Elon Musk's legal team fumed as prospective jurors made it clear that they absolutely hated the billionaire.
Being one of the most despised men in America does come with a few downsides, it turns out.
As Elon Musk is set to stand trial in San Francisco’s federal court for allegedly manipulating Twitter’s stock, his legal team is discovering that it’s pretty hard to find impartial jurors who don’t “hate” the billionaire’s guts, according to new reporting from Courthouse News.
The judge Charles R. Breyer had to carefully present the conundrum to the over 90 prospective jurors.
“Whatever your opinion is on Mr. Musk, Twitter or Tesla, can you set it aside in the sense that you will judge the defendant based solely, emphasize solely, on the evidence produced in this trial and the law as I give it to you?” judge Breyer asked the prospective jury pool, as quoted by the outlet.
A particular lightning rod was Musk’s close ties to the Trump administration. Musk donated nearly $300 million to Trump’s presidential campaign, and led the administration’s effort to gut the federal government through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, a pet project of Musk’s.
“Even though you may have strong views on the presidency, this is not the forum where this is expressed,” Breyer emphasized. “Whatever your views of the presidency are, they are not going to influence your views in this case.”
Okay, thought I’d turn an exhausting day into possibly useful info for you all.... The U.S. institution of trial by jury is likely more familiar to some of us than others. If you’re a writer coming from outside the States, though, what may not immediately be apparent is that far, far more Americans interact with the legal system than ever show up for a civil suit or are charged with a crime.
All those jurors have to come from somewhere.
So. There are multiple requirements to be a legit juror, but mostly it boils down to, you’re a U.S. citizen, you’re over 18, and you have all your civil rights (i.e. you’re not a felon yourself). You also, so far as I know, have to be a resident of the county where the trial is taking place. In practical terms this means once you get any kind of state-issued ID, even a learner’s permit - if you’re over 18, you’re in the list the computer draws from for the next jury pool.
(Yes, I once had to arrange transportation to a jury summons when I still wasn’t legally allowed to drive by myself. Fun. Not.)
About two to three weeks before you’re due to show up, you get the summons in the mail. At which point a certain amount of profanity may ensue, because you have to prepare to upend all your plans for at least an entire day. You can ask for a deferral, or even to be dropped from selection, if one of several hardship conditions apply. You’re the sole person doing 24/7 medical care for someone, for example, or you’re going to be in the hospital on that date with major surgery involved. “My workplace won’t let me take that day off,” is NOT one of those conditions. Let the court know that, and they will then duke it out with your workplace. No, seriously, that is what will happen. The jury summons is a civic duty. It is, effectively, being “drafted” for that day. Constitutionally. I would not want to be the employer who has to hear from the Clerk of Courts. It would not go well.
So, you prep, you clear your schedule, there’s usually a questionnaire to fill out (either on paper or, more recently, on a county website) so they have some background to make sure you’re who they meant to call... and then you wait. In my home county, you wait until the night before you’re due to come in, and call the automated line to see if they still need a jury pool the next day. It’s possible the lawyers will hash things out and call the trial off. No trial, no jury needed.
Assuming you’re not that lucky, then it’s get up very early in the morning so you can get to the courthouse on time. They try to put courthouses near the center of the county, but some counties are very big. And you come prepared, because you’re likely to be there from 8 AM to 5 PM or later.
My experience is that it’s very cold in courthouses. Don’t ask me why. After the first trip I started bringing multiple layers so I didn’t freeze myself into bronchitis. It... mostly works.
Summons in hand, you go in through the metal detector; anything else you bring in with you (coats, water, etc.) has to go in a tray and fit through an x-ray machine under the unblinking and likely already-tired eyes of a couple deputies. And you take a deep breath before plunging into what will be an introvert’s most horrible day, because you will be surrounded by strangers you cannot get away from.
You follow the various staff directing you to the first auditorium, where you hand in your summons, let the clerks know whether you’re employed and whether or not your employer is going to pay you for the day (often they don’t), then try to find a seat not so close to the speakers that your ears will get blasted when everyone else shows up and they show the instructional vids about voting being a civic duty, take it seriously, etc., etc.
(It is and I do, but I’ve seen the vids so many times by now....)
Aaand then you wait. And wait. Often two hours plus. While the attorneys up in the courtroom overhead are duking things out with each other, and with the judge, and reading all the questionnaires to try and figure out who they might want on their jury and what questions they want to ask.
A certain number of people may get let go at this point, depending on how many trials they’re picking for. The clerk of court quipped that they ought to consider lottery tickets....
Finally the attorneys hit the end of when the judge will allow them to keep delaying things, and all the pool gets led upstairs to the courtroom itself. Once everyone’s in, all rise for the judge, there’s another lecture on civic duty, fair and impartial, and so on.
(Everyone is already freezing, tired, and there’s no coffee. Seriously, there’s a spot for snack and drink machines when we have breaks, but not one drop of coffee. The court clerks also mourn this as an affront against humanity.)
The attorneys - prosecution and defense - get introduced, as well as the defendant. And then the questions start. One of the first being, does anyone in the pool know anyone 1) who’s going to be in court or 2) one of the other jurors? Even with random selection, it’s possible you get some people who know each other....
Other questions that may show up include but are not limited to: Can you be fair and impartial with X charges? (Given you have no idea what you’re a jury for until this point, from a traffic ticket to murder, this is important.) Do you think you can judge the credibility of a witness? Have you, a family member, or someone you know been involved with a similar crime? Do you know any of the witnesses?
Once they get past all of that and mark down a preliminary “who’s affected by what and why”, then the attorneys go back to the judge’s bench and start discussing who they’ll pick. Jurors don’t get to overhear this. If they have specific follow-up questions for a particular jury candidate, you get called up to the judge’s bench to answer them.
(My frank and honest answers seemed to unnerve both the prosecution and the defense. Heh.)
BTW, a jury may be less than the classic twelve. For many trials they just want six or seven, so they’ll pick out eight or nine (so they have a few alternates). They’re also likely to be selecting juries for several trials from the same pool. So once they make their first picks, those jurors are brought over to the jury box, sworn in, told not to talk with anyone about the case, and released until court is back in session. Everyone else has to sit and wait through the rest of the picks....
Yes, you do get a lunch break. Eventually. Depending on how far the judge thinks he can push people to get the attorneys done - that’ll vary, especially if you have older jurors or those with medical conditions who need to eat something with medicine or end up in trouble. Lunch may break for an hour, which isn’t as long as you’d think because there’s nowhere nearby to get solid food unless you hit the road. In lunch hour traffic. Fun.
(I bring lunch in a cooler. Have I mentioned I’ve done this a lot of times?)
And then it’s back to the next set of attorneys, and questions, and... it’s a long, cold, exhausting day surrounded by people. Though if you are selected, the trial is usually the next day or at most later that week, so with luck you’re only upended for a few more days.
Whether or not you get picked, you’re then out of the pool for a year. If they do call you back early, you can tell them that!
Jury duty. Necessary, somewhat interesting, very chilly. So it goes!
Kind of a magical day, a total “the mysteries plan” type day——Jury duty morphed into a possible 3 week trial experience!, Although—the chances of me being chosen are less than infinitesimal.
3 jurors told profound Criminal Justice System failure stories. Two said that they couldn’t be fair in a trial where police would be witnesses because of their past negative interactions with the police.. The 3rd, her eyes welling with tears, said “The police killed my brother and my son after a high speed chase in Oakland”.
When the judge asked if she could be fair to both sides as a trial juror, she screamed out “The system’s not working!”
I have picked many juries prior to that and had never heard such dramatic statement’s of hostility towards the police uttered by potential jurors. We potential jurors were asked to return to the jury room. We latter learned that the case settled, probably in part at least to what the 3 potential jurors had said about the police earlier.
First warm day in an ice age, really warm. After leaving jury land, I treadmilled at Valley gym for 36 minutes. On the way home, at the Palendale and Mc Henery red light, there was a homeless man and his dog. He was flying a sign (asking for help). I gave him $5 and two bottles of sparkling water. As I waited at the light, he drank in the heat. And, as he drank, I healed.
He healed me.
It was the perfect gesture “at”.” At" the callous hardness of the jury court experience.
The homeless man , a white maybe 35 year old, was blackend from sleeping out side. It’s been a brutal cold wet stretch out there—But, today it was warm and he and his dog now had water.
Note:
Re: "the mystery’s plan", above, the Inuit Indians have a saying that there are two plans every day: your plan and the mystery’s plan.
I had been a trial lawyer for about 40 years before I was called to jury duty in April of 2023. I have been in many jury trials as a criminal defense attorney during those 40 years. Because I was a criminal defense attorney, it was not likely that the District Attorney would leave me on the criminal case in which I was potential juror.
When we are picking a jury, we ask potential jurors questions to attempt to determine if they could be fair given the facts of the trial. I think that jury selection is the hardest part of trial work. It involves a lot of mind reading and guess work.
I have passed that light at Palendale and McHenery many times on my way home from Trader Joes or the gym. The homeless man and his dog were there on a little island one lane from the curb many times. If I stopped at the light by them, I’d give the homeless man money and or water. He camped in a grassy area 1/4 mile down Mcherey near rthe road. I would see him there as I drove passed at times.
He may have moved on because I haven’t seen him there for awhile
When I did a lot of work with the homeless in 2017 and 2018, I would say to myself when I handed a bag of food to a homeless person that this gesture was “At” the harshness of society that I had experienced. In other words, instead of retaliating against people who had wronged me , I passed out a bag. I had a healing encounter with the homeless person. In accepting the bag, they healed me. So, my response to hostility, which demanded a response, was a healing gesture, passing out the bags.
I will not spend the rest of 2024 focusing on Trump and the chaos in the Republican Party, but today it has been impossible to look away.
In Trump’s election interference trial in Manhattan, Judge Juan Merchan this morning dismissed one of the selected jurors after she expressed concern for her anonymity and thus for her safety. All of the reporters in the courtroom have shared so much information about the jurors that they seemed at risk of being identified, but Fox News Channel host Jesse Watters not only ran a video segment about a juror, he suggested she was “concerning.” Trump shared the video on social media.
The juror told the judge that so much information about her had become public that her friends and family had begun to ask her if she was one of the jurors. Legal analyst Joyce White Vance noted jurors’ fear for their safety was a concern normally seen only “in a case involving violent organized crime.”
Nonetheless, by the end of the day, twelve people had been chosen to serve as jurors. Tomorrow the process will continue in order to find six alternate jurors.
It is a courtesy for the two sides at a trial to share with each other the names of their next witnesses so the other team can prepare for them. Today the prosecution declined to provide the names of their first three witnesses to the defense lawyers out of concern that Trump would broadcast them on social media. “Mr. Trump has been tweeting about the witnesses. We’re not telling them who the witnesses are,” prosecutor Joshua Steinglass said.
Merchan said he “can’t blame them.” Trump’s defense attorney Todd Blanche offered to "commit to the court and the [prosecution] that President Trump will not [post] about any witness" on social media. "I don't think you can make that representation," Merchan said, in a recognition that Trump cannot be trusted, even by his own lawyers.
An article in the New York Times today confirmed that the trial will give Trump plenty of publicity, but not the kind that he prefers. Lawyer Norman L. Eisen walked through questions about what a prison sentence for Trump could look like.
Trump’s popular image is taking a hit in other ways, as well. Zac Anderson and Erin Mansfield of USA Today reported that Trump is funneling money from his campaign fundraising directly into his businesses. According to a new report filed with the Federal Election Commission, in February and March the campaign wrote checks totaling $411,287 to Mar-a-Lago and in March a check for $62,337 to Trump National Doral Miami.
Experts say it is legal for candidates to pay their own businesses for services used by the campaign so long as they pay fair market value. At the same time, they note that since Trump appears to be desperate for money, “it looks bad.”
Astonishingly, Trump’s trial was not the biggest domestic story today. Republicans in Congress were in chaos as members of the extremist Freedom Caucus worked to derail the national security supplemental bills that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has introduced in place of the Senate bill, although they track that bill closely.
The House Rules Committee spent the day debating the foreign aid package, which appropriates aid for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan separately. The Israel bill also contains $9.1 billion in humanitarian aid for Gaza and other countries. A fourth bill focuses on forcing the Chinese owners of TikTok to sell the company, as well as on imposing sanctions on Russia and Iran.
At stake in the House Rules Committee was Johnson’s plan to allow the House to debate and vote on each measure separately, and then recombine them all into a single measure if they all pass. This would allow extremist Republicans to vote against aid to Ukraine, while still tying the pieces all together to send to the Senate. As Robert Jimison outlined in the New York Times, this complicated plan meant that the Rules Committee vote to allow such a maneuver was crucial to the bill’s passage.
The extremist House Republicans were adamantly opposed to the plan because of their staunch opposition to aid for Ukraine. They wrote in a memo on Wednesday: “This tactic allows Johnson to pass priorities favored by President Biden, the swamp and the Ukraine war machine with a supermajority of House members, leaving conservatives out to dry.”
Extremists Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Thomas Massie (R-KY) vowed to throw House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) out of the speakership, but Democrats Tom Suozzi of New York and Jared Moskowitz of Florida have said they would vote to keep him in his seat, thereby defanging the attack on his leadership.
So the extremists instead tried to load the measures up with amendments prohibiting funds from being used for abortion, removing humanitarian aid for Gaza, opposing a two-state solution to the Hamas-Israel war, calling for a wall at the southern border of the U.S., defunding the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and so on.
Greene was especially active in opposition to aid to Ukraine. She tried to amend the bill to direct the president to withdraw the U.S. from NATO and demanded that any members of Congress voting for aid to Ukraine be conscripted into the Ukraine army as well as have their salaries taken to offset funding. She wanted to stop funding until Ukraine “turns over all information related to Hunter Biden and Burisma,” and to require Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to resign. More curiously, she suggested amending the Ukraine bill so that funding would require “restrictions on ethnic minorities’, including Hungarians in Transcarpathia, right to use their native languages in schools are lifted.” This language echoes a very specific piece of Russian propaganda.
Finally, Moskowitz proposed “that Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene…should be appointed as Vladimir Putin’s Special Envoy to the United States Congress.”
Many congress members have left Washington, D.C., since Friday was to be the first day of a planned recess. This meant the partisan majority on the floor fluctuated. Olivia Beavers of Politico reported that that instability made Freedom Caucus members nervous enough to put together a Floor Action Response Team (FART—I am not making this up) to make sure other Republicans didn’t limit the power of the extremists when they were off the floor.
The name of their response team seems likely to be their way to signal their disrespect for the entire Congress. Their fellow Republicans are returning the heat. Today Mike Turner (R-OH) referred to the extremists as the Bully Caucus on MSNBC and said, “We need to get back to professionalism, we need to get back to governing, we need to get back to legislating.” Derrick Van Orden (R-WI) told Juliegrace Brufke of Axios: "The vast majority of the Republican Party in the House of Representatives...are sick and tired of having people who...constantly blackmail the speaker of the House.”
Another Republican representative, Jake LaTurner of Kansas, announced today he will not run for reelection. He joins more than 20 other Republican representatives heading for the exits.
After all the drama, the House Rules Committee voted 6–3 tonight to advance the foreign aid package to the House floor. Three Republicans voted nay. While it is customary for the opposition party to vote against advancing bills out of the committee, the Democrats broke with tradition and voted in favor.
