Jury duty completed
tl;dr - three spics in a car with 4% tinted windows (state law minimum is 70%) stopped for reckless driving on a highway. Officer ordered them to lower all windows for safety repeatedly, only driver's door was lowered. They sped off when the officer approached the window. Ended up crashing after like five minutes at over 70mph, one was apprehended immediately, two fled onto nearby train tracks - when the third rail was powered, mind you - but got caught. One after being tased, then failing to follow an order to put his hands up, and finally a one-minute struggle with a spry male zoomer officer; the other after he was found by other officers because the female officer chasing him (lol) lost him, she was too slow and noticeably short of breath at the end.
Two glocks were then found in the vehicle, one with an extended mag. Also six baggies of pink cocaine/ketamine.
We delivered a true bill on sixteen counts ranging from firearm possession to controlled substance possession to reckless driving to assault to resisting arrest - in other words, 50%+1 voted in favor of each charge, so they're all getting indicted on all counts raised and now going to trial.
Seeing the road the chase took place along, on a map and in the dashcam/bodycam was surreal because... it was part of the EXACT route I take to get to and from work. I unironically felt like I could have just posted "another nightshift another dollar", except it was a police chase.
We only briefly deliberated, mostly because of two women - one white-haired boomer, one millennial, both overweight, both exuding a patently liberal vibe - who were uncomfortable with the "assault" charge. Reason being that the officer's injury was to his meniscus, and he'd had to jump a few feet down a fence chasing the spic onto the tracks and yelled "fuck!" pn landing, so that may have been the cause. Amusingly, after the holdouts called the assistant DA back into the room to read us the statute again, we got six of the "no" votes to flip to "yes", because we could jewishly interpret the wording to say that qupte "causing injury" - which, we reasoned, was satisfied by making the officer chase him in the first place - and the "intent", which ONLY applied to obstructing his own arrest, and NOT to actually causing the injury to the officer, were separate... lol. But I also thought a "yes" would still be the right call regardless, because a) the standard for the indictment is only "reasonable cause", not "beyond a reasonable doubt" like it would be at trial, and I think it's more likely he was injured in the struggle than the fall, and b) even if the fall caused the INITIAL damage to his meniscus FIRST, I think it's unlikely the struggle didn't exacerbate the existing damage, which as I understand it would still be "causing injury".
It's funny, my initial moral quandary was solely from the gun charge, and I went in expecting to vote to nullify, because I think all statutory weapons restrictions are inherently both morally wrong and also illegal due to 2A... but then I heard their latrino-ass names, saw they were brown, saw/heard that none of them ever used English and failed to obey commands given in English repeatedly, that one was explicitly confirmed not to speak any English upon his arrest caught on bodycam, AND we learned the driver had no license or ID of any kind... and especially paired with all the drugs, it was enough to prove to me that they were 100% foreigners and probably gang members. At that point, my moral dilemma was completely flipped - should I choose not to nullify an unjust and illegal law in this case, because the accused are aliens? On the grounds that I believe foreigners should not and do not qualify for natural or civil rights protections under the constitution and should explicitly be kept disarmed and powerless at all times, because it is morally right and proper that they should literally live or die at our pleasure, and if it were up to me, any foreigner present in the country illegally would be promptly hanged without trial anyway, picrel. In the end, I sided with my conscience... and selectively threw the book at them, despite that including an unjust law, to punish them for invading my country. LOL.
After the true bill was returned, the ADA was free to speak more openly. At that point, we learned that they were literally Tren de Aragua gang members and that the car had been stolen from a rival gang - he just didn't include a grand theft auto charge because he couldn't prove it... at which point the whole panel laughed, and I loudly exclaimed, "huh, how did I know!?" :)
So as you can see, the humor should be obvious, considering the moral dilemma being flipped on its head, my employer, and my coincidental familiarity with the route of the chase. I'm glad I did this, and admit to taking some pleasure from weaponizing state power against criminals who happen to also be my personal/ethnic enemies.
... so how was your day chumbies? :)
