YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
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User ID: 680
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
2hr ago
Pretty much, the problem with lost of exclusionary systems is that a motivated set of agents can exploit them in a way that is more harmful than a blanket system approach. Someone is always looking to break your edge case for personal gain. I'm not sure what the best way to fix that problem is, I just am losing faith in the ability of universal suffrage to adequately allow governance in an increasingly polarized and mercenary society.
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
2hr ago
There was an independent family court case so money for the children was not in our purview. We were strictly about the civil claims.
If I was on the jury I’d be one of the “sellouts”
What's the limit? Would you "sell out" on a murder case, a million dollar lawsuit, a rape case. What is your line, where letting injustice happen rather than be personally inconvenienced for a couple days? Do you think if you are even in the court as a plaintiff or a defendant, you'd personally agree that it's good that half the jury is going to give you a harmful judgment because you've inconvenienced them? I guess I just find this opinion the equivalent of burning the commons for personal benefit in a way that is very short sighted.
The real sad story of democracy is seeing how many people, faced with the smallest perceived injustices, want to tear it down.
I don't want to tear democracy down. I want to remove universal suffrage and try and find a better form of suffrage. I don't yet know if one exists, hence it's an inchoate thesis.
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
2hr ago
Looks like juries can be fairly high variance then. I hope the next one I serve on is better, and I can just chalk this up to a bad combination of personalities.
I assume you're referring to this comment.
Yes
A civil jury would not be deciding criminal charges for fraud, thus we have the two options.
You are just wrong, it was you who claimed fraud can only be criminal. I never claimed such, I claimed the charge was fraud in civil court. Go read the link in this comment, NC allows Fraud under a Miscellaneous Tort in civil court.
Edit: if you want to be super pedantic about the use of "charge" vs "accuse" then sure, have your bagel. Everyone else seemed to understand what I meant colloquially, so I guess you can pick bullshit fights without being clear. But you are strictly wrong that fraud is not also a civil court tort.
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
3hr ago
there is always a new broad willing to run his life for him and pay his way, I have no reason to think that Baby Number Seven isn't on the way.
Unfortunately I would not be willing to bet against you on this. What I expect a normal person to see as a wake up call, probably went over his head. I imagine woman #4 will help pay for his legal fees against woman #3 (this one), until at which point he is living the barracks again because all of his money is going to a recursive loop of legal expenses and child support.
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
3hr ago
Specifically for Unjust Enrichment it is called Quantum Merit in NC, @ToaKraka has a link to the jury instructions here, this looks slightly similar to the instructions we received for Quantum Merit. It was only applied for the divorce funds
I can't seem to find the Breach of Contract instructions, but it wasn't applied to the whole relationship but to individual elements. Essentially sets of offers and agreements. Like the hospital/birth costs, there was an offer of "paying half" and agreement to do so with both testifying under oath that they agreed to it. The terms were never specified but the jury instructions had a statement about a reasonable repayment schedule. Sorta the same for the credit card on deployment. He got sunk because his own testimony had him saying that she'd be paid back, realistically she didn't provide evidence that he did/didn't do so, especially when she had access to his accounts... but most of the jury went with the idea that he didn't and had agreed to do so.
Here's my response to the fraud, looks like its just a misc tort.
I think a bunch of this case rested on the fact that nobody on the jury (including me) had a good opinion of the defendant and no one thought he actually followed through on his commitments. He was demonstrably a man-child. Unfortunately not all of the jury considered the the plaintiff might not be telling the truth 100% and might be omitting the fact that she repaid herself from his accounts, with his implied consent, and was now just suing him for extra.
Weeeeelll... guy has demonstrated he has the sense of personal responsibility and reliability of a wet paper bag,
No disagreement.
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
5hr ago
The worst part is she could have just easily paused the card, we had a juror with the same exact card going on and on about it.
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
5hr ago
You said he was a gunnery sergeant. I know there are jokes about Marines being crayon eaters, but this guy was being sent on deployment for active service, and unless he was a desk wallah in the quartermaster's stores or something, he has to have some technical knowledge. Especially if he's in the stores, he would need to know how to open up a browser.
I was probably being a bit exasperated. He probably knows how to open a browser. He just seemed to make really stupid decisions one after the other without any seeming idea that they were stupid.
So it's either he didn't understand (or at least failed to properly explain his understanding) what is going on (as they weren't deliberating fraud charges, they would have been deliberating civil liability fraud) or the story was fake.
Or maybe you don't really know as much as you think you do. And/or are not understanding what was going on.
There was no prosecutor, I never said there was. It was a plaintiff (Becky) suing the Defendant (Chad), the charges/accusations/laws-broken what ever you want to call it were: Breach of Contract, Unjust Enrichment, and Fraud. If your first response to improper legal terminology is accuse me of fabrication, I think the internet has ruined your mind.
the standard of evidence for a civil trial is not beyond reasonable doubt but instead "more likely"
"More likely than not" that the plaintiff had to prove, which she seemed to fail to submit evidence to do so. Meaning the lack of evidence would fall on her, giving a default judgement to the defendant.
when one side is bringing evidence
Partial, very cherry picked evidence. For example we did not get raw bank statements, we got an excel spreadsheet with her claims of the transactions (which conflicted with the following) + a heavily filtered set of bank statements that only showed transfers from 4 places: Her account -> Joint, His -> Her, Her -> His, Joint -> Her, for a set time period which was not the full relationship length. We got screenshots from another camera looking at the screen of the phone with cropping applied. We got a credit card statement with plenty of charges that she made (due to the location, he was in Turkye and Europe) but the final amount was stated as what he owed her.
So I guess if your stance is that bad biased evidence is more believable than no evidence, thats definitely a stance, though I'm not sure you'd like that applied to your interlocutors in the future.
Why would a civil trial jury bring fraud charges
North Carolina allows for civil fraud. Not sure what to tell you. If you want to type it into an LLM it will tell you the exact same thing. I tried to find the exact statue but ChatGPT seems to suck at that for some reason (probably indexing the page). All I can say is that I got instructions from the judge with the rest of the jury and fraud was one of the charges we were to consider.
perhaps the story itself is fabricated.
What's my motivation for writing out a 3 page essay on my jury trial experiences when I hate writing, and I hate looking at my writing. Skepticism is never an unfounded trait on the internet, but if you are banking on your layman-legal knowledge as the critical support pillar, then I think you should recalibrate how much you think you actually know.
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
6hr ago
This actually help assuage my consciousness that I had participated in some small injustice for failing to hold my ground. I can easily recognize that I have my own internal biases towards people displaying overt emotion in situations that construe to me as manipulative, which i think occurred in this case. And following the bank statements towards the 22k + seeing her as manipulative likely lead me to the conclusion I did.
I think its useful to get context that the lack of evidence might have been a strategy from the defense attorney to try and hang heavily on the burden of proof being on the plaintiff. I just think the plaintiff cut a far more sympathetic figure to large swaths of the jury, and the defense needed something more to push the needle.
Problem is that we were strictly instructed that we could not charge the plaintiff with anything. There was a legal form we had to fill out. It's strictly Chad -> Becky damages and charges affecting Chad only. I agree that Becky probably committed criminal forgery but based on our instructions there was nothing we could charge her with. He'd have to counter sue, which I don't think would be our jury.
Likely criminal theft or wire fraud. 5k awarded from Becky to Chad.
Not if she was listed on the personal account and given access with his permission would be my guess. Don't give people your bank accounts sounds like a pretty basic common sense idea.
It indeed sounds like a gift. Without further context, “benefit” doesn’t necessarily imply “financial” benefit, so it’s not a promise of investment returns. However, given the ambiguity, I'll still award half of the amount, 3.5k from Chad to Becky.
This was actually my stance. The "benefit" bit he said under oath sounded suspiciously like something you get tithing church members to say. They don't believe God/Church will literally under contract pay them back, but the good deed of doing this act with benefit them. I wanted to award her half, I think she benefited from the divorce, I think he did too, sounds like a fair split. This was a very contentious argument, the karens wanted to give her 100% and refused to compromise on 75% at all.
Also sounds like a series of gifts and her possibly committing perjury. No money awarded from Chad to Becky.
I was able to talk them into this. but once they circled back to giving her a flat percentage of what she was asking for it essentially abrogated this.
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
6hr ago
I for some reason remember it as a line from A Few Good Men. But apparently thats a Mandela effect, it was never actually said. The other jury members said it showed up in legal dramas.
We all found it amusing, and it was pretty apt. The plaintiff was actively arguing with the defendant's lawyer while on the stand and avoiding answering his questions.
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
14hr ago
do we think Chad would put any time, effort, or consideration into hiring a lawyer?
I'm pretty sure he hired the same firm that did his divorce. The Plaintiff alleged it and had this really annoying habit of calling the defense attorney by his first name with a lot of attitude whenever he (the attorney) didn't let her off easy. She was fighting with the attorney on the stand.
I told her to do what she liked
He pretty much said this. And that was sort of my problem. She was clearly doing what she liked. I really find it hard to believe that she didn't withdraw money from his account to make herself whole. Was she expecting him to directly transfer it with a note? I struggle to think if this man could open up an internet browser.
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
14hr ago
I have to agree that you seem to be doing a reverse-karen
For every action I guess there must be an equal and opposite reaction. The rise of the Male-Karen is upon us. Woe be to non-men! I'll take that into consideration. To be clear I did not like the defendant at all. Morally I think he should have to pay 100%. Legally though, I think the plaintiff really failed to demonstrate that she never took money from his account to make herself whole, and that the relationship was setup in such a way that it was transactional, so that every payment she made was part of an implied contact.
The legal charges were:
- Breach of Contract
- Unjust Enrichment
- Fraud
BoC pretty much requires and offer, acceptance, and mutual agreement on terms. There was not a lot of offering being made, and it was not an implied contract. UE, requires that the plaintiff expect to paid back at the time of the payments, it was very unclear. Fraud required deceit which was never even demonstrated.
Notably they were also in child court for much of the other stuff, she was also just concurrently suing him in civil court for what appeared to be a vindictive last attempt at controlling him. That's why my stance is that she was entitled to 35k - 22k = 12k roughly. That's not escaping responsibility but its not also punishing him for her equally bad decisions.
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
14hr ago
I was trying to head off HBD assertions that this is just Black underclass behavior 101. He was from Miami. He had quite dark skin, not very white. His last name was (and I checked that this wouldn't dox him) Albert.
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
1d ago
The Case against Democracy: The Average Juror
I’m not sure if this is really more of a memoir of my experiences, a thesis on something profound, or just a heaping pile of drama for everyone’s vicarious enjoyment. I’m also not sure if it belongs in the culture war thread, but it has fragrances of memetic-hazards.
We recently had a OP on Jury Trials in the American Justice System. By happenstance of fate, I was summoned to be apart of a jury this week. Now, I actually wanted to serve on a jury, and even after all of it, I still do. I think of it as a small duty to my country as a citizen, and look in askance to any of my fellow citizens that want to shirk their duty. Being a citizen comes with duties, in exchange for privileges, and I have been converging on the idea that a lack of desire to serve your duty should at least strip you of voting rights. Now I recognize I am somewhat financially privileged in this. I am an ML Engineer. My company pays for jury duty time like its holiday time. My time on the jury had no financial consequences for me, and really only impacted some deadlines on projects I run. That’s not the same for everyone, but that is adding to my inchoate theory, that if you can’t afford to perform jury duty because of the financial hardship, maybe you shouldn’t be allowed to vote but also be excused from jury duty.
I won’t really dig into the process because I imagine its roughly the same everywhere, you show up, they give you a number, there’s a subsample to a pool, then a further subsample to the actual jurors on the case, Voir Dire is the term for the second subsample. Voir Dire was actually pretty interesting from my perspective, and also where I think this case ultimately was decided. I think the context of the case is required, so I’m going to chronologically jump around a bit.
The TLDR of the case is: Becky meets Chad, Chad is a hot man-child with a room temperature IQ, he needs someone to pretty much run his life because he has zero internal sense of accountability. Becky dates Chad, has a child with him out of wedlock. Chad eventually breaks up with her because “she’s controlling”. Becky files civil suit for damages for a bunch of big-ticket items (hospital bills for the kid, his divorce from his previous ex, forwarded financial funds, credit card charges he made on her card, and his share of the lease that they needed to void after he broke up with her).
The Details: Enter right stage: Chad, not his real name but shockingly close to his actual name, which is one of the Chad-like names pill-folk use, is a Marine Corps Gunnery Sergeant, about mid 30s. His face is somehow permanently stuck in a Derek Zoolander duck face look. He is the defendant in the case. He is ethnically hispanic, but has a very white surname, in case any of our resident “race realists” feel the need to let their theories run wild. He has 4 children from two other women, and eventually 2 more children from the plaintiff. When he met and dated the plaintiff he was still married but legally separated from the last woman. From left stage: the Plaintiff, Becky, is a hispanic woman, sorta attractive, but not a knockout like Chad is. Her age was never stated but probably late 20s early 30s. She brings 1 kid from a previous relationship.
Chad and Becky meet, have a whirlwind relationship in the beginning, within ~6-ish months of meeting, Becky moves into Chad’s leased apartment, he pays the rent, she covers groceries and utilities. They are in “love”. In January of 2024 Becky get pregnant with Chad’s child, she wanted to start a family with him. Problem 1: He’s still legally married to his ex. He’s also broke, chronically bad with money. He stated all his past wives and girlfriends pretty much ran the financials of his life, he brought home the “bacon” and they gave him an allowance. Shortly after moving in together, he gives her access/control of both his personal bank account and the joint checking account he sets up. His pay check is split between child support, rent, and these two accounts. The split was never stated. Since he’s broke, they will “figure something out”, she ends up forwarding 7k through out the next year-ish in unevenly distributed sums as legal fees for the divorce. He never asked and states it was a gift, however he says “the benefit will be returned back 4x, 5x, 10x fold”*. After the relationship she contends it wasn’t a gift and he should pay her back.
Moving on, through out this relationship, she keeps forwarding money to him from her personal account. Sum total of about 10k. She provided evidence to the jury of these transactions but also labelled a bunch of them as to him, when they were actually to the joint account. His account likewise sent her a bunch of money, about 5k. I say “his account” because under oath he testified that he never transferred her money. Which is to say she went into his account and payed herself back. She also transferred a total of about 22k from the joint account to her personal account, as illustrated in the evidence. The evidence was super cherry-picked (it was her evidence, Chad provided zero evidence on anything) so the jury was never really shown what that 22k total was for. In one of the bigger mistakes (in my opinion) of the case, the defense attorney never asked her what this money was for or if it was her making herself whole. I really wanted to reach out of the box and smack the defense for what seemed to me as incompetence on that.
Eventually Chad gets deployed for 6-months. He loses his government travel card in a bar fight. Luckily he had her $500 limit credit card. He spends to the limit, calls her up and she refills it, sometimes multiple times a month. She’s asking him to stay on the boat but keeps refilling the card, He ends up spending about 5k over the 6 months. He promises he’ll pay her back once he gets his deployment per-diem. No evidence is ever presented to the jury that it happened or did not. All we have is the credit card statements.
Eventually, the baby is born, there are hospital bills, OBGYN bills, the works. Becky pays for it all, Chad agrees he’ll pay half of what his insurance doesn’t cover. However Tri-care does not cover the birth expenses because Becky and Chad are not yet married. Becky has barely any insurance and so Chad racks up a 7k bill for the child.
Finally Chad gets relocated to a different base, the happy couple (tho increasingly less happy) agrees to relocate and find a house together. This is about May/June of 2025. The divorce has gone through, Chad is free of the ex, he takes Becky ring shopping. She is unsure if she wants to marry him at this point because “they have a lot to work through”, he retorts “who else would you marry”. They start house shopping, he does pretty much none of the work, but vetos things. The comms get pretty murky as this part of the evidence is literally screenshots from Becky’s phone cherry picking texts, sometimes cutting off mid conversation. The inferred gist is that Becky signed Chad’s signature on the lease without his consent. Somewhere during this process Becky gets pregnant with baby number 2. Chad breaks up with Becky citing the reason is that “she is controlling, vengeful, and manipulative”. Becky terminates the lease but has to pay a bunch of penalties. Amounting to about 6k. If you’ve been keeping track the number comes out to about 35k. (Again ignoring her 22k withdrawal??) She sends Chad a bill for that amount. He refuses to pay. She takes him to court and here we are.
Chad if I haven’t been clear yet, is pretty much a lothario. He’s pretty, dumb, needs to date his mother to survive, is a fey-ish reckless crayon eater who just lives life in the moment, going from one desire to the next. Even myself, feeling actively repulsed by Becky’s weeping on the stand (and boy did she weep), I found Chad to be pretty much a reprehensible scumbag. Most of the testimony was Becky’s and a large part of it she spent crying or fighting with Chad’s lawyer. The lawyer actually said the famous words: “Permission to treat the witness as hostile”. I also 100% believe that she was very controlling, but that’s also the kind of woman Chad wanted to date. Becky submitted all the evidence and the defense attorney (Chad’s) seemed to be banking on the theory that the burden of proof was on her to prove everything, and thus submitted no evidence. Unfortunately, Chad cut a very unsympathetic figure and the jury makeup was such that emotion and female in-group bias seemed to be the prime motivation for a large part of the jury.
Jury Selection
Which brings us back to jury selection. This and the actual jury deliberations are to me the most culture war interweaved part of this. Fundamentally, when the chips are down, culture war facts matter. If you want to win a jury, you need to be willing to acknowledge some less than savory stereotypes that have a lot of evidence. The core arena in this case was the Male-Female Gender wars.
I really expected to be removed during jury sections. I’ve been told that in some cases, attorneys really dislike engineers on juries. Something about overly analytical, black and white thinking, and a propensity towards confidence in their knowledge that could lead a jury. I’m sure the few trial lawyers here will tell me I’m wrong and its actually because engineers are arrogant retards. However I on this case, the anti-engineer heuristic held it ground. I think on this case the plaintiff (Becky) was really going for emotional appeals. The plaintiffs attorney dismissed 3 software engineers before me. After the 3rd one was dismissed after stating his job, the judge called a recess and took counsel back to his chambers. I assume to read the plaintiffs counsel the riot act on making jury selection take all day. As such when I sat down, he was pretty docile, I got a few general questions about contracts, deals, relationships and any military ties I had. The strategies I inferred for each counsels was:
Plaintiff:
- Stack the court with women
- Remove anyone with ties to the military
- Remove analytical people
- Remove anyone not swayed by tears
- Remove people who think spending in a relationship is not something that can be tallied
Defense:
- Remove women with kids
- Add military related people
- Add people who believe in clear contract definitions
- Remove people who believed in implied score keeping in a relationship
I specifically think the defense lost this case during jury selection. Their questions where more vague and what they were selecting for was also not great. Too much defense. Their mistake was that the jury ended up with 8/12 jurors as women. 2 of those women were both massive karens. One was a stay at home military spouse of 32 years. She pretty much wanted to rake Chad over the coals. During deliberation she accused him of fraud for every incident, and wanted to tack on punitive damages even though nothing he did was deceptive (legally required for fraud). The other Karen was a massive menace and is in large part why the jury ended up awarding the plaintiff 20k of the 35k she asked for. She threatened the bailiff on me and the single conservative male juror. Me for not budging on letting her fuck the defendant over, and the conservative because he swore at her when she was being a piece of work. She justified it as she felt “unsafe” for not getting her way.
What was the most astounding to me was how much the women were just looking for any legal pretext to side with the plaintiff, almost to a T. Oh they hemmed and hawed and occasionally gave ground when the law did not exactly fit. But it was pretty much an uphill battle the whole way. I know I’ve gotten into arguments with plenty of the male-issue posters here but in actually I am pretty biased towards men, or at least biased against common female manipulation and herd solidarity behaviors. The real fact that the plaintiff had the burden of proof and actually failed to show much of it, particularly the lack of the defense paying her back (or realistically she paying herself back from his accounts) was pretty much dismissed. The the conclusion from the beginning was that she was going to get some money, we would just haggle over how much. And towards the end when I was standing by ground on dollar amounts or laws, then they switched to taking the amount she asked for as “truth” and started trying to assign a percentage of that “as general damages” irrespective of the actual documented damages. Justice was not in their minds, it was “how do we help a sister out” minus a “stupid tax” for being dumb enough to date this guy.
And while they were bad, what was worse was the sellouts, the people who just didn’t want to be there and agreed with whatever the consensus was because they wanted to leave. Like lets fuck someone over so you can leave? Zero ability to think of a future where they might be in court and the jury just wants to fuck them over so it can leave. That really boiled my blood. And even worse, I let myself be swayed on some items, I tried to compromise on dollar amounts, but it was like that famous gun rights meme, I’d compromise and then they wanted me to compromise some more, and more, until they barely moved and I’d be 85% away from my original stance. And when I ended up standing my ground, oh the anger, the petty insults, the backhanded insinuations, it was ridiculous.
I’ve been laying awake these past few nights wondering if I should have just flexed my financial privileges, hung the jury, forced everyone to spend 8 hours a day with me in a room, day after day until they just agreed to my position or the compromised version: the 7k for the hospital (breach of contract), 3.5k out of 7k of the legal fees from the divorce (unjust enrichment), and about half of the new moving fees: 2k (breach of contract). Summing to about 12k. No fraud charges or punitive damages. I can't imagine I would have made many friends but I'm not sure I ever want to see any of these people ever again.
Inchoate Thesis
As I lie awake, looking over my crappy post, struggling for a thesis, the one that keeps popping up is that the average juror sucks. It's similar to the apocryphally famous Churchill quote: "The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." Now replace democracy -> general jury pools, and average voter -> average juror. A jurors inability to put aside innate bias should be disqualifying. Make them take an innate bias and only select them for pools orthogonal to their biases. Remove from the pool people who can't spend 3-5 days in the jury without financial hardship. America is not an economic zone, if you can't make commitments to serve a small duty to your country, you shouldn't be a citizen with voting power, or the power to decide what is justice for your fellow citizens. The actual recognition of the ingroup bias for women should be basic reading for all lawyers. The preconceived conclusion that the plaintiff was going to get money and we were just haggling over how much feels like such a miscarriage of justice that I feel actually icky for having participated in it.
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
2d ago
My field is ML Engineering (in defense research), and I would agree that we are different than a SWE, and the demand is, these days, higher. But unless the you are an LLM-MLE, the pay is commiserate if slightly higher, I make about $10 an hour more than SWEs with relatively comparable experience at my company.
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
3d ago
Or maybe he'd be an ML engineer and still easily affording his new construction house and herd of children, taking the kids out for 200$ worth of burritos every Sunday night.
Sorry to be pedantic, but this is not true either. ML Engineering has existed for quite some time, easily longer than Neural Networks have been used. It's a well paid field, but it's only paid slightly higher than the median SWE. Pretending that the LLM-ML Engineers pay is anything more than the top .1% of the field would be fallacious.
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
3d ago
But people aren't downvoting "uncivil" posts, they are downvoting posts they disagree with.
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
7d ago
As a former Sconnie, my grandmother whole heartedly endorses the brandy old-fashioned.
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
8d ago
I still have no idea why people downvote here, we aren't reddit, just because the feature exists doesn't mean it should be used.
I acknowledged that I could be using less precise terminology, because I'm not an asshole. You seem to want to be seen as one instead.
I'm not mistaken, I'm just not pedantic af about syntax. Which apparently you are. Good to know.
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