Moving on. Our main story tonight concerns jury duty.

A summons for which is one of the things you least want to

find in the mail, aside from maybe a bill, or a human toe.

And please, a pinky?

Call me when you're serious enough to send a middle piggy

then maybe we'll talk business.

Complaining about jury duty has long been

a beloved American past time.

Just watch this caller to a 90's local TV show,

delights the host with his whining.

GREG: They put us down in this holding pen,

they call it "the jury assembly room."

-Yeah. -GREG: The J-A-R, the JAR.

They stick you in this JAR, with like 300 other people

-for a whole week. -Oh man.

GREG: And I think it's like being in jail only

jail is a whole lot better because jail is a lot cleaner

-and has much better lighting. -Oh.

GREG: And we have to pay for our own food,

and we don't get to go outside, and we don't get free HBO

and we don't get to talk as much and we don't get healthcare

and we don't get conjugal visits--

You don't get any of that stuff?

GREG: We don't get any of that.

Now, he's actually right.

You don't get conjugal visits while waiting to be called

at jury duty. Although, judging from that call,

being at jury duty isn't that caller's primary obstacle

in that department.

As for not getting HBO I don't know what

he's complaining about there, they don't even give me free HBO

and I'm actively ruining it.

Now that man, Greg, was a regular caller to that show.

And I know that because we got curious about him after

watching that clip, and it turns out, he's a lot.

For example, Greg has a website where you can find classic

'Gregism's' like, "Environmentalism is evil,"

or "The Baptists are the pin in the Homo Grenade."

Incidentally "Gregism's," isn't even a term I made up,

it's an actual section of his website.

We could honestly spend the rest of this show on Greg,

but sadly, we do have to move on.

Because, the important thing about jury duty--

You know what, just one more thing about Greg.

He's been tweeting, "It's almost time to have

a great hashtag-weekend everyone! Who's with me?"

every Friday, for the last very, many Fridays.

And read the room Greg!

No one has great hashtag-weekends anymore.

We're all sitting at home watching the days blur together

in a miserable hashtag-TIMESOUP.

But while it might sound cliché, serving on a jury really is

an essential civic duty. The right to a trial

by an impartial "jury of your peers," is enshrined

in the Sixth Amendment of the Constitution.

But the truth is, while your peers are supposed to be

chosen from a fair cross-section of society,

people of color are routinely excluded.

According to a study of 14 federal district courts,

under representation of the Latino and African American

populations is ubiquitous. Which is a problem

with huge implications for juries.

This social psychologist staged mock cases,

where some juries were all white,

and others were racially diverse.

And found that the diverse ones operated more fairly

and deliberated more comprehensively.

In this study they raise more facts from the trial,

they discuss a broader range of information,

they discuss the information more accurately,

actually in discussing the facts of the case.

They're more willing to have uncomfortable conversations

about controversial issues, like those involved in race

and racial profiling.

Yeah. It turns out juries are sort of like

presidents of the Spokane, WA chapter of the NAACP.

When they're entirely white,

things tend to go south, fast.

And this is reflected in the real world.

Researchers who examined felony trials in Florida

found juries formed from all white pools convict

Black defendants a full 16 percentage points more often

than they do white defendants. But,

that gap in conviction rates is entirely eliminated

when the poll includes at least one Black member.

And that's one of those facts that you probably assumed

was true, even though you wish it wasn't.

Like the fact that dogs don't really enjoy music,

or that Sean Penn's new wife is a year younger

than his daughter.

So tonight, let's take a look at why juries are so often

unrepresentative, and what we can do about it.

And the whole process starts with

what's called "a jury wheel," a pool of potential jurors

in a community. It used to be an actual wheel.

And for many years, Black people were

explicitly excluded from them. And even after

the Civil Rights Act of 1875 said you couldn't discriminate

against jurors based on race, many officials would still

find ways to remove them, like by printing their names

on different colored paper, so they could be avoided

during the supposedly random drawings.

And while thankfully, that doesn't happen anymore,

our current system has many flaws, that can end up

having a similar result. For instance, nowadays,

jury wheels are often computerized lists gathered

from voter registration and driver license records.

But there's a big problem there,

as this public defender in New Orleans explains.

Not everybody's registered to vote,

and not everybody owns a car, and has a driver's license.

The problem is when we use voter registration

or DMV records, we're probably excluding

around 35 percent of New Orleanians.

Right, 35 percent of people are excluded there.

And being registered to vote and owning a car

doesn't affect whether you're qualified to serve on a jury,

it just affects how much money you probably spend

on bumper stickers.

Bumper stickers! Think of them as traffic twitter.

That's not a compliment.

And the exclusions don't stop there.

Most states ban people with felony convictions,

and with juror pay being incredibly low,

lower income people can be unable to afford to take part.

Both of which disproportionately exclude people of color.

So inherently, the system is already biased.

And that's before you even get into the mistakes

that jury summoning systems can make, which to be fair,

can sometimes, be pretty fun.

I got "Jerry" duty.

I said, "What's 'Jerry' duty?"

"Summons for "Jerry"-- "Jerry" Service."

If you're picked then you go up to the judge and then you say

if they're guilty or not guilty.

Yeah, Jacob got jury duty. And while I can't believe

And while I can't believe he found Casey Anthony not guilty,

that's what he and his "Jerry" decided,

and we just need to live with that.

But some errors are significantly less fun.

For instance in Connecticut, it emerged

that their jury selection computer program

had accidentally read the 'd' in Hartford

to mean 'deceased.' So for nearly three years,

it never summoned anyone from Hartford,

or indeed, New Britain, the second largest city

in that district because their list of names

had been accidentally misplaced,

and was never entered into the program.

And the thing is, those two missing cities accounted for

63 percent of African Americans in the district,

and 68 percent of the Hispanic population.

Which is horrible! 'Cause if you're going to

forget a town in Connecticut, why not forget Danbury?

Because, and this is true, fuck Danbury!

From its charming railway museum,

to its historic Hearthstone Castle,

Danbury, Connecticut, can eat my whole ass.

I know exactly three things about Danbury.

USA Today ranked it the second-best city to live in

in 2015. It was once the center of the American hat industry,

and if you're from there, you've got a standing invite

to come get a thrashing from John Oliver,

children included, fuck you.

Now, that Hartford error was made by the government's

own system. But many courts, actually contract out

their jury selection to companies like these,

who promise to run the process cheaper and more effectively.

But private companies can be surprisingly unreliable.

Take what happened outside Tulsa, Oklahoma,

where a Black man was tried by an all-white jury

drawn from a pool of 200 jurors without

a single Black person in it, after the company handling

jury selection accidentally excluded zip codes

where 90 percent of its Black residents lived.

Then there's Allen County, Indiana, where this company

had a system that was programmed to work through an alphabetical

list of townships, and stop when

it reached ten thousand names. Unfortunately, it turned out

75 percent of African Americans in that county,

happened to live in Wayne Township,

towards the end of the alphabet.

Meaning, they had roughly half the chance of being included

on a jury, than a truly random system would have produced.

So yet again, alphabetization fails us.

I've said this for years, it's an ABC supremacist system,

that disrespects the better end of the alphabet.

'Cause think about it. 'Z' has got all the hotties!

Zayn, Zoe, Zendaya, Zac Efron and of course, Zonkeys.

Half donkey, half zebra, all sex.

Now the extent of that Indiana error only emerged

when a man who had been convicted there

sued over the makeup of his jury,

and his lawyer pointed out to the State Supreme Court

just how lax the design process had been.

That's true.

That county's jury system was originally designed

by a college student. Whose previous job incidentally,

had been working at a head shop.

And look, there are plenty of jobs that people with

head shop experience are qualified to do,

for instance, cleaning bong resin off an Ikea couch cushion

or going on a late night snack run to 7-11

and only getting 40 percent of what everyone asked for.

I'm just not sure that programming a county's official

jury list is one of those jobs.

And whether the errors in these programs were deliberate

or just careless, the result is the same.

And I'd love to tell you mistakes like these are rare,

but the truth is, no one knows how common they are.

We only know about the examples that I've mentioned so far

because of lawsuits that took years!

Private vendors often won't reveal details about

their systems, claiming their algorithms

are a trade secret.

And 39 out of 50 states provide no public access

to jury data. So, your court system might have

a massive problem, and until a nine-year-old

shows up for a murder trial, no one would have any idea.

And all of this is before jurors even show up

for selection, at which point, things can get even worse.

Because prosecutors tend to exclude Black jurors.

Sometimes out of implicit bias,

but sometimes, out of a bias that is pretty fucking explicit.

Just watch this Philadelphia DA addressing

a room full of prosecutors in a leaked 1980's training video

explaining which jurors they might want to avoid.

Another factor, I'll tell you, if--

You know, in selecting Blacks, again,

you don't want the real educated ones.

Again, it's-- this goes across the board,

of all races, you don't want smart people.

Uh... And again, but-- if you're sitting down

and you're gonna take Blacks, you want older Blacks.

In my experience, Black women--

young Black women are very bad. Uh, there's an antagonism

I guess maybe 'cause they're downtrodden

on two respects. They got two minorities,

they're women and they're Black,

so they're downtrodden on two areas,

and they somehow, uh, want to take it out