We have received only one negative email, and I was not sure whether I should publish it or not (it actually was the third received email, between LTs and NYs--Ive been thinking about it), but here it is, not because we want to pick on the sender, whom we do not identify, but because her arguments so perfectly typify the arguments of everyone else who also supports jury duty that it would save both time and energy just to deconstruct her arguments right here right now: You are so very wrong in your assumptions. Our right to a trial by our peers is a basic priviledge [sic]. Who would you have judge and sentence us.....the King? Get a life. There are three mistakes here. First of all, she misuses the word “privilege.” George Orwell wrote a book called “1984” in which he described the attributes of a totalitarian society, one such attribute being what he called “double speak,” that is, defining a word as its exact opposite in order to hide the evil intentions of the regime, and that’s exactly what this person is doing here, for a “privilege” in truth is something that is both desired and earned, but jury duty is neither desired nor earned, rather, is forced indiscriminately on all persons. Second, she asserts that a jury is to take the power of arbitrary judgment away from the king, and originally she would have been correct, for trial by jury originally was aristocrats ganging up against the king, but after the end of monarchy, trial by jury became aristocrats ganging up against the poor, until some genius came up with the idea of making the poor into jurors, but that has just left us with the problems we face today: people being forced against their will, the poor losing the wages they need to survive, and jurors being incompetent. Aristocrats can be asked to dedicate free time to a cause, because they have lots of free time, since they are not really working anyway, but everyday working people cannot afford to take time off for anything, so the next logical step in the evolution of the jury is clearly a part-time professional jury. Her comment about the king is wrong also because there is now a new king with absolute power in the courtroom, and that is the judge, who can overturn the jury verdict, or imprison or fine jurors arbitrarily, so trial by jury has really just substituted one king for another. Finally, to prove her moral superiority to us, she flippantly tells us to “get a life,” but here she is not only just borrowing language from a tired cliché but even misapplying its meaning, for it is precisely because jury duty deprives us of life that we protest against it. Overall, her comments are so trite and predictable that is sounds as if she is just parroting back the lies that the court has rammed down her throat to justify its imposition of jury duty on her, and pretending like her rehearsal of those trite lies somehow makes her more moral than us, but her very inability to discern those lies demonstrates that she must lack either historical knowledge, mental acuity, psychological self-honesty, or basic human compassion, or some combination of these, and such lacks are normally associated with moral inferiority, not superiority. Such is the “morality” of everyone who advocates forcing people against their will to work on an unpaid job in which they have neither interest nor competence.
Posted on: Mon, 10 Mar 2014 08:30:33 +0000
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