The Jury Got It Wrong

It is ironic that juries are comprised of twelve people, emblematic of the Disciples of Christ, the same twelve people who failed to defend him from a conviction and subsequent death sentence. Sometimes juries get it wrong. It happens with much greater frequency than we care to admit: in recent years, DNA evidence has helped legal advocates demonstrate over and again that such judicial blunders are common. There have been multiple cases across North America of the wrongly convicted being freed after years of imprisonment ? there isn?t much you can do to restore the time they?ve lost, although on occasion they return to the real world with a pile of money provided by a contrite government. But it is the fact the errors occurred at all that should give us pause. And this is only in the instances where DNA evidence can be useful ? there are many other cases where the conviction might be just as wrong but without that special kind of evidence to prove it. There are a lot of reasons for these errors: sometimes the jury is so poorly chosen that it becomes a group of people with biases that stack the cards against the accused; sometimes the evidence presented is faulty, or incomplete, or even wildly untrue; sometimes police investigators have done such an awful job that the truth is horridly obscured and any rational group of people would have reached the same erroneous conclusion; and there is little reason to doubt that a jury can sometimes be twelve extraordinarily stupid people. And always, the fate of the accused rests at least partly in the skills of prosecutors and defenders --- quite apart from the value of the evidence, persuasive lawyers have been able to convince juries that blue is red and that up is down. But what can you do when a jury of 115 million people fails to convict? When a jury pool that large makes the wrong choice? No matter what else it might be, an American presidential election that involves an incumbent candidate, is an exercise in passing judgment on the evidence of his (unfortunately, it is always ?his?) performance. Where the two main candidates are new pretenders to the throne, the jury is asked to consider intangibles: which of these guys will do the better job, or the least harm. Where one has already held the job for four years, though, the evidence for or against letting him hold onto the keys to the kingdom is what the jury is being asked to consider. In short, a presidential election where a sitting president is running is not so much a presentation of choice between two main candidates as it is a trial to judge the performance of the one who has already done the job for a while. In the 2004 presidential election, there was a lot of evidence to consider. The Democrats fielded an unattractive candidate: an eastern aristocratic intellectual with a filthy rich spouse. He was vilified by the other party for a number of foibles, some real and some not, but still managed to obtain a significant body of votes from the American people ? he didn?t lose by much. The Republicans fielded the other guy, the down home folksy sort of guy who you might not mind living next door, although you?d probably be careful about lending him your tools. For a long time, pundits are going to debate what John Kerry did wrong and what George Bush did right in this election; but the reality is that the evidence was before the court, and the jury screwed up. An offhanded comment by Kerry, allegedly made to an aide during the campaign, probably sums up what much of the world thinks about this election: ?I can?t believe I?m losing to this idiot!? But it doesn?t matter an awful lot what people outside the United States think of the result. Overwhelmingly, the people of the world are stunned that the American people failed to act on the evidence before them. With the exception of a brief period after September 11, 2001 when George Bush actually looked presidential, when he actually sounded like he had more than just a few brain cells, the evidence shows a man who has blundered and fumbled and been wrong at almost every step. He has created huge suffering around the world and even if Americans are so churlish as to not give a damn about that, he has created massive suffering at home. Some of the evidence the jury ignored in exonerating Bush is blatant, although there is also a substantial portion that might have come to the attention only of the most careful juror. Certainly the prosecution and the defense cautiously ignored many of the prickly issues and the media covering the trial did very little to examine the evidence and help out the jury with factual reporting. Instead, it relied almost entirely on campaign press releases with the absolute assurance that such material could not possibly be skewed or somewhat less than honest. Consider some of the ?evidence?: - Bush assures Americans they are safer from terrorism under his presidency although the only real evidence is that they were not ? the only terrorist attack came on his watch and there are substantial reasons for believing that he was, at the very least, asleep at the switch - Bush invaded a corrupt and absolutely powerless Afghanistan régime because a bunch of Saudis allegedly were behind the attacks of September 11; ignoring the illogical nature of that, the Afghans asked for evidence and offered to turn over to the US the alleged perpetrators upon receipt of that evidence, but the response from Washington was simply bombs - Bush has sent thousands of troops to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq while reducing their pay, assistance to their families, assistance to veterans and managing to get American troops stuck in a mess from which withdrawal is probably far in the future - Bush has managed to cause the death of more than a thousand American troops so that his oil patch buddies can get their mitts on Iraq?s resources - Bush has undone, or is undoing, numerous international treaties designed to make the world a safer or cleaner or more just place - Bush has refused to accept that outsiders should have any right to criticize or interfere in America, but he has not hesitated to insinuate the US wherever and whenever he has pleased, resulting in most of the world that didn?t already hate America to start hating it - Bush has articulated plans to gut the American social security system and pretends this is actually in the best interest of everyone, rather than just the best interest of his corporate friends - Bush and his team have elevated conflict of interest and fingers-in-the-cookie-jar to an art form - Bush has, or is planning to, trample the rights of women, gays, the poor and anyone else sitting below the salt - Bush is turning the US into an exclusionary dictatorial theocracy - Bush?s stewardship of the economy has been deplorable, with some of the greatest job losses and economic downturns in decades - Bush?s watch has included the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, thereby squandering all the moral superiority that America always claimed about how their killing machine was a decent and well-behaved killing machine, unlike those ruffians out there - Bush managed to strip away huge swaths of civil rights from American citizens with his up-against-the-wall Patriot Act - Bush managed to provide huge tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans while providing nothing for the masses, even making their lot worse by passing on to them the cost of the tax breaks for the rich - Bush?s policies are designed to cripple American industry and American workers while granting special status to offshore interests controlled by his corporate pals - Bush has sent virtually all of the National Guard to fight in Iraq despite the fact that the NG exists for the purpose of protecting the continental US from invasion and domestic upheaval - Bush has repeatedly been caught lying ? uranium in Niger, WMD in Iraq, and so on, with hardly a whisper from compliant media even though his predecessor in the White House got himself impeached for lying about oral sex - Bush killed off attempts to conduct stem-cell research while lying to the American people about that too: he is not a complete idiot, all evidence to the contrary, and knows full well that stem-cells are not harvested from aborted fetuses but it was on that basis that he quashed the most exciting and promising medical research since the discovery of antibiotics - Bush is incredibly lazy, taking more time off work than any previous president - Bush just might be mad ? there is substantial evidence to suggest that he is severely impaired psychologically and that he may still be suffering from his long years as a booze and drug abuser This is just a smattering of the evidence which should have told the majority of American people that this man is not fit for the presidency, that he should be convicted of failing to meet the burden of proof that would allow him to keep the job. But by careful manipulation of reality and the press, coupled with unfortunate gaffes in the Democratic camp, Bush managed to fool enough people that he?s their man. There are only two ways to assess this result: either the American people are a lot stupider than common sense would suggest they could possibly be; or a huge number of them share the same morally bankrupt vision of the world as Bush. There is good reason to believe it is the latter. In the past, America has carried on an isolationist policy but perhaps it is now time for the corollary. Maybe it is time for the rest of the world to shut off America and let it stew in its own juices, to stop trading with it, to make its military leave their countries, to stop adhering to any agreements they might have with the US. Maybe it?s time to send the United States to its room until it learns how to behave.