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by gwbas1c 19 days ago
> because jurors in Seattle have become accustom to thinking that the only way to overcome reasonable doubt is to have it on video.

Who serves on a jury frequently enough to become accustomed to anything? I've only been mailed for jury duty a few times, and every time when I check the night before I'm waived out.

1 comments

I think a more accurate way to phrase this is that potential jurors in Seattle have grown to believe etc.

How does that happen? Television. They see the police pulling up surveillance videos or using high tech lab technologies on television shows and assume that these fictional techniques are the norm. See, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSI_effect

Television courtrooms are half of it, the other is social media. Tiktok and Youtube and Facebook will show you videos all day long with notable events that were pulled from security cameras, or uploaded by bystanders with cell phones, or found in the background of videos that were intended to capture something else.

The other side of the equation is that surveillance infrastructure is already nigh omnipresent, as described by the attached article. A juror who gets alerts every day from their Ring doorbell, who drives a Tesla with an integrated dashcam, and parks in a lot covered by their apartment's security cameras, can be easily persuaded that camera surveillance should be the standard of proof.