Charlotte | She/her | 24 | Mostly supernatural | paper conservator | Here for fun, short stories, inspirations, fresh ideas that sort of thing, and an occasional scream into the void
you will go for like three months with nothing happening and you’re bored as hell and then in the span of two weeks eight different things happen at once - some fantastic and some shitty and some just plain bonkers - and you’re just running around like a chicken with your head cut off and no clue what the fuck is going on
A quick reminder that when people say, “we were all for pride until they Went Too Far,” what they often mean is, “I was never ‘for pride’ until it became a little more socially acceptable to say so without facing consequences.”
Growing up (at least for myself), when gay marriage was still illegal, the same people who pretended they were always “for pride” were the same ones who’d’ve said, “But a child needs a mommy and daddy! Homosexuality is unnatural because of that!!” as an 'argument’ as to why gay marriage deserved to stay illegal.
I am OBSESSED with people telling me how they met the love of their life. Just found out my director met his wife through a misdirected email - that’s fate right there.
“I saw her last name was Jewish - and I’m Jewish, so when I corrected the email I told her Shabbat Shalom with a smiley face — this was the very beginning of the emoticon era, you understand. She had a watermark of a dog rescue at the bottom of her email, and I love dogs, so I found her website and there she was — all these videos of her rehabilitating dogs and talking about the organization. I fell in love with her just from those videos.”
😭😭😭
“I asked if we could meet for coffee, told her I was looking for volunteer opportunities — which was halfway a lie — and she said ‘okay, but just so you know I have a boyfriend, so this is strictly business,’ and I was so disappointed, but I did want to meet her. We sat in that coffeeshop until they turned the lights out on us, and she broke up with her boyfriend the next day.”
MULTIPLE people in the notes have told me how important these tags are to them so here’s to keeping it in the main post.
people in the notes suggesting it was “improper” for the juror to do this or that it “introduced bias” to the court proceeding 🙄 the ice agent in question accused a moc of assaulting him / resisting arrest. how is the agent being a white supremacist not relevant. what universe are you living in
As a member of the world’s SECOND oldest profession, I assure you this is just one of many ways the justice system is systematically fucked up.
For anyone who wants to know how to fact check something you are told while on jury duty without getting fined:
First, you need to understand that the rule that jurors can’t just google things is coming from a good place. Like imagine that you are on a jury that’s considering, say, a medical malpractice lawsuit and one of your fellow jurors comes into the jury room and says to you, “I think the victim’s expert was lying because WebMD totally contradicts everything they said.”
And you might be like, “But WebMD is notoriously unreliable website and the expert you’re talking about is a researcher from Mayo Clinic.” But this person cannot be swayed.
Like, we can all agree that would be bad.
So even though these rulescan contribute to unjust outcomes as in the case above (and seriously, the fact that the defense attorney didn’t fact check that is probably grounds for legal malpractice), they also prevent jurors from just looking up bullshit online and taking it more seriously than the actual experts the court has put on. And I think in the era of anti-vaxxers/QAnon/COVID denial/etc., we can all understand why it’s a bad idea to trust that people can tell fact from bullshit online.
So in light of this, how do you as a juror fact check something?
The key here is that you have to ask the court for information. Jurors can ask questions of the court during deliberations, so if something you said sounds off to you, you can ask for more information.
The key term you want to use here is “credibility.”
The job of a jury is to decide what are called “questions of fact.” Long before the trial even starts, lawyers will have hashed out all the “questions of law” — like, what the statute of limitations is; what laws, exactly, were allegedly broken; whether the court you’re in even has jurisdiction; stuff like that. Jurors are responsible for deciding which side’s version of the facts has more credibility.
For instance, if the prosecution’s witness says X and the defense’s witness says Y, the jury is responsible for deciding which is true, X or Y. And you do this by weighing which one is more credible.
So in this case, if the juror had known to, he could have told the judge, “In order to properly assess the ICE agent’s credibility, I need more information about his tattoo. I have doubts about whether he was telling the truth about it, which would impact how credible I would find his testimony. Can the agent please provide evidence that it really is what he says it is?”
There are a lot of problems with our legal system, and I think one of the biggest is that jurors aren’t educated about what they can and can’t do. Juries have a lot of power, if (and only if) they know how to use it.
Reblogging for that last post, because frankly, “what to do as a juror” is one of those things the schools should really be teaching us. Serving on a jury is one of the most powerful rights of citizenship and everyone should be educated in how to exercise it correctly.
not normal: feeling tired regardless of what you’ve done that day
normal: waking up tired every now and then due to stress or lack of sleep
not normal: waking up tired most mornings
normal: getting a little tired after standing for long periods of time
not normal: not being able to stand for very long without tiring out. being stood up drains your energy
normal: being tired more often during times of peak stress and lack of sleep, but otherwise fine
not normal: being tired/exhausted consistently for over 6 months
normal: melting into the sofa after a long day, and then struggling a little to get up
not normal: being too exhausted to move, to eat, to talk, or to do anything a person might be expected to do in an evening
normal: not liking to get out of bed in the morning
not normal: having mornings where you physically cannot get out of bed, or struggle greatly to get out of bed
the key thing is that it is not normal for you to spend most of your time being too tired to do daily tasks, and it is not normal to exist in a constant state of exhaustion. if possible, you should seek help if you’ve been experiencing fatigue for a while
my dad always says “it’s not trespassing if you’re not planning to do anything bad” which as a legal argument wouldn’t get far but as a moral prerogative is completely sound
