The Marshall Project reports that:
When a California judge handed down a six-month sentence to Brock Turner, a former Stanford swimmer convicted of sexually assaulting an unconscious woman, the relative leniency generated an indignant storm on social media and a petition to recall the judge. Perhaps the most extraordinary repercussion was a mutiny among prospective jurors, one that raises questions about the delicate relationship between jurors and judges.
In protest of his sentence in the Turner case, at least ten prospective jurors appearing in Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky’s courtroom last week refused to serve on a panel in an unrelated new case he is trying, reports the East Bay Times. One after another, the judge thanked the candidates for their candor and excused them from duty. No judge or judicial or jury expert I spoke with can remember a similar episode in modern American history. And some were troubled by the development.
Indeed, as the report goes on to explain, a lot of high profile judges and law professors are having kittens over ordinary people deciding they've had enough. The legal beagle elites are claiming the refuseniks are just lazy bums trying to get out of jury duty and there may be some truth to that.
But maybe what's motivating the refuseniks is the same thing that is motivating the Trump phenomenon: ordinary citizens telling elites that we're mad as hell and we're not taking it any longer.
Some judge lets a privileged kid skate on three sexual felonies with a sentence that amounts to three months in protective custody, while we all know an underprivileged kid who did the same thing would be doing hard time in a real prison. And maybe some folks have had enough.
On top of which, with regard to the specifics of the case, jury duty's hard enough if some asinine judge is going to throw all of your hard work out the window with a grossly unfair and inadequate sentence.
So I don't blame the refuseniks. To the contrary, I applaud them. If that means lawyers and judges have to work a little harder, that's a small price to pay for the people speaking truth to power.
