ToaKraka
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User ID: 108
IIRC, some users of this website have expressed concern that juries in left-wing cities will be unsympathetic to right-wing defendants. Here we have a mildly interesting example where a left-wing juror was angered by a right-wing defendant's "conspiracy theories", and was upstanding enough to express to the judge concerns that he might not be able to be impartial, but the judge refused to remove him from the jury!
A black Muslim felon is indicted on dozens of federal fraud charges regarding his operation of a nonprofit. He conducts his defense, including voir dire and jury selection, pro se (without a lawyer).
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The venue for this trial is Alameda County, California, where Harris took 75 percent of the votes (85 percent in the city of Oakland) in year 2024. A particular person is selected as an alternate juror. After taking the oath, he approaches the judge to express concerns that he will not be able to be impartial.
He began by saying, “I was hoping this wasn’t going to be an issue because I stayed engaged for all the hours and everything. And then the defendant spoke, and all that came out was discrimination, conspiracy theories, and police corruption.” He continued: “That just upsets me to no end, because being gay, trans, and non-binary, having bottles thrown at my head when exiting gay bars, being denied housing for being gay, when that’s the only thing [Colar] talked to us about, I’m sorry, that’s just festering in my head right now.” According to Juror 48, there was “no way [he was] going to be able to get that out of [his] head.” He also reacted to Colar’s claim that the prosecution was “turning a small thing into a big thing”: “So there is a thing. That’s just going to stick in my head the entire time.”
When the court reminded Juror 48 that his task was to evaluate the government’s evidence and decide whether the government met its burden of proof, he did not retreat from his views. He acknowledged that the court had discussed the need for jurors to be impartial. But he expressed strong disapproval of Colar’s invocation of “oppression, discrimination against Muslims and Africans, and police corruption all across the nation” as a defense to the charges. And he suggested that this factored into his ability to evaluate the evidence. “I’ve actually been discriminated against and I’ve actually had these issues,” Juror 48 said. “It just pisses me off that that’s being used as a scapegoat in an instance like this.” He added: “Literally the only things that [Colar] said were, were just those three things. Like, there was no substance.”
The defendant asks the judge to remove this alternate, but the judge refuses to do so. “I hear what [Colar] is saying about [Juror 48].… But—and he’s coming back Monday. I’ll tell you that much.… I’ll give it some consideration, and if I need to think about it further on Monday, I can.”
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The next day, it turns out that one of the non-alternate jurors got into a car crash, so the alternate juror in question now will be on the jury if he isn't excused. However, on a second colloquy with the judge, the juror says he has changed his mind and can be impartial.
During the discussion, the court told Juror 48 that he was “now part of the jury” and asked him about the views he expressed on Friday. The juror said: “I let my emotions get the best of me on that one,” and described how Colar’s statements at voir dire “just brought up a lot of the bad issues that had happened in the past. So that little trauma from back then kind of came from nowhere.” He asserted that “over the past few days, I remembered exactly, like, there was a report I got afterwards, and I’m completely, like, past all that.” He added: “It was a little scratch in the back of my head that really bothered me at first. But, again, given a few days, I’m perfectly over it now. I’m fine.” The court asked him if he had any concerns about his ability to be fair and impartial, follow instructions, and evaluate the evidence. The juror replied, “No, I don’t.”
Colar then spoke to Juror 48. He said, “[Juror 48], I believe that you should be excused, and the reason why is because you did state your bias.… What’s making you change your mind now?” Juror 48 responded, “When you were speaking during the jury selection, it had brought up some past traumas.… I have overcome those things in the past with the support of my friends and my family. I just had to remember that over the weekend….” He continued, “I promise, I am not going to be biased,” and “I was able to calm my head back down.” When Colar pressed him on what specifically triggered the reaction, the juror reiterated that “it’s the fact that the entire thing, the entire time you were talking,… all I was hearing from you was that there was discrimination, that they were against people of the Islamic faith, things like that, and that kind of just got stuck in my head.”
The defendant again asks the judge to remove the juror, but the judge again refuses to do so.
The district court asked no further questions and found Juror 48 fit to serve. Colar maintained his objection, stating, “I don’t believe that he can put that aside.… If something else comes up that I say and it re-triggers [him],… I don’t think he can put it to the side.” The court replied: “It’s… the position that… one would obviously take in your shoes and I understand it, and it is preserved for the record on appeal.”
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The defendant is convicted on all charges, and appeals. The appeals panel reverses and remands.
A juror’s initial expression of bias can be overcome if, upon further inquiry, he unequivocally commits to setting it aside and deciding the case based on the evidence presented. Juror 48 eventually told the court that he was “perfectly over” his earlier reaction and had no concern about his ability to be impartial. Still, for two reasons, the district court abused its discretion in finding Juror 48 fit to serve and failing to excuse him for cause under an actual bias theory.
First, a juror’s assurances must be measured against the whole record, with any remaining doubts resolved against the juror. Juror 48 attributed his change of heart to having “time to calm down” and remembering how to “overcome it.” That described a shift in his current emotional state, not a reassessment of the conclusions that he had drawn. The court did not ask whether he still believed that there was “a thing” or that the defense theory lacked merit, the very views that made Juror 48’s statements so serious. A bare promise by Juror 48 that he was “not going to be biased” did not, in context, unequivocally assure his impartiality.
Second, Juror 48’s bias was tied to a defense theory that would recur. As the government admits, racial and religious targeting was “a theme of Colar’s defense” throughout his trial. That theme triggered Juror 48’s prejudicial reaction. In his continuing objection, Colar raised the concern that “if something else comes up that I say and it re-triggers… his emotions, [] I don’t think he can put it to the side.” Yet the court never asked Juror 48 that critical question: whether hearing the defense theory throughout the remaining weeks of trial would retrigger his emotions and impair his ability to serve impartially.
The district court abused its discretion by failing to promptly investigate Juror 48, deferring inquiry until a seat opened, and conducting an inadequate colloquy after the juror had heard evidence. The record as a whole was unclear as to whether Juror 48 unequivocally committed to setting aside his bias, and this doubt should have been resolved against him. The court’s failure to excuse him was an abuse of discretion. These errors ultimately deprived Colar of his Sixth Amendment right to an impartial jury. We vacate Colar’s convictions and reverse and remand for a new trial.
If you think it's relevant, the judge in question is black and was nominated by Obama.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
12hr ago
The US census considers MENA people white
This actually hasn't been true for two years now.
OMB accepts the recommendation to create a new minimum reporting category for MENA separate and distinct from the White category, and to revise the White category definition accordingly.
MENA groups and members of the public generally have long voiced the need for a separate MENA minimum category. The 1997 revision to SPD 15 also identified MENA as a topic for further research because there was a lack of public consensus on how to define the category (e. g., shared language, geography) at the time. Since then, Federal agencies have conducted research and stakeholder outreach showing broad public support for the use of the term “Middle Eastern or North African”, and that MENA respondents understand the use of the category and select it when available.
Described further in Part 3 below and consistent with the existing minimum categories, the detailed checkboxes and definition examples for the MENA category were selected to represent the largest population groups in the United States as reported by the 2020 Census. Although several commenters expressed interest in explicitly including Armenian, Somali, or Sudanese, the 2015 NCT found that most respondents who identify as Armenian, Somali, and Sudanese did not select MENA when it was offered. Additional research is needed on these groups to monitor their preferred identification.
ToaKraka
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19hr ago
Why does your custom home have a bedroom lock?
(1) The new custom house is (still) not yet complete. This key is for my bedroom in my (mother's) current house. My mother directed me to add locks to that house's bedroom doors several years ago, in preparation for a several-weeks-long visit by her annoying mother.
(2) The new custom house's bedrooms have locks (and solid doors) for privacy.
Does she not need it? Why carry it?
Her car has two keyfobs—one for her and one for me. I actually don't remember why I decided to carry the spare keyfob around all the time, but I can think of two justifications: (1) If both of us are away from home, and the house is burglarized, then the keyfob will not be stolen. (2) If both of us are away from home, and she locks herself out of her car and calls me to come and unlock it, then I can drive directly to her rather than needing to stop at the house and pick up the keyfob.
ToaKraka
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23hr ago
How do you spoiler-tag stuff on The Motte?
There is a "formatting help" link below the comment preview.
ToaKraka
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1d ago
There are none. Go to your account options (under the "content" tab) and disable the filter that is rewriting reddit . com links to point to old . reddit . com.
ToaKraka
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1d ago
Surge protectors are good investments.
Or uninterruptible power supplies.
ToaKraka
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1d ago
In-person meetups between people who are not physically attracted to each other are overrated.
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My retirement party was two hours long (including 1.5 hours of time theft). This was justifiable. There were something like a dozen people present, and they spent the time eating and discussing their shared job. Even then, I didn't actually enjoy it that much.
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My housewarming party with my former coworkers will be four hours long. IMO, this is on the long side, but can be considered justified because (1) the coworkers will discuss their shared job, (2) large amounts of food will be provided, (3) the drive is three or four hours each way (which also implies some staggered arrivals), and (4) substantial amounts of time will be taken up by a house-design contest in which the attendees will discuss the design process with each other. Even then, I don't really expect to enjoy it that much, other than the house-design contest and inviting people to walk with me on the "flat" roof. (I'm holding it not just to show off my cool custom house, but also to show up a coworker who said he was going to hold a housewarming party and then failed to do so.)
In contrast:
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A few months ago, I half-jokingly suggested organizing a meetup of people who are interested in nonconsensual editing of print and PDF items into HTML. But a meetup centered on HTML would make far more sense to conduct online: the attendees would share their screens to show off their different approaches. And, even then, what's the point of doing all this rigmarole for an hour of ephemeral screen sharing? The people who would attend can just make individual blogposts on the topic on their personal websites.
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Several years ago, I gave serious consideration to asking fellow New Jersey hater @The_Nybbler for an in-person meetup. But what would we actually discuss? Merely hating New Jersey isn't actually substantive enough for a conversation. Even if it is considered substantive enough, it can sustain maybe five minutes of conversation that would be far easier to carry out online (with links to relevant laws). And there's no point in setting up an ephemeral one-on-one conversation when it's much more useful and lasting to just upvote his comments and provide links to relevant laws whenever he expresses hate for New Jersey on this website.
ToaKraka
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1d ago
A true extremely-online person uses the all-comments "firehose" page, so that he never misses out on consooming comments as they are posted.
According to Kiwi Farms, this article (may be paywalled; archive) covers how one of the men severely injured the five-week-old baby and was charged with child abuse.
ToaKraka
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2d ago
I am extremely far from an expert on the topic, but I believe that many emulators automatically verify the ROM's checksum against trusted checksum databases like No-Intro, and will warn you if no match is detected.
ToaKraka
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3d ago
I remain in hopium-huffing mode, not game-playing mode.
(I will take this opportunity to note that Dyson Sphere Program, Factorio, Captain of Industry, etc. are industrial engineering, not civil engineering. But I am interested in them.)
ToaKraka
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3d ago
All basketball arenas should be renovated into indoor-soccer arenas.
Don't forget that indoor American football also exists.
ToaKraka
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3d ago
In American football, you've got your quarterback that's usually fairly well rounded, then you get a mix of big mofos and sprightly gazelles.
Compare the old system of one-platoon/ironman football, under which substitutions were strictly limited and therefore all players had to be competent both on offense and on defense. Presumably, the replacement of this system with unlimited substitution and two or three totally separate platoons of players has contributed to the specialization of players in the modern day.
ToaKraka
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3d ago
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Right pocket: Wallet; keychain with house key and bedroom key; keyfob for my car
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Left pocket: Phone; keyfob for my mother's car
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3d ago
Why are 55+ communities allowed?
A cursory search indicates that 55+ communities are specifically exempted from federal law's ban on age/race/etc. discrimination in housing.
What are the perceived benefits of 55+ communities? It's weird to me that people are getting so offended at the idea of an almost-30-year-old woman can continue living in the same home she lived in before her father passed away.
In the vein of the famous comic: (1) You signed a contract. (2) Obey the contract. Whining that the contract is "weird" and (in the linked tweet) "HOAs have too much power" will not garner any sympathy when you agreed to the contract's provisions and you are free to just live somewhere else.
ToaKraka
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3d ago
ToaKraka
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3d ago
ToaKraka
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3d ago
You have to press the Enter key twice in order to leave behind the blockquote.
ToaKraka
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4d ago
Dark Souls 2 is the only game in the "Soulsborne" ""series"" that I've actually played. I have significant nostalgia for it (without DLCs) on the PlayStation 3 a decade ago, and years afterward I accumulated 300 hours of playtime on PC.
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I've never felt much need to try Dark Souls 1 or Demon's Souls when Dark Souls 2 is so awesome already. (I think my brother and I did also have those two games on PS3. I don't remember why I didn't play them at that time. Maybe I preferred to spend all my time on Dynasty Warriors Gundam 1, 2, and 3.)
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It is my impression that Dark Souls 3 and Elden Ring are "rollslop" in comparison to the more methodical gameplay of their predecessors.
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As for Bloodborne and Sekiro, I prefer rolling to parrying.
ToaKraka
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4d ago
Don't forget that Bridge Constructor technically is in the same genre. Civil engineering is an extremely broad category.
ToaKraka
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4d ago
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Nioh 1 (faster-paced action RPG)
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Dark Souls 2 (slower-paced action RPG)
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Darkest Dungeon 1 (slow-paced dungeon crawler; kind of dumb, but a reasonably fun time-waster)
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Nuclear Throne and Enter the Gungeon (move with keyboard and shoot with mouse)
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Death Stranding 1 (transport cargo across landscapes)
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Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 3 with Tale of Two Wastelands bugfixes
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Kerbal Space Program 1 (plan space missions)
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Cities: Skylines 2 (build cities)
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Mini Motorways (draw road networks)
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Freeways (draw highway interchanges)
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Gundam Breaker 4 (the closest thing to Dynasty Warriors Gundam that's playable on PC)
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House of Dead Ninjas and Super House of Dead Ninjas (simple action)
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Solitairica (solitaire roguelite)
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Slipways original and fancy (draw trade routes to develop planets)
ToaKraka
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4d ago
And here's where I will drop just a little bit of CW here:
I will take this opportunity to point out that, in my own dabbling, I have noticed that, when given a race-neutral prompt, a local decensored LLM will always make all the characters white.
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A while ago, there were several controversies regarding companies' clumsy insertion of nonwhites into race-neutral prompts. What happened to that? Have they just gotten better at hiding it?
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If a prompter knows that his race-neutral prompt of "Write an erotic description of a young, skinny woman in a shopping mall." will always generate a white woman, and he doesn't make the extra effort of manually adding "Pick race randomly between white, black, East Asian, and South Asian.", can he be considered racist?
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To what, if any, extent should LLMs produce a mixture of races in their responses to race-neutral prompts?
You replied to your own comment, rather than to the comment that I think you meant to reply to.
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