Double Flee A

Chewbacca never dies

This seemed to me like it came from another planet, or at least a dystopian novel, but my attorney has verified that it's the case, right now, in the United States.

If you're called to jury duty, you're going to be asked questions that will help the legal-types decide whether to have you sit on the jury for a particular case. If it's a death penalty case, you're going to be asked whether or not you believe the death penalty is ever an appropriate punishment. Unless you might criminally implicate yourself by answering (which in this case is hard to imagine), you are required to bleat yes or no, and in the current legal setup, the prosecution says whether or not you're allowed to sit on the jury based on your answer.

Implications of this include:
1. that the prosecution has, holy of holies, determined reality’s level of subjectivity
2. that your beliefs at any given time quantifiably exist to a degree sufficient to kill someone over and
3. that your beliefs are apparently the rightful property of the state. Hmm.

For a person such as myself, this presents a paradox. I think it's wrong to kill anybody, period. I think it's so totally wrong that I'd lie about my beliefs in the above scenario in order to make sure it didn't happen. Conveniently, some might say, I also happen to think that beliefs themselves are so subjective that anybody could say they changed theirs any time they felt like it, as often occurs during regime changes, or in America, sporting events.

Implicit in the nature of the questioning itself is that some legal repercussion could be headed my way if I lie about my own beliefs! Which I only believe in enough to lie about because no one including the state should kill anybody in the first place!

Rather than run around like my ass is on fire (which does sound like fun, actually) because of this insanity, I’d lie, and say “Sure, I believe in the death penalty. Rush Limbaugh? He’s like a father to me.” That would do the trick, I’m pretty sure.

Another way of saying it is this: Asking what I believe under these circumstances is like asking whether “lord of the rings” is the movie in which Chewbacca dies. It’s triply absurd.* Here’s why.

One: By asking a juror whether he endorses the death penalty, the prosecution assumes that a non-death-penalty bias is going to taint his decision whether or not the defendant is guilty. It would be hilarious if somebody’s life didn’t depend on it. We can deduce from this standpoint that the trial plays second fiddle to its results from the outset. So much for fairness.

Two: By asking a juror whether he endorses the death penalty, the prosecution assumes the juror (for all his supposed wisdom, yeah, that’ll be the day) didn’t consider that his beliefs can’t effectively operate independent of the framework of the law, which is maybe the most fundamentally fucked up and insulting point of all. Now truth itself orbits the law? It isn’t surprising that the law assumes, of course, moral absolutism. But it’s not possible to legislate that, much less enforce it, hence the tumult of headlines about America’s great victories in the war on drugs and the war on terrorism.

Three: The law doesn’t own juries. They own it, and I, for one, am not showing any servile deference to a system which I regard it as my duty to question, especially when it attempts to require me to do so.

From laws that protect no one and that by and large the poor alone are eligible to be prosecuted under, all the way to a jury of revoltingly catatonic, accusatory ideologues, and stopping for a little ass-kicking by the police along the way, our “justice system” could have been named as much by George Orwell in one of his wryer moods.

Hark! An idea that solves the problem of the prosecution’s idiotic, logically unsound death penalty question!

Don’t kill anybody.

Otherwise, there’s this. I’d lie about a lie or I’d lie about the truth, but I’d never tell the truth about how I feel about the death penalty to prosecutors hoping to get it from me. Since I’m anonymous writing this, I might be anybody. Therefore, anyone you ask whether or not they believe in the death penalty might be lying, either because they’re me or somebody else with an ounce of neural tissue. Therefore it’s useless to ask, but cheers for us, it always was anyway.



* LOTR is a series, not a movie, Chewbacca’s not in any of them, and Chewbacca never dies, even in the movies in which he’s a character.

posted by dale @ 9:58 PM