9 ms·

My wife was summoned for jury duty, and the case had to do with sexual abuse. At jury selection time they ask if a prospective juror would have difficulty being

My wife was summoned for jury duty, and the case had to do with sexual abuse. At jury selection time they ask if a prospective juror would have difficulty being impartial because of the nature of the case. If you were uncomfortable discussing the matter, you could ask to be taken aside to discuss without the others in the room hearing it. Out of a few dozen people, seven women left the room to explain why they could not be impartial, some of them returning in tears. They weren't gone for a short while, either, many of them took 20 or 30 minutes before returning to the court room. One of them was called back out of the room at the very end, and my wife suspects that she was actively being abused and this was an opportunity to seek help without the abuser being present. This isn't something that I have to personally worry about if I'm by myself, but it's something that so many women do have to worry about all the time. I can't even imagine the burden that women must carry.

sandworm101 5y ago
If they came back in tears and were removed from the jury, then the system worked. A clearly impartial potential juror was removed and a past victim was saved from a horrible experience of sitting through such testimony. But what about those who have been abused but aren't in tears? This came up very recently. One of the Ghislaine Maxwell jurors discussed his history of being abused with other jurors. The question becomes then whether anyone who has been abused can ever be impartial about abuse. To say that they cannot, imho, does victims a great disservice. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59884806 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59884806
- deanCommie 5y ago
  I find the very premise of trying to find an "impartial" jury very strange. It makes sense at first pass, but falls apart soon after. Are these not to be a jury of my "peers". Are not all humans biased in one way or another. If being abused creates bias, why wouldn't NOT being abused also not create bias. We don't have perfect access to information. Sometimes in order to be considered impartial, jurors are basically expected to have no familiarity with basic fundamental news stories. Are people so disconnected from reality really "peers"? Ultimately, I guess, it's the best we can do.
  - woodruffw 5y ago
    Impartiality in a jury trial context doesn't refer to the absence of biases (we all have them and truly getting rid of them is an impossible task), but a conscious effect by the jurors to discharge their office without prejudice, i.e., without allowing their biases to manifest as judgments independent of the evidence presented in court. Put another way: there wouldn't be a point in deliberation if we didn't have biases. Our justice system trusts and (weakly) attempts to enforce the gap between those biases and prejudices that would actually interfere with the court's duty.
    - jerf 5y ago
      And to put it another way, the job of a juror is to convict or exonerate the person on trial, not to convict or exonerate their own abusers by proxy. Vulcans might not have a problem with this, but humans so obviously do that pretending otherwise is impractical.
      - bcrosby95 5y ago
        I've served on a few juries. From my experience, the average person thinks its much easier to get out of it due to biases than it actually is.
  - 300bps 5y ago
    Are not all humans biased in one way or another This appears to be binary thinking. There are nearly infinite degrees of bias. Strong emotions are one way to ensure that someone is heavily biased. That's what the jury system is trying to avoid. So someone who has never been abused can still be biased in literally any way. But the presumption is that without having such an emotional personal experience with it means they are less likely to be heavily biased. They'll be more likely to be swayed by the testimony in court rather than their experience outside of the court room.
  - Sebb767 5y ago
    If you're accused but innocent and provide a good case for your innocence, but a juror provides a crying testimony that no one believed them in the jury room, leading to you being sentenced, you'd probably think differently. Sure, we can't get a perfectly impartial jury. But someone with a past trauma probably won't be able to judge the case for its merits.
- kmonsen 5y ago
  If you remove any jurors with history of abuse, do you not remove all the people that have life experience that could be relevant? With a jury of only lets say strong white males that have never been abused or abuse adjacent, but have had several experience where they felt woman didn't give them enough respect are we that would seem a lot worse to me. Obviously this sounds like an extreme example, but the reality is that such a large part of the population has been the victim in abuse situations that you are going to disqualify into a situation similar to this.
  - tomp 5y ago
    I'm a white male who's never been sexually abused but I can clearly see that's wrong. This, and being more objective / less emotional (due to not seeing it personally) would probably make me a better juror in such a case than someone who's personally experienced it.
    - kmonsen 5y ago
      I don't know, I am also a white male and I feel I cannot understand how abuse really works. Of course this might just be me being dense, doesn't say anything about you or anyone else.
    - not2b 5y ago
      With no experience of abuse, you might more likely to be persuaded by arguments like "why didn't she report it earlier" than people with actual experience, who know exactly why.
  - kazinator 5y ago
    I think the whole concept of random citizens being pulled in for jury duty is idiotic. Jurors should be professionals who are trained in being jurors: who, for one thing, thoroughly understand topics in critical reasoning such as fallacies, and cognitive biases. They should be properly paid, and so are not sitting there on a Saturday morning, socking it to the defendant out of spite for being dragged out of their regular lives without adequate compensation.
- rectang 5y ago
  > If they came back in tears and were removed from the jury, then the system worked. Not true, since no abusers came back in tears and were removed from the jury. Or do you consider abusers impartial but abuse victims biased?
- mywacaday 5y ago
  Rightly or wrongly its not about disservice to a victim turning up for jury duty its about disservice to the accused. Imagine if you were wrongly prosecuted for for abuse, found guilty and then discovered that three members of the jury had themselves suffered the same abuse you were accused of, you'd immediately look for a re-trial.
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
edit: deleted, not worth trying to add any discussion to a topic like this.
- throwanem 5y ago
  Why not? It's not as if the exemption questionnaire on the back of the summons has a checkbox for it. I've been called for jury duty any number of times. Not once has anyone ever called me, personally, out of one room and into another - always as part of a group of selectees heading to a courtroom or voir dire or whatever. Between that and everything else, it doesn't seem like a leap at all.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  Abuse is often ongoing for long periods of time, so I don't know that it's necessarily implausible.
- fullstop 5y ago
  > Seems like a hell of a leap. What are the odds someone is being abused concurrent with jury duty vs any other time in their life up until that point? Not really. In abusive relationships, the abuser often controls every aspect of the abused person's life and there are not opportunities to seek help without the abuser knowing. It's why there are sometimes signs in the bathrooms of women's health clinics informing the patient to initial their sample cup in red marker if they are being abused or have something that they wish to discuss in private. This may well have been one of her only chances to speak with someone without an abuser knowing. She was the only one called back when the selection was complete. I've been called for jury duty several times and this has never happened while I was there.
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    We've all heard that cliched phrase about the word "assume." This happened in a courthouse, not a hospital. I think the context of the discussion behind closed doors could have just as easily been "that is so bad you really need to consider reporting it" or even something more mundane. In any case, seems a little farcical to assume that meant she was actively being abused though it certainly seems like a decent one of many possibilities. I'm not saying your theory isn't plausible. I'm saying you're getting tunnel vision on the first plausible thing you came across.
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
If we are removing all jurors who have been abused because they are 'not impartial', aren't we left with a collection of people who are totally ignorant? The jury has to judge how a reasonable person would act in a certain situation, who is lying and who is telling the truth. Off one end, we have victim blamind and rapists walking free, off another end, uk had "serial liar" who invented false rape allegations and sent 9 innocent people to jail.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  The whole jury system in founded on ignorance. Both sides don't want anyone who was a cop, knows any cops, has studied the law, or was ever arrested. Often, people with any kind of higher education will be dismissed. Last time I went to jury duty they asked anyone who had ever been party to any legal matter to leave. It's pretty wild.
  - sandworm101 5y ago
    >> Both sides don't want anyone who was a cop Except for cops. Cops certainly like to have fellow cops on their juries. There is an old joke about removing Manhattan jury cases to Staten Island. All the NYPD cops seem to retire there. So if the case involves potential police wrongdoing or even just police testimony, one side wants a Staten Island jury as many jurors will have at least some familial connection to the police.
    - alasdair_ 5y ago
      The same thing happens with national security cases being tried in Virginia. This is one of the main reasons Snowden is unwilling to return to the US - the jury would be massively rigged against him.
      - vkou 5y ago
        Is it any more 'rigged' than many of jury trials that do go through?
  - 5y ago
TigeriusKirk 5y ago
Similar experience here. In the last few months I was in the selection pool for a domestic abuse case. The judge asked if anyone had personal experience with domestic abuse and then asked each juror who raised their hand if they wanted to discuss it in private. Some gave a brief version of their story in the courtroom, usually it was their parents while they were growing up. Some preferred privacy, which the judge said they'd come back to later. The jury selection was completed without ever calling those people in for private explanations. No one who had raised their hand for that question was selected. As far as impartiality goes, I certainly felt some bias against the accused just based on the nature of the crime and his courtroom demeanor. But I was resolved that I would keep that in mind if I was selected and treat him as fairly as possible despite that. Impartiality is the ideal, and you usually have to make the effort to make it happen. In some circumstances where you have personal experience with similar crimes, that may be too much to ask.
Mezzie 5y ago
> This isn't something that I have to personally worry about if I'm by myself, but it's something that so many women do have to worry about all the time. I can't even imagine the burden that women must carry. Not just women, but children. I was aware that I could be sexually assaulted/harrassed and what to do about it by the time I was 5, and I started getting uncomfortable comments in person around age 11. I'm also exceptionally lucky and have never actually been assaulted. Not particularly relevant to most people here, but some of you will have daughters, so. Edit: Also relevant potentially to your colleagues and co-workers, since one reason I stopped participating in tech spaces while I was a teenager (I still coded, just only alone or anonymously) was because I felt unsafe being a 13-14 year old girl who was the only female in a room/space with dozens of men, some of whom were 2-3 times my age. I don't think I can overstate the danger alarm bells, especially given how rampant homophobia was back then and I was also gay.
- brnaftr360 5y ago
  There's a considerable asymmetry here between men and women. I'm really curious about sussing it out and understanding how it develops. At an early age, about 5 or so I was exposed to sex, with peers, male/female. Later I was raped through coercion by two older children at 10-ish, male/female. Additionally none of this was ever reported until adulthood. As a male I've repeatedly been put in positions that I could describe as uncomfortable (though I don't, usually), pressured intimacy, catcalling, sexually forward girls/men... Having gotten feedback from female peers in adulthood, I've gotten to wondering about the way that society tends to articulate sex and rape to women. The summary of framing that I've gotten from one of my intimates, is that at an early age women are given the impression that sex is their single lever in a relationship or socially. Sex is the only way which a woman can gain approval. Which, to me, seems like it would drastically amplify the experience of rape. There's also the puritanical considerations of virginity and slut shaming, etc... But I don't know that it's really a running theme in individual women. And then there's the proactive modality. At the time of my rapes, I was not informed on rape or consent, and so the context wasn't that of violence, but simply commonplace arm twisting, and because it was as such I only ever saw that it could be framed as a traumatic episode much later. On the obverse, having been informed of such things as detestable, as violent, as traumatic and serious and driven to reporting it, I could imagine that it would escalate my feelings, and I suspect so would dealing with it externally with strangers and institutions and perhaps having some artificial narrative constructed by interlopers either directly or indirectly. I mean, consider having to talk to parents, police, social workers and so on it's implies a considerable escalation from the day-to-day. Especially as a child. Of course this seldom happens. I wonder if it's a sort of funeral psychology where you feel compelled to cry and mourn because that's what's implied, even if you don't feel the need. But as a male having gone through these situations, without the framework being described, but rather having the privilege to describe it myself, it simply never evolved into a trauma. And I think this might be borne out by the statistics wherein boys/men simply do not report rape, just beyond the fact that it may happen less frequently. But having direct perspective on it, I wonder if I'm an oddball, or if trauma resulting from female rape is sort of amplified by the way women are socialized and informed.
cortesoft 5y ago
When I was in a jury pool for a murder trial, I remember being shocked at how many people raised their hand when the question of whether they had personal experience with murder was asked. I figured barely anyone would raise their hand, but so many people had either had a close family member murdered, or were themselves accused of murder at some point. I really realized how sheltered my life has been.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  People lie to get out of jury duty especially trials expected to be long and/or shocking.
  - cortesoft 5y ago
    I am sure it happens, but I feel like a lot of people say they would lie but when it comes down to it and a very serious judge is asking you from the bench, I bet fewer lie than who say they would. They also don't mess around with jury duty... one of our jurors went missing on the walk from the jury gathering spot to the courtroom, and the judge was PISSED. Sent the bailiff looking for them to hold them in contempt.
- int0x2e 5y ago
  The US is an extremely violent place. On most violent crime categories, it ranks highest among developed nations.
heresie-dabord 5y ago
A complementary anecdote, I think worth adding here. I (male, white) served on a jury that comprised six women. The trial was a charge of sexual assault. Every one of them had a personal tale of assault to tell. It was as tense in the deliberations as you can imagine... like 12 Angry Men [1] but even more harrowing. I am convinced that the only reason we were able to arrive at a just verdict is because one of these jurors also had the courage to discuss the case of her beloved relative who was falsely accused of rape and was exonerated only many years later, after his life had been destroyed. We were able to focus on the evidence. But it was not an easy deliberation. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12_Angry_Men_(1957_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12_Angry_Men_(1957_film)

sandworm101 5y ago

If they came back in tears and were removed from the jury, then the system worked. A clearly impartial potential juror was removed and a past victim was saved from a horrible experience of sitting through such testimony. But what about those who have been abused but aren't in tears? This came up very recently. One of the Ghislaine Maxwell jurors discussed his history of being abused with other jurors. The question becomes then whether anyone who has been abused can ever be impartial about abuse. To say that they cannot, imho, does victims a great disservice. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59884806 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59884806

deanCommie 5y ago
I find the very premise of trying to find an "impartial" jury very strange. It makes sense at first pass, but falls apart soon after. Are these not to be a jury of my "peers". Are not all humans biased in one way or another. If being abused creates bias, why wouldn't NOT being abused also not create bias. We don't have perfect access to information. Sometimes in order to be considered impartial, jurors are basically expected to have no familiarity with basic fundamental news stories. Are people so disconnected from reality really "peers"? Ultimately, I guess, it's the best we can do.
- woodruffw 5y ago
  Impartiality in a jury trial context doesn't refer to the absence of biases (we all have them and truly getting rid of them is an impossible task), but a conscious effect by the jurors to discharge their office without prejudice, i.e., without allowing their biases to manifest as judgments independent of the evidence presented in court. Put another way: there wouldn't be a point in deliberation if we didn't have biases. Our justice system trusts and (weakly) attempts to enforce the gap between those biases and prejudices that would actually interfere with the court's duty.
  - jerf 5y ago
    And to put it another way, the job of a juror is to convict or exonerate the person on trial, not to convict or exonerate their own abusers by proxy. Vulcans might not have a problem with this, but humans so obviously do that pretending otherwise is impractical.
    - bcrosby95 5y ago
      I've served on a few juries. From my experience, the average person thinks its much easier to get out of it due to biases than it actually is.
- 300bps 5y ago
  Are not all humans biased in one way or another This appears to be binary thinking. There are nearly infinite degrees of bias. Strong emotions are one way to ensure that someone is heavily biased. That's what the jury system is trying to avoid. So someone who has never been abused can still be biased in literally any way. But the presumption is that without having such an emotional personal experience with it means they are less likely to be heavily biased. They'll be more likely to be swayed by the testimony in court rather than their experience outside of the court room.
- Sebb767 5y ago
  If you're accused but innocent and provide a good case for your innocence, but a juror provides a crying testimony that no one believed them in the jury room, leading to you being sentenced, you'd probably think differently. Sure, we can't get a perfectly impartial jury. But someone with a past trauma probably won't be able to judge the case for its merits.
kmonsen 5y ago
If you remove any jurors with history of abuse, do you not remove all the people that have life experience that could be relevant? With a jury of only lets say strong white males that have never been abused or abuse adjacent, but have had several experience where they felt woman didn't give them enough respect are we that would seem a lot worse to me. Obviously this sounds like an extreme example, but the reality is that such a large part of the population has been the victim in abuse situations that you are going to disqualify into a situation similar to this.
- tomp 5y ago
  I'm a white male who's never been sexually abused but I can clearly see that's wrong. This, and being more objective / less emotional (due to not seeing it personally) would probably make me a better juror in such a case than someone who's personally experienced it.
  - kmonsen 5y ago
    I don't know, I am also a white male and I feel I cannot understand how abuse really works. Of course this might just be me being dense, doesn't say anything about you or anyone else.
  - not2b 5y ago
    With no experience of abuse, you might more likely to be persuaded by arguments like "why didn't she report it earlier" than people with actual experience, who know exactly why.
- kazinator 5y ago
  I think the whole concept of random citizens being pulled in for jury duty is idiotic. Jurors should be professionals who are trained in being jurors: who, for one thing, thoroughly understand topics in critical reasoning such as fallacies, and cognitive biases. They should be properly paid, and so are not sitting there on a Saturday morning, socking it to the defendant out of spite for being dragged out of their regular lives without adequate compensation.
rectang 5y ago
> If they came back in tears and were removed from the jury, then the system worked. Not true, since no abusers came back in tears and were removed from the jury. Or do you consider abusers impartial but abuse victims biased?
mywacaday 5y ago
Rightly or wrongly its not about disservice to a victim turning up for jury duty its about disservice to the accused. Imagine if you were wrongly prosecuted for for abuse, found guilty and then discovered that three members of the jury had themselves suffered the same abuse you were accused of, you'd immediately look for a re-trial.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago

edit: deleted, not worth trying to add any discussion to a topic like this.

throwanem 5y ago
Why not? It's not as if the exemption questionnaire on the back of the summons has a checkbox for it. I've been called for jury duty any number of times. Not once has anyone ever called me, personally, out of one room and into another - always as part of a group of selectees heading to a courtroom or voir dire or whatever. Between that and everything else, it doesn't seem like a leap at all.
emodendroket 5y ago
Abuse is often ongoing for long periods of time, so I don't know that it's necessarily implausible.
fullstop 5y ago
> Seems like a hell of a leap. What are the odds someone is being abused concurrent with jury duty vs any other time in their life up until that point? Not really. In abusive relationships, the abuser often controls every aspect of the abused person's life and there are not opportunities to seek help without the abuser knowing. It's why there are sometimes signs in the bathrooms of women's health clinics informing the patient to initial their sample cup in red marker if they are being abused or have something that they wish to discuss in private. This may well have been one of her only chances to speak with someone without an abuser knowing. She was the only one called back when the selection was complete. I've been called for jury duty several times and this has never happened while I was there.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  We've all heard that cliched phrase about the word "assume." This happened in a courthouse, not a hospital. I think the context of the discussion behind closed doors could have just as easily been "that is so bad you really need to consider reporting it" or even something more mundane. In any case, seems a little farcical to assume that meant she was actively being abused though it certainly seems like a decent one of many possibilities. I'm not saying your theory isn't plausible. I'm saying you're getting tunnel vision on the first plausible thing you came across.

ClumsyPilot 5y ago

If we are removing all jurors who have been abused because they are 'not impartial', aren't we left with a collection of people who are totally ignorant? The jury has to judge how a reasonable person would act in a certain situation, who is lying and who is telling the truth. Off one end, we have victim blamind and rapists walking free, off another end, uk had "serial liar" who invented false rape allegations and sent 9 innocent people to jail.

jeffbee 5y ago
The whole jury system in founded on ignorance. Both sides don't want anyone who was a cop, knows any cops, has studied the law, or was ever arrested. Often, people with any kind of higher education will be dismissed. Last time I went to jury duty they asked anyone who had ever been party to any legal matter to leave. It's pretty wild.
- sandworm101 5y ago
  >> Both sides don't want anyone who was a cop Except for cops. Cops certainly like to have fellow cops on their juries. There is an old joke about removing Manhattan jury cases to Staten Island. All the NYPD cops seem to retire there. So if the case involves potential police wrongdoing or even just police testimony, one side wants a Staten Island jury as many jurors will have at least some familial connection to the police.
  - alasdair_ 5y ago
    The same thing happens with national security cases being tried in Virginia. This is one of the main reasons Snowden is unwilling to return to the US - the jury would be massively rigged against him.
    - vkou 5y ago
      Is it any more 'rigged' than many of jury trials that do go through?
- 5y ago

TigeriusKirk 5y ago

Similar experience here. In the last few months I was in the selection pool for a domestic abuse case. The judge asked if anyone had personal experience with domestic abuse and then asked each juror who raised their hand if they wanted to discuss it in private. Some gave a brief version of their story in the courtroom, usually it was their parents while they were growing up. Some preferred privacy, which the judge said they'd come back to later. The jury selection was completed without ever calling those people in for private explanations. No one who had raised their hand for that question was selected. As far as impartiality goes, I certainly felt some bias against the accused just based on the nature of the crime and his courtroom demeanor. But I was resolved that I would keep that in mind if I was selected and treat him as fairly as possible despite that. Impartiality is the ideal, and you usually have to make the effort to make it happen. In some circumstances where you have personal experience with similar crimes, that may be too much to ask.

Mezzie 5y ago

> This isn't something that I have to personally worry about if I'm by myself, but it's something that so many women do have to worry about all the time. I can't even imagine the burden that women must carry. Not just women, but children. I was aware that I could be sexually assaulted/harrassed and what to do about it by the time I was 5, and I started getting uncomfortable comments in person around age 11. I'm also exceptionally lucky and have never actually been assaulted. Not particularly relevant to most people here, but some of you will have daughters, so. Edit: Also relevant potentially to your colleagues and co-workers, since one reason I stopped participating in tech spaces while I was a teenager (I still coded, just only alone or anonymously) was because I felt unsafe being a 13-14 year old girl who was the only female in a room/space with dozens of men, some of whom were 2-3 times my age. I don't think I can overstate the danger alarm bells, especially given how rampant homophobia was back then and I was also gay.

brnaftr360 5y ago
There's a considerable asymmetry here between men and women. I'm really curious about sussing it out and understanding how it develops. At an early age, about 5 or so I was exposed to sex, with peers, male/female. Later I was raped through coercion by two older children at 10-ish, male/female. Additionally none of this was ever reported until adulthood. As a male I've repeatedly been put in positions that I could describe as uncomfortable (though I don't, usually), pressured intimacy, catcalling, sexually forward girls/men... Having gotten feedback from female peers in adulthood, I've gotten to wondering about the way that society tends to articulate sex and rape to women. The summary of framing that I've gotten from one of my intimates, is that at an early age women are given the impression that sex is their single lever in a relationship or socially. Sex is the only way which a woman can gain approval. Which, to me, seems like it would drastically amplify the experience of rape. There's also the puritanical considerations of virginity and slut shaming, etc... But I don't know that it's really a running theme in individual women. And then there's the proactive modality. At the time of my rapes, I was not informed on rape or consent, and so the context wasn't that of violence, but simply commonplace arm twisting, and because it was as such I only ever saw that it could be framed as a traumatic episode much later. On the obverse, having been informed of such things as detestable, as violent, as traumatic and serious and driven to reporting it, I could imagine that it would escalate my feelings, and I suspect so would dealing with it externally with strangers and institutions and perhaps having some artificial narrative constructed by interlopers either directly or indirectly. I mean, consider having to talk to parents, police, social workers and so on it's implies a considerable escalation from the day-to-day. Especially as a child. Of course this seldom happens. I wonder if it's a sort of funeral psychology where you feel compelled to cry and mourn because that's what's implied, even if you don't feel the need. But as a male having gone through these situations, without the framework being described, but rather having the privilege to describe it myself, it simply never evolved into a trauma. And I think this might be borne out by the statistics wherein boys/men simply do not report rape, just beyond the fact that it may happen less frequently. But having direct perspective on it, I wonder if I'm an oddball, or if trauma resulting from female rape is sort of amplified by the way women are socialized and informed.

cortesoft 5y ago

When I was in a jury pool for a murder trial, I remember being shocked at how many people raised their hand when the question of whether they had personal experience with murder was asked. I figured barely anyone would raise their hand, but so many people had either had a close family member murdered, or were themselves accused of murder at some point. I really realized how sheltered my life has been.

dragonwriter 5y ago
People lie to get out of jury duty especially trials expected to be long and/or shocking.
- cortesoft 5y ago
  I am sure it happens, but I feel like a lot of people say they would lie but when it comes down to it and a very serious judge is asking you from the bench, I bet fewer lie than who say they would. They also don't mess around with jury duty... one of our jurors went missing on the walk from the jury gathering spot to the courtroom, and the judge was PISSED. Sent the bailiff looking for them to hold them in contempt.
int0x2e 5y ago
The US is an extremely violent place. On most violent crime categories, it ranks highest among developed nations.

heresie-dabord 5y ago

A complementary anecdote, I think worth adding here. I (male, white) served on a jury that comprised six women. The trial was a charge of sexual assault. Every one of them had a personal tale of assault to tell. It was as tense in the deliberations as you can imagine... like 12 Angry Men [1] but even more harrowing. I am convinced that the only reason we were able to arrive at a just verdict is because one of these jurors also had the courage to discuss the case of her beloved relative who was falsely accused of rape and was exonerated only many years later, after his life had been destroyed. We were able to focus on the evidence. But it was not an easy deliberation. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12_Angry_Men_(1957_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12_Angry_Men_(1957_film)