The first time I sat on a jury, all of my idealism about juries went out the window.

The (very serious criminal case) jury I was on was encouraged to report anything like that to the bailiff, who would relay it to the judge.

There's no avoiding defenestration.

For what it's worth, I probably could have wriggled out of jury service on medical grounds but made sure to do the opposite.

In the UK, lawyers do not get to pick and choose jurors; jurors are entirely random. The only way a juror can be 'excused' is if it turns out they are related to the defendent or something.

There are some people - oftentimes very literate people - that mistake having no opinion for being stupid. It's very far from that. Oftentimes being neutral and keeping your mouth shut is the smartest thing you can do. There's frequently a popular image of someone who is smart as someone who is very quick to form judgments and articulate them with little information; this can be a useful skill in certain situations but is the opposite of what our legal system wants in a juror.

Having a degree is not an attribute that you can be dismissed "for cause" for, and the attorneys have a limited number of preremptory challenges available. At least in my area, where > 50% have college degrees, if they tried to strike everyone with a college degree they wouldn't have a jury pool left.

They're selecting for neutrality. What both lawyers and the judge all want to see is someone who doesn't have an opinion on the case before it begins. That neutrality could be a product of them being easily swayed by arguments, or it could be someone who is coldly logical and makes a decision purely based on the evidence presented.

I watched about 65 people get dismissed, and what they all had in common was they were visibly emotional before the trial had even begun. That is what gets you dismissed. Meanwhile, about half the folks in the jury box didn't even realize that the fact that we were still sitting in the jury box meant we would probably be serving on the jury, we were still like "Oh, I'm probably going to get dismissed because I'm X kind of person and the lawyers aren't going to want X kind of person." If you can think of it that dispassionately, you are the type of person the lawyers want.

The person was the oldest or second oldest in the room. I don't think that was a coincidence.

(I was definitely not the oldest in the room - I think I was like the 2nd or 3rd youngest.)

May I ask in which state?

In every state I've been on a jury, the foreman was chosen by the other jurors.

The person was the oldest or second oldest in the room. I don't think that was a coincidence.

This was never the case in any of the juries I was on.

MA is the outlier a lot of the times when it comes to court law it seems.

It's hard to believe there are still people who think having a witness take the stand in their own defense is a good thing. The only trial I've been in where that happened, the witness did what every defense attorney fears: he made things worse for himself than they were before (and things were pretty bad: it took us less than half an hour to convict).

How do you know this, when in the previous sentence you admitted:

I have never been called for jury duty

I've been on juries three times so far. The lawyers absolutely did not filter for people who could likely be swayed.

Or perhaps you confused "people who are likely to be swayed" with "people who have an open mind."

You will feel like an intellectual titan.

https://youtu.be/-C-JoyNuQJs?t=2386

    Also about once a year, I get a letter from a lawyer, every year a different lawyer, at a company -- I don't want to embarrass the company by saying their name, so I'll just say their initials -- IBM [laughter] saying that they want to use something I wrote.

    Because I put this on everything I write, now. They want to use something that I wrote in something that they wrote, and they were pretty sure they weren't going to use it for evil, but they couldn't say for sure about their customers. So could I give them a special license for that?

    Of course. So I wrote back -- this happened literally two weeks ago -- "I give permission for IBM, its customers, partners, and minions, to use JSLint for evil."

    [laughter and applause]

    And the attorney wrote back and said: "Thanks very much, Douglas!"

They can enforce that all employees adhere to FOSS principles or would be subject to termination. Many for profit companies have the exact opposite policy.

I'd draw your attention to last year's article... "Employee commits suicide after MongoDB fired her during mental health leave" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46403128 (for any wondering, it went to arbitration - https://www.pacermonitor.com/public/case/62342462/Surman_et_... )

They blew up their only defence, which is to claim it's not meant seriously, by firing employees who refused to commit to the message of the document.

Getting fired for refusing to be the victim of a crime is... well I'm not a lawyer but I think that's pretty damning for the EF.

Legal documents are perfectly literal, and no place for satire. There is a reason lawyerese is so perfectly dry and lifeless.

Good to see they've successfully expanded the scope since, and lifted the restrictions on the purposes for which they could be considered evil.

Everyone's happy and no one can fault you.

Sarcasm, irony, or hyperbole are all fine in a joke. Less so in a binding document someone is required to sign to keep their healthcare and income.