple of days at the courthouse in a waiting room with a whole bunch of other people on jury duty. During that time when a judge needed to seat a jury they would send about 24 of us over to that court room.

14 of that 24 would be seated in the jury box (enough for 12 jurors and 2 alternates), and the other 10 would set in the spectator area and be instructed to pay attention. The lawyers for both sides and the judge would question those of us in the box, and excuse those of us they found unsuitable. The excused person would be replaced by one of the watchers and the judge or lawyers would ask them some of the questions the rest of us had already answered, and then resume asking new questions.

Lawyers often ask prospective jurors questions that don't seem to have any connection to the case. They are trying to just get to know more about you to figure out if you are the kind of person who would be sympathetic to their case and also to the types of arguments they plan to use.

A question the defense lawyer asked us to get our measure was "If you could have dinner this evening without anyone in the world, now living or anyone from the past, who would you choose?".

I was around 5th from the end he started at. The answers I remember before he got to me were "My deceased mother" and "Richard Feynman". The rest were also pretty normal.

While they were answering I was thinking about who would be interesting. Various famous living and dead scientist and mathematicians came to mind...but what makes them interesting is their work which I am not smart enough to have a good dinner conversation about.

Finally he got to me and I had my answer: "Adolf Hitler". That startled quite a few people :-)

When asked to explain, I said that Hitler committed some of the biggest atrocities in modern times, such as the Holocaust. And he expected to get away with it. And he almost did get away with it. Doing all this required getting a large number of Germans from all walks of life to go along with this, often enthusiastically.

I figured he must have some sort of charisma in person that is off the charts to be able to talk so many people into doing so many terrible things. I thought that would probably make him an interesting person for a dinner conversation.

Needless to say I did end up on that jury. The defense lawyer used his last peremptory challenge to reject me. (A "peremptory challenge" does not require the lawyer to give a reason. Each side gets a small number of them).

I was a bit surprised by that actually because I had expected the prosecutor to be the one to toss me, after my answer to one of her question which was "If aliens came down to Earth and told you that had been watching our broadcasts and were confused about the drug problem and wanted you to explain it to them, what would you say?". (The case was a drug case so she was trying to get our thoughts on drugs in general).

I said I'd tell them that we have a variety of recreational drugs available, some legal (alcohol and tobacco for example) and some illegal. I'd tell them that some of the illegal ones (marijuana for example) are less harmful than the legal ones, but we totally lie to kids in our drug education programs and paint pretty much all illegal drugs as very harmful. I'd tell them that of course kids end up trying drugs like marijuana, and find out they were lied to, and many then think maybe they were lied to about all drugs and end up trying (and maybe becoming addicted to) drugs that they might have avoided if we had just been honest about marijuana. I'd tell them that we also waste police and prosecutorial resources that could be going toward stopping actual harm arresting and prosecuting marijuana users, and wasting money jailing them.

I thought I'd probably be her first peremptory challenge after that.

BTW, I long hair and was wearing a tie-dyed short that made it look like I'd just come from a Grateful Dead concert and was probably on drugs myself, which I thought might even make me her first peremptory even without that answer.