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SPEAKER_31: This week on The New Yorker Radio Hour, the novelist Jennifer Egan on how we could end the enormous problem of homelessness if we had the will to do it. That's The New Yorker Radio Hour. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER_17: Hey, I'm Latif Nasser. I'm Lulu Miller. This is Radiolab. And today in service of this Radiolab Rewind we're about to play for you this episode from the archives. I want to ask you, Lulu, have you ever done jury duty?
SPEAKER_15: I have not. And I really want to. I mean, maybe I shouldn't say that on the air because like the envelope will come and it'll be the good. But I would love to and I have never even been called. I think I've moved so many times. I don't know where I am.
SPEAKER_17: I just became a citizen relatively recently, as you know. So I haven't I also haven't been called, but I, I, I want to do it. Yeah. What is it for you? Why do you want to do it?
SPEAKER_17: I mean, there's part of it that feels like you're I don't know. It's a weird thing to say, like maybe like a little power trip to be like, oh, wow. Like I get to it's also and again, another thing that maybe I shouldn't say out loud, but like, there's something like kind of voyeuristic about it. Yeah. It's like an out of body moment. It's out of your life. You get to kind of like exit your life and sort of get plunged into probably the most dramatic moment of somebody else's life, kind of in a in a ethical, moral puzzle of what to do next. And there's something kind of, I think, very humbling and powerful about that moment. And today, we have a story that is about that power. But it's it's about not just a power
SPEAKER_15: that you walk in the door of jury duty with. It's about this kind of trap door on any jury, which I had no idea about was waiting there that you can kind of fall through and access a whole new realm of powers that isn't just about guilt or innocence that isn't just about truth, but it's it like gives you and your whole jury. I don't know change democracy. Yeah, it does feel like it's not it's not just the power to change an individual's life.
SPEAKER_17: It's the power to change this society that we live in. And that it to me, once you first hear about this power, once you first discover this power, then to hear the variety of ways it's been used. They're both so inspiring and and so horrifying that you Yeah, it kind of Yeah, kind of knocks you down.
SPEAKER_15: Yeah. And as the story goes, this is I think this this contains one of the most frightening moments that that I've heard radio lab encounter in an interview ever. Yeah, for sure.
SPEAKER_15: The show is called null and void.
SPEAKER_00: Wait, you're listening to radio lab radio from WNYC.
SPEAKER_10: rewind. Now for some reason, this speakerphone doesn't ever want to go off. Can you guys call me right back and I won't put it on? Okay. All right. Sorry about that.
SPEAKER_18: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krolwich. This is radio lab. And today. Today we have a story about something that you might not know that you have, but you definitely do have it. Yeah, sort of a crazy, maybe even scary, maybe scary, even secret. A crazy, scary secret.
SPEAKER_18: Hello. Hello. Power. Hey, Soren. And it comes to us from our producers, Tracy Hunt.
SPEAKER_24: Are you there? And Soren Wheeler. Yeah, I'm here. Okay, no speakerphone now.
SPEAKER_10: Okay. So this story for us got started with this woman, Laura Crejo.
SPEAKER_21: I am a freelance internet marketer. She's from Colorado. And in the mid 90s,
SPEAKER_21: something happened to Laura that hadn't happened to anyone in centuries.
SPEAKER_16: So we'll just, why don't you take a sec to 1996, the day you got your jury summons, that very first one? Well, that was the day of jury duty. I had,
SPEAKER_10: I had totally forgotten about the jury summons until the day of, and I picked it up and I read the back of the summons and it said something about six months in jail if you don't show up. And so I didn't have a ride to the courthouse. And so I called the court and asked them if I really had to show up since I didn't have a ride. And they're like, yeah, yeah, you have to show up. And I said, well, I'll have to hitchhike then. And if, if something happens to me, I said to them, my blood is on your hands. I wanted to make them feel guilty about making me show up, but that didn't work. She said I had to show up anyway. But whatever.
SPEAKER_16: The point is Laura did get to court in Gilpin County in Colorado. And when she got there, she walked in, took a seat. I think there was about 40 jurors in the pool of jurors.
SPEAKER_10: And first they fill up the box with 12 jurors and then they ask them questions about themselves. Real quick, were you hoping to get booted off?
SPEAKER_21: Oh yeah, I was hoping to get booted off. Of course, any,
SPEAKER_10: any good red blooded American was hoping to. But towards the end of jury selection? I was, uh, I was one of the last ones to be selected.
SPEAKER_16: So the next day, Laura and the 11 other jurors showed up to hear the case. And the case was for this 19 year old girl. And she was charged with possession of methamphetamine.
SPEAKER_10: What happened was is that she was up in Central City, which is a gambling town. And that day she was driving in her van with her boyfriend.
SPEAKER_16: And eventually the two of them drove to this casino. Her boyfriend jumped out of the van. He went to the casino. And then she kept driving and then the police pulled her over. They just, for whatever reason, pull her over.
SPEAKER_18: I don't know what she got pulled over for.
SPEAKER_10: They just pull her over and...
SPEAKER_10: The police said that she got out and put her purse on the hood of the car and then made a lunging movement towards it.
SPEAKER_16: Which they said gave them probable cause. To search her purse. Because now they're thinking, oh, does she have a weapon in her purse? Like, what is she trying to hide? And so the police open up her purse and they start kind of rifling through it. At which they found this one ounce of methamphetamine.
SPEAKER_16: And so one of the questions before the jury was, is this young woman guilty of possession of methamphetamine beyond a reasonable doubt?
SPEAKER_21: So at the end of the trial, Laura and the other 11 jurors got up and went to the jury room to deliberate.
SPEAKER_10: And so we talked about a lot of things. One of the things I remember we talked about was whether or not the police were lying about, you know, her lunging towards her purse and things like that. There is also the fact that she did have this meth.
SPEAKER_16: But it was unclear whether it was actually hers or not.
SPEAKER_21: Because according to the girl, when her boyfriend got out of the van, he put something in her purse, she said, without her knowledge.
SPEAKER_16: This girl saying the meth might be his, but it's definitely not hers. I mean, to me, that's the whole thing.
SPEAKER_10: It's element number one of the possession charge, is that they have to knowingly possess.
SPEAKER_21: So for Laura, if she said she didn't know she had it,
SPEAKER_10: and it could be her boyfriend's,
SPEAKER_21: then she's not guilty.
SPEAKER_16: It seems to her that it was just like a pretty big hole in the prosecution's case.
SPEAKER_10: I mean, to me, I just couldn't get beyond that. And so Laura turned to the other jurors,
SPEAKER_10: and I said to them, I was like, well, isn't that enough reasonable doubt for you to acquit her? And they were all like, no, she had it in her purse. She knew it was there. It's almost five o'clock. We need to convict her and go home.
SPEAKER_21: But Laura wouldn't budge. She just couldn't get herself to go along. And so she held out. And that night when she went home, she just kept turning this case over and over in her mind. And she started wondering
SPEAKER_10: what the girl was looking at as far as a sentence, right? But that's not technically what a juror is supposed to do.
SPEAKER_18: No, in fact, the judge in this case, and generally,
SPEAKER_21: the judge had told them, you know, like,
SPEAKER_10: I'm the one that gets to decide the sentence.
SPEAKER_21: You don't have to worry about the sentence here.
SPEAKER_10: You just have to find out whether she's guilty or not guilty. But I was worried about the sentence. You know, you have, when you're a juror, you have somebody's liberty in your hand.
SPEAKER_16: And so Laura sat down on her computer. She got online, and she found this criminal statute. And to her understanding, this girl... Was looking at two to six years.
SPEAKER_21: And she's like, what? That just feels so out of whack. That doesn't feel right.
SPEAKER_16: Also, it's a felony charge.
SPEAKER_10: You know, you can't erase that. So the second day of deliberations, you know, we just went back and forth. Were the police lying? Yes, we think the police are lying. Is that reasonable doubt? No, it's not reasonable doubt. After all my arguments about reasonable doubt, were exhausted.
SPEAKER_21: That's when Laura turned to the other jurors and tried this completely different tactic. She looked at them and she was like, look, even if you think she's guilty...
SPEAKER_20: We didn't have to convict her for any reason. That we could let her go. That even if she broke the law, we could say we don't agree with the law. You know, we're here to be the conscience of the community.
SPEAKER_10: That's what I told them. You don't have to convict her.
SPEAKER_21: That seems like I would imagine some people might be like, what are you talking about? Of course we do. We're supposed to just say whether she broke the law or not. That's what a jury does.
SPEAKER_10: Right, right. Well, that's where everything broke down. Because as it turns out,
SPEAKER_16: when Laura started making this argument, a whole series of events set into motion. One of the jurors, apparently, they wrote a note saying Laura's in here, she's talking about sentences. She's saying that she's only going to acquit this girl. That note got sent to the judge and she was like, well, I'm going to quit this girl.
SPEAKER_10: And then that note got sent to the judge and apparently the judge exploded and called us all back in and declared a mistrial.
SPEAKER_20: And then about a month later, the sheriff showed up at my house
SPEAKER_10: with a summons for contempt of court. Paul Grant represented Colorado
SPEAKER_01: juror Laura Crehome.
SPEAKER_21: And suddenly Laura's story caught fire.
SPEAKER_01: After she refused to convict a young woman in a drug case last year.
SPEAKER_10: I was the first juror in 400 years that was actually punished for their verdict, prosecuted. Really? Well, actually, 326 years.
SPEAKER_21: The point is, when Laura told those other jurors that they could essentially ignore the law, that they could disregard the facts if they disagreed with the law, she had tiptoed
SPEAKER_04: what you're about to see is going to infuriate a lot of you. into this very bizarre
SPEAKER_21: A lone juror
SPEAKER_16: tosses out the law.
SPEAKER_21: Almost like a loophole, like a legal loophole of some kind. I think it's absolutely appalling that on some sides people see as a trapdoor to anarchy and on other sides people see it as like one of the foundational bedrocks of what it means to be in a democracy. It is something called jury nullification.
SPEAKER_04: Jury nullification. I have to say
SPEAKER_21: the first time I heard about jury nullification I googled it and the first thing that came up was this YouTube video by CGP Gray and it was a video by CGP Gray that was a little explainer thing with an animation. And I think it was the first thing that was said on the frozen screen of the YouTube video was you can get arrested for talking about this. Really? And I was like, whoa, okay, I'm hitting play on that. Let's go. You can get arrested for talking about this. Well, that ends up being sort of true. But also sort of not. Which is what makes it a loophole. Thank you.
SPEAKER_19: Anyway, as we dug into it
SPEAKER_21: we figured we were going to need some help understanding this thing. So I was thinking I would start with a little bit
SPEAKER_08: what jury nullification is. Yeah. So we called up our favorite legal expert.
SPEAKER_16: Right. Ellie Mistahl.
SPEAKER_08: And I am an editor of Above the Law and the legal editor of More Perfect on WNYC. More Perfect? That sounds amazing.
SPEAKER_18: What is that?
SPEAKER_21: You know what, it's not worth mentioning. Anyway, when we were talking to Ellie the first thing that we asked him was, you know, just give us a pure uncut version of jury nullification.
SPEAKER_08: Okay, so a pure aspect of jury nullification would be let's say I am the defendant. I am accused of stealing a car. I absolutely stole that car. Everybody saw, they had me dead to rights. All they had me on video. My mama said he stole the car. No reasonable doubt. Your DNA's in the car. My DNA's in the car. But I stole the car because my kid was sick and I needed to get to the hospital to take him to the hospital and I had no other option and so I smashed the window to somebody else's car, I hot wired it, I put my kid in the back, I drove to the hospital saved my kid's life. Now I'm up for trial from the guy who has the Audi I live in Westchester the guy who has the Audi is like he stole my car. Which is true. I demand justice. And the jury says yeah, no. No. We're just gonna the jury would nullify that clear
SPEAKER_08: that clear illegality that clear crime that I committed.
SPEAKER_19: So it's like yes he took the car
SPEAKER_21: but the law, the way it's written doesn't account for the fact that in this particular case that's okay with us. Right.
SPEAKER_08: So that's kind of the pure version of it and that's kind of the most kind of happy clappy duh. Yeah it's a very happy version of it. I could have stolen Justin Bieber's car I probably couldn't get convicted in a court for that. Nobody likes him. Nobody likes him. So they could be saying the law's
SPEAKER_21: not nuanced enough, they could be saying the punishment is off, they could be saying in this case the supposed victim sort of deserved it. Or they could be saying we disagree with this law. Right. Okay wait
SPEAKER_18: something I don't understand is like so here we have a situation where Laura says she doesn't agree with the sentence like does she or any of the other jurors have like a right to do this? Is there like something written in the constitution that says they can do that? No. There's nothing in
SPEAKER_08: the constitution that directly explicitly says yes you have the right to completely ignore the law and let off whoever you want to if you feel like it. That's not a constitutional right. Okay. But it's not exactly a crime. Because, Ellie says, a jury is
SPEAKER_19: told to do what they think is best. If they think their best is nullifying
SPEAKER_08: a law that's also not exactly illegal. Which, just to get back to
SPEAKER_16: Laura for a second, is why the court never actually charged her for jury nullification. Instead they found her guilty for not answering questions directly during the jury questioning process.
SPEAKER_21: But eventually that conviction was overturned on appeal because in general the things that are said in a jury room are protected. They're private.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah. So it's not a right, it's not a crime. What it is is a power. And so I think of it kind of like What kind of monster are you? The X-Men. The Wolverine. So, Wolverine's power is he can detach steel adamantium claws from his hands. Uh huh. That's just a fact of Wolverine's life. He just he has the ability to do this. It's his power. Now, is it a right for him to have claws shooting out of his hands? No. Absolutely not. Is it illegal for him to have claws shooting out of his hands? Well, not really, right? It's illegal for him to use them in certain ways, right? So if Wolverine comes into your house and scratches you on the face, that's assault. We have a law against a law prescribing assault. But Wolverine has the power to just walk around as he is with these claws in his hands. It's built into the nature of his being.
SPEAKER_21: Real quick to the people who care about superhero powers. We know that Wolverine's power is actually the ability to heal, but Ellie's point still holds. Wait a second.
SPEAKER_18: This is throwing me off a bit. So the jury like, the claws so the jury has this claw like power or whatever, but they're not allowed to use it? I mean, his
SPEAKER_21: simple point is that jury nullification is as fundamental to the jury's as having claws is to Wolverine. That's just a
SPEAKER_19: fact of their existence. But they
SPEAKER_18: still get in trouble if they use it? Laura did. But then how did we end up in this weird place where you can do it? You don't have the right to do it, but you can do it. But if you do it or even talk about it, you might get in trouble. That's such a weird... I'm super glad you asked that
SPEAKER_21: question because it gives me a chance to... Hey, Matt, are you back there? Could you cue some like English jaunty 1700s type music?
SPEAKER_18: Coming right up. Alright, now we're in the mood. Alright, explain. Yeah, so I ended up finding this
SPEAKER_16: guy, Jeffrey Abramson. Professor of
SPEAKER_25: law and government at the University of Texas at Austin. And Jeffrey told me
SPEAKER_16: it all has to do with this sort of battle over who has the power to decide what the law is. And he says the opening shots of that battle go all the way back to the William Penn trial in
SPEAKER_25: 1670, which is really the birth of religious liberty. I guess
SPEAKER_16: we can also cue some sounds of horses on cobblestone streets. I refuse to do that. Just do it. Just do the horses.
SPEAKER_16: So much better. Thank you. Okay, so it's 1670, London, England. We've got our guy, William Penn. So William Penn
SPEAKER_25: at the time was a young man. He was a Quaker.
SPEAKER_16: And one day he's walking through the streets of London to hold a prayer meeting
SPEAKER_25: and Grace Church meeting chapel.
SPEAKER_16: He walks up to the chapel door. But
SPEAKER_25: he finds it locked by the authorities.
SPEAKER_16: And the reason the doors were locked was because there was actually this century old law on the books. It made it a
SPEAKER_25: crime essentially to be a Quaker. But what Penn does...
SPEAKER_16: Hey.
SPEAKER_22: Okay, one both of you and two Gather round, gather round, yes. Penn starts calling everybody
SPEAKER_21: together in the street.
SPEAKER_16: And as more and more people start to gather, there is a large throng.
SPEAKER_25: Like three or four hundred people show up. Come on, come on. And so the authorities seize the occasion him to arrest him for breach of the peace. You take your hands off of me
SPEAKER_07: right now. Get him. And eventually get him.
SPEAKER_21: Penn gets thrown into jail. And he gets a
SPEAKER_25: jury trial.
SPEAKER_22: The indictment is as follows that William Penn of London... Now the government
SPEAKER_16: the king was pretty much discharging Penn for being a Quaker. But the authorities
SPEAKER_25: thought they could go underneath the table and just prosecute him for what was the common law crime of breach of the peace. Are you guilty
SPEAKER_22: as you stand indicted in manner and form as foresaid or not guilty? I plead not guilty in manner and form. And the case
SPEAKER_21: is pretty open and shut. I mean he gathered hundreds of people in the middle of the street.
SPEAKER_25: According to law and the evidence he's guilty. But his defense is show me what law in England makes it a crime to worship God in my own way.
SPEAKER_16: So the jury went off to the jury room? But the jurors
SPEAKER_25: come back several times and say we cannot agree. What was their hang-up?
SPEAKER_21: Well I don't know how inside the heads of those people you can get but it seems like they just didn't feel like locking him up for that was the right thing to do. Even though it was technically against the law. Right. And so
SPEAKER_16: the judge says to the jurors, I am telling
SPEAKER_25: you that if the evidence shows that Penn preached to a throng on a public thoroughfare. And he clearly did. You have to find him guilty of the crime of breach of the peace.
SPEAKER_21: And then the judge locks him up in the jury room? Without food, tobacco
SPEAKER_25: or rest facilities. For a
SPEAKER_21: quote considerable amount of time. And then finally
SPEAKER_25: they come back and acquit him. The judge accepts the acquittal and then orders the jurors to jail for perjury. Put the whole jury in jail?
SPEAKER_18: Yeah, they get locked up. But there's one guy in the
SPEAKER_16: jury who's like, this is not cool. So that guy ends up filing an appeal.
SPEAKER_21: It went to the highest courts in the realm.
SPEAKER_25: All the way to the king's court. The chief justice ruled that it henceforth would be illegal to prosecute jurors for a not guilty verdict. So this becomes the start of jury nullification.
SPEAKER_21: And what it really was was the birth of this kind of bubble, this protected space called the jury room that you can't punish anybody for what they do in the jury room. So that notion crosses the Atlantic Ocean and becomes a part of the American tradition of law so that when the colonies are coming they have trial by jury and they have juries and smart people are writing things about how the jury is the place where the people get to decide what happens and we have to protect that. You can't punish them for what they do. And so you get people like Adams and Jefferson making grand arguments about the role of the jury. And actually Jeffrey says, one of the things that we get from a jury is freedom of the press. Where in the 1700s this newspaper guy in New York supposedly libeled the king or the crown. And to the jury in that case it was pretty clear that he did. But they decide that
SPEAKER_25: the law itself is unjust. And boom, there you go, freedom of the press.
SPEAKER_21: So this idea sort of baked into our nation's beginning of trusting
SPEAKER_25: ordinary people to do the work of justice themselves.
SPEAKER_21: I mean ordinary people being white men at the time. But then in the
SPEAKER_16: mid 1800s that starts to change because of two things. One more and more laws are being written and they're just more complex and complicated and they're just harder for people to understand. Number two the legal world is becoming way more professional. More and more people are getting legal training. Even judges who before didn't have to necessarily have legal training to become a judge, they're getting legal training. And so now judges are seen as the experts in the law. And then what happens is that you see more and more judges sort of take back the power to decide what the law is from the jury.
SPEAKER_25: And the United States Supreme Court made clear in a decision in 1895
SPEAKER_16: that juries had
SPEAKER_25: no responsibility for deciding whether to enforce the law, question number one, or what the law properly interpreted was, question number two.
SPEAKER_21: And from this you get the sort of judges instructions that are given to the jury. And we still have this sort
SPEAKER_25: of instruction today that ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the case is now upon you. It is your job to find the facts. But it is my job to instruct you on the law. Now
SPEAKER_21: it wasn't exactly that jury nullification became illegal, more like just the court kind of pushed it down, made it a sort of unspoken thing. And over the next 100 years or so, it does I mean certainly there's times when jurors sort of refuse to convict. The famous cases are like during prohibition and some arguments that during the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, but really the explicit idea of jury nullification, the idea that this is really a role for the jury stays mostly underground. Until the clause come out.
SPEAKER_18: That's after the break. Yeah.
SPEAKER_21: Yeah.
SPEAKER_15: Lulu here. If you ever heard the classic radio lab episode sometimes behave so strangely, you know that speech can suddenly leap into music and really how strange and magic sound itself can be. We at radio lab take sound seriously and use it to make our journalism as impactful as it can be. And we need your help to keep doing it. The best way to support us is to join our membership program, the lab. This month, all new members will get a T-shirt that says, sometimes behave so strangely. To check out the T-shirt and support the show, go to radio lab dot org slash join. Radio lab is supported by Capital One with no fees or minimums. Banking with Capital One is the easiest decision in the history of decisions. Even easier than deciding to listen to another episode of your favorite podcast. And with no overdraft fees, is it even a decision that's banking reimagined? What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See Capital One dot com slash bank. Capital One N.A. member FDIC. After
SPEAKER_07: but her emails became shorthand in 2016 for the media's deep focus on Hillary Clinton's server hygiene at the expense of policy issues, is history repeating itself? You can almost
SPEAKER_30: see an equation, again, I would say led by the times in Biden being old with Donald Trump being under dozens of felony indictments. Listen to On
SPEAKER_07: the Media from WNYC. Find On the Media wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER_18: Hey folks, just a quick note, this story that you're about to hear has in it an interview that contains some threats of violence. Might not be appropriate for sensitive listeners or young children.
SPEAKER_25: We've all seen the pictures of Los Angeles
SPEAKER_26: police officers beating a man they had just pulled over.
SPEAKER_16: In this video you see Rodney King, he's on the ground, and police are surrounding him and they're kicking him and beating him with batons repeatedly. Showing to most
SPEAKER_25: reasonable observers that there was severe police brutality against an unarmed black man.
SPEAKER_30: Four Los Angeles police officers charged in the... Initially the trial was supposed to be
SPEAKER_16: held in Los Angeles, but because of concerns about media exposure, they got moved to neighboring Ventura County
SPEAKER_25: where the jury is almost all white. And after a months-long
SPEAKER_16: trial and weeks of jury deliberations, the jury
SPEAKER_26: in the Rodney King case has delivered its verdict. You get an acquittal. They acquit the officers.
SPEAKER_16: Not one of the four
SPEAKER_26: police officers seen on videotape beating Mr. King a year ago is guilty of using excessive force. They've all been found not guilty. And of course, they all know
SPEAKER_16: what happened in LA after that. Five days of riots.
SPEAKER_30: We've seen rocks and bottles and various things going to cars. More than 60 people
SPEAKER_16: were killed. He is bleeding, unconscious
SPEAKER_04: in the street. You can see a white plume of smoke. There was about a billion dollars worth
SPEAKER_16: of damages. There are several other plumes
SPEAKER_04: just like that in this area. I must say, I'm scared. We all saw
SPEAKER_16: what happened. And it looked very much to African-Americans in Los Angeles that these white people in Simi Valley, CA
SPEAKER_25: had voted race rather than evidence to acquit.
SPEAKER_01: I'm 43 years old. I have witnessed this for 43 years of my life. The injustice. I cannot even convey to you the hurt.
SPEAKER_21: So according to Jeffrey, that was round one. And then just three years later OK.
SPEAKER_05: It's a white car.
SPEAKER_25: You get round two.
SPEAKER_27: This is the police tracking OJ Simpson's white Ford Bronco. There you see the police cars.
SPEAKER_25: The OJ Simpson trial.
SPEAKER_28: Charges laid by LA police against OJ Simpson in connection with the brutal slaying of his ex-wife Nicole and 25 year old Ron Goldman. There is massive blood
SPEAKER_25: evidence. Bloody footprints. One of the bloody gloves. Massive DNA evidence. Blood drops leading
SPEAKER_31: up to and inside the house in his bedroom. And yet a
SPEAKER_25: predominantly black jury. We the
SPEAKER_12: jury in the above entitled action find the defendant Orenthal James Simpson not guilty of the crime of murder acquits.
SPEAKER_12: You heard
SPEAKER_31: the verdict. Can we ask you
SPEAKER_21: reaction? So while many black people thought that a white jury had ignored the law in the Rodney King case. It's a disgrace.
SPEAKER_23: Shocked. Now many
SPEAKER_21: white people felt that a largely black jury I think it's absolutely appalling.
SPEAKER_26: It gives me no faith in the jury system whatsoever. had done the same thing in acquitting
SPEAKER_21: OJ.
SPEAKER_21: And according to Jeffrey these two cases together they sparked a national conversation about jury nullification. The day
SPEAKER_25: after the OJ Simpson verdict the Wall Street Journal ran a first page story essentially arguing that in inner cities throughout the country black jurors were remarkably acquittal prone.
SPEAKER_21: In other words according to the article there was a spike in acquittals among black jurors in cases where the defendant was also black. And the most likely
SPEAKER_25: explanation is a kind of jury revolt.
SPEAKER_21: Now Jeffrey actually argues that this idea of a jury revolt was overstated in part because he says you can never really know if a juror is actually ignoring the law. But sometimes
SPEAKER_09: we as prosecutors would persuade a jury beyond a reasonable doubt but the jurors would still find them not guilty.
SPEAKER_21: Georgetown law professor Paul Butler who was a prosecutor in DC at the time says that's exactly what was happening. Did that feel wrong
SPEAKER_09: to you? It did. It felt wrong personally because you know like every prosecutor I wanted another notch in my belt so yeah tick me off. But the reason they were doing this is because they didn't want to send another young black man to jail. Which Paul says was mostly
SPEAKER_21: what his job was.
SPEAKER_09: If you go to criminal court in DC you would think that white people don't commit crimes. They're just utterly absent from the criminal court. And obviously that's not a reflection of the real world. And over the years day to day, locking up black people takes a psychic toll.
SPEAKER_21: Paul says he started to ask himself
SPEAKER_09: did I go to law school to put black people in prison? And for me the answer became no. Well now a black law professor
SPEAKER_04: is urging black juries to use nullification in their fight for racial justice. That led me to not only
SPEAKER_09: understand what these African American jurors were doing in DC but in cases of non-violent crimes to endorse it. If you let a guilty
SPEAKER_04: defendant off isn't that the same as really taking the law into your own hands? It absolutely is
SPEAKER_09: the same as taking the law in your own hands. As a political protest.
SPEAKER_14: Young black men is under criminal justice supervision.
SPEAKER_21: I guarantee you... So yeah, I mean that one sort of seems to grow directly out of the racial mix of things that were going on in both Rodney King and in the O.J. case. But as this was all bubbling up there was a group called the Fully Informed Jurors Association that started actually in this tiny butthole of a town in Montana with these like super libertarian... You can say that because you are from
SPEAKER_18: Montana. Yes. I am from
SPEAKER_21: Montana. I am allowed to say that. And they started this group that was basically advocating for jury notification. Writing up pamphlets. You know, sending out things. Eventually the internet comes along and attention to jury notification just kind of goes poof. There's claims that jurors in Atlanta in the mid 1990s started acquitting sports like bookmaker people. Defendants on a regular basis. So like in the past those cases had sort of been seen as slam dunks and in the post trial interviews jurors were saying that they saw... The reason was they saw no moral difference between betting on sports and playing like the Georgia Lottery. By the time you get medical marijuana initiatives around 1996 all of a sudden it's become much much more difficult for prosecutors to convince juries to convict in marijuana cases. And so prosecutors are deciding not even to file charges in those cases. It comes up in gun rate cases during that time. So you have like this spasm of interest
SPEAKER_18: largely because of these two kind of race related trials and then suddenly you have it kind of spreading sort of in all these different places. Brochure about your jury rights.
SPEAKER_16: And in fact today what you're seeing is this kind of rising activism. Good morning would you like a brochure about your jury rights? Around getting the word out about jury notification. Brochure about your jury rights. Morning ma'am would you like a brochure about your jury rights? A lot of this is happening at courthouses all across the United States in Philadelphia, in Florida. Just say your name and who you are
SPEAKER_17: what you do. We actually sent a reporter to
SPEAKER_16: Denver to talk to this guy. Yeah yeah sure. My name is
SPEAKER_13: Mark Iannichelli. You spell that last name I-A-N-N-I C-E-L-L-I I am with an activist for jury notification. Three days a week. Very cold, very hot.
SPEAKER_16: Rain or shine. Mark would show up at the courthouse. He and some other people. We're out here today talking
SPEAKER_13: about jury rights. And they would
SPEAKER_16: just stand near the steps of the court and hand out these pamphlets that basically say that it's your right as a juror to vote
SPEAKER_13: not guilty if it's a bad law designed by bad politicians.
SPEAKER_16: You know you have the right to vote your conscience. The jury's there to represent the conscience of the community. You have the right to judge the law. You can vote not guilty
SPEAKER_14: and not tell anybody and it's your right and it's personally legal and that's how you get rid of bad law.
SPEAKER_24: And are these people of various sorts?
SPEAKER_21: Yeah various sorts. You'll get the kind of guns rights people. You'll get the libertarians out west. I am with
SPEAKER_13: Occupy Denver. You get like
SPEAKER_16: occupiers like Mark and you might get some like racial justice people who think there's too many brown people in jail. So jury notification is a very big tent. See there's a
SPEAKER_11: prosecutor. You see he's got the L.L. Dean tote bag. Well it's really not a good sure about your jury rights.
SPEAKER_21: But then the thing is here's where we get to the getting in trouble part. Guys like Mark. We got arrested here. Who hand out these pamphlets in front of courthouses. They sometimes get arrested. We were distributing the information
SPEAKER_14: and they came down and they got seven of these right here from the Fully Informed Jury Association and we were handing them out to everybody and I get arrested for seven classified felonies looking at 21 years in prison. Under what grounds?
SPEAKER_21: Jury tampering. Almost always jury tampering.
SPEAKER_16: Yeah. But so no one ever says
SPEAKER_18: No once again they can't. Jury notification is legal because obviously it's not. And so they get
SPEAKER_21: usually they get arrested for for jury tampering. But then these cases will go and they'll get appealed and eventually I don't think we've found a case where this isn't true. Every single case the charges will get thrown out because it's free speech. Well actually
SPEAKER_16: I did find one case.
SPEAKER_29: A Mecosta County man is facing a five year felony for obstruction of justice after he says he was arrested for passing out flyers on jury rights.
SPEAKER_33: He had been interested in a case that was going on up in Mecosta County, Big Rapids, Michigan. This is David Common.
SPEAKER_16: He's the attorney representing our main guy here, Keith Wood.
SPEAKER_33: So the case that Keith was interested
SPEAKER_16: in, the one that kind of spurred him to head down to the courthouse with these pamphlets involved an Amish man who got in trouble with the state of Michigan filling up some wetlands near his property and he was facing you know all these fines and possible jail time. Keith thought this was totally unfair and so he went online, found a brochure
SPEAKER_33: put out by the fully informed jury association and made a bunch of copies and just showed up at court on a day that he knew they were scheduled to start a trial. He just handed out his flyers to anybody who wanted them there at the courthouse. So he's standing outside the
SPEAKER_16: courthouse on the sidewalk but there is a jury selection going on that day and so when the judge comes into the courtroom and sees potential jurors with these pamphlets he you know wants to know what's going on and then...
SPEAKER_33: One thing led to another. He found out well there's a guy out in front of the courthouse handing these things out.
SPEAKER_16: The court officer confronts Keith outside of the courthouse and tells him to stop.
SPEAKER_33: And when he would not stop, the officer finally, court officer finally told Mr. Wood, well the judge wants to talk to you. And Mr. Wood said, well I don't want to go in and talk to the judge. I'm out here. And the officer basically said, well you're going to be arrested if you don't come in and talk to the judge. So then of course under the threat of arrest he went in and the judge never asked him a question, never talked to him and just ordered his arrest. For a jury tempering.
SPEAKER_33: And the court set a bond of $150,000 for this man who'd never been in trouble, was married, had seven kids, had his own business in town. I mean he's not a flight risk at all.
SPEAKER_16: So Dave says a lot of this case hinged on when somebody actually becomes a juror. Are you a juror when you get a summons and show up to the courthouse? Or are you a juror only once you are actually seated on a case? The argument of the state
SPEAKER_33: has been all along that once you're summoned that makes you a juror. And it was our position that's not the law. In fact the statute for jury tampering says, you're supposed to be a juror in a case. I think that's pretty clear. We filed motions asking the district court judge arguing his first amendment rights and his right to free speech and the judge ruled against us and then it ended up going to trial.
SPEAKER_16: The trial lasted about two days and the jury in this case came back with a guilty verdict in about 30 minutes. He appealed, he got rejected, and now they're waiting to see if the Michigan Supreme Court will take it up. So what are the larger ramifications of this case?
SPEAKER_33: I have been surprised by the judges on appeal that they don't you know, I mean it's
SPEAKER_33: I don't know, it's almost like it's a very statist don't mess with the system kind of ruling. It's really what it's coming down to. In fact Judge Jacklovic when we had him on the stand they had to admit that he did what he did because of the content of the brochure and the educational pamphlet Mr. Wood was handing out. That's a blatant first amendment violation and it's just been ignored.
SPEAKER_16: So you're talking about the judge who originally directed the police to kind of talk to Mr. Wood?
SPEAKER_33: Yeah, we called him as a witness during the trial. Oh, I didn't know that. So we got him on the stand and he at first tried to argue, well I really wasn't doing it because of the content of what was on there. It was just I didn't want jurors being handed stuff, whatever it was. He tried to dance around it. But we put up instance after instance of his own quotes, you know, and things he had said himself which made it abundantly clear he was doing it because he didn't like what the pamphlet said.
SPEAKER_33: Regardless of whether or not those in power liked what Keith Wood was doing that's not the issue. I mean, isn't that the whole point of free speech? And if we're getting to the point where you can't as a citizen hand out information like that, you know, I'm sorry. I don't want to live in a country like that. That's ridiculous.
SPEAKER_13: We are now in a first amendment free speech war.
SPEAKER_16: OK, Julian, can you hear me? Yes, yep, I hear you.
SPEAKER_21: This is Julian Hichlin. He became a kind of a jury nullification activist hero of sorts when he was arrested in 2010 at the federal district court here in Manhattan. Well, I made nine appearances
SPEAKER_06: at this courthouse and was arrested five times. And he was about 78 years
SPEAKER_16: old at this point. And he was
SPEAKER_18: just handing out flyers? Yeah, yeah. Do you have
SPEAKER_16: like a desk or like a table set up or are you just standing there? No, no, no, no. I stand
SPEAKER_06: up. I have a sign that says jury information. And I just as they go by, I just pass out this one page flyer. Do people come up to you when they see
SPEAKER_16: jury information? Like are there? Some do.
SPEAKER_06: Some do. More of them run away.
SPEAKER_16: And he used to show up at courthouses like all over the place, like in New Jersey and in Pennsylvania and like in Philadelphia and in Florida. And actually
SPEAKER_21: when we talked to him, he was in Orlando staying with his friend Mark, and they were heading down to the local courthouse the following Monday to urge people to nullify laws they don't agree with. Basically because they see nullification as a kind of a check on times when the government or a law goes, in their view, too far. We have many cases
SPEAKER_06: like this that have shown it. When the slaves were escaping from the south and going up north, people were running them up into Canada. And they were told that they had to return them. After all, the slaves were property. What they were guilty of was theft when they didn't return these slaves. This is probably the most
SPEAKER_21: famous example of jury nullification cases where northern jurors, even though they knew someone had harbored a slave and was therefore guilty, they would just refuse to convict.
SPEAKER_06: They didn't do it. That's how the, that's actually the most important jury nullification case that this country probably ever had, is they just let the slaves, they just sent them up to Canada. They were just violating the law out and out. That's the point of having a jury. In fact, Thomas Jefferson made the statement, the only thing that will save this country is the jury. The only thing.
SPEAKER_21: Hey, by the way, if you need to stop and take a drink of water, don't hesitate. Well, I need to stop and
SPEAKER_06: cry a little.
SPEAKER_06: But, anyway, let's go on. You don't mind if I cry while we talk about this. This touches me pretty much. I mean, what is it,
SPEAKER_21: I don't, of course I don't mind if you cry. I'm curious, what is it that's hitting you in that way emotionally? Well, I think about these
SPEAKER_05: I'm sorry, I think about these cases that I just can't believe what's happened in this country. I can't believe how corrupt this country has become.
SPEAKER_21: And you're seeing that corruption in people being locked away, put away for things they shouldn't be put away for? For drugs, for example.
SPEAKER_06: Do you know that we now are the number one prison state in the world? We have the highest percentage of prisoners in any country in the world. That's the United States of America. And of course, but look at the people 40% of the people are in there for drug violations. Why does the government have any right to tell you what you can do with your body? It's the same thing for prostitution. Why should the government be able to tell you whether you can have sex or whether you can't have sex? Or why you can smoke a cigarette? Or why you can't smoke a cigarette? Now, I understand why the government tells you you can't shoot somebody else. To me, that makes sense. But if you want to shoot yourself, that's your business. Anyway, and I'll tell you something, we're going to the courts even though to pass out this literature on Monday in Orlando, that's why I'm down here. And I've been in contact with a judge and he's been in contact with me and he's informed me that if I show up, I'll be arrested. So of course, I probably have 50 or 100 people along, I hope, along with me. Oh, Julian, so you're going to be, is that what
SPEAKER_16: you're doing at the courthouse? Are you going to be passing out the jury pamphlets?
SPEAKER_06: That's exactly right. And the judge has promised us that we'll be arrested.
SPEAKER_16: And I'm asking
SPEAKER_06: all my people to come with guns and shoot the cops that come after us.
SPEAKER_21: You're not serious about that, are you? I am serious.
SPEAKER_06: Well, I mean, that would be the
SPEAKER_21: thing that you just said, you understand why the government would stop someone for, I mean, that crosses a line. The point is, there comes
SPEAKER_06: a time when you've got to stop it. And I think that time is December 5th. It's got to be ended. You got to start killing the police and the guards and hopefully the judges until they learn how to behave. Well, but that's not justice either.
SPEAKER_06: The point is, we've tried now for years, it doesn't seem to sink into them that it's their job to uphold the law, not to keep throwing people in prison. For 70 years I've been doing this, and this is the first time it ever occurred to me that I would ever have to do such a thing, but I can't help it. There's no reason why I should be arrested and taken away, and if they're going to try and do it, I want them killed. It's just that simple.
SPEAKER_06: I have a hard time believing
SPEAKER_21: that you believe that that deserves killing a court clerk who has a family. Comes out in time to arrest me.
SPEAKER_06: They've been warned, I've sent them the letter, I've told them anybody that comes within 15 feet of me that's an officer of the court, or an employee of the court, that they're to be removed one way or the other. I've come to the conclusion that it has to be ended. Well, I think that if
SPEAKER_21: you're in a position... And I hope to see that it's ended on
SPEAKER_06: December 5th. We just can't put up with it anymore. I think that if you're in a
SPEAKER_21: position of considering doing what you've just said you're considering doing, that... I'm not going to
SPEAKER_06: do anything, it's only if they do something. Well, okay.
SPEAKER_06: No matter what we have to do, it's not going to happen again. Julian,
SPEAKER_21: I'm going to interrupt you there and just say, you know, I think we're probably best off just ending the conversation and letting our microphone person go home and letting me... Anyway, you've heard my opinion. It's not only my opinion,
SPEAKER_06: it's my intention. Yeah, we
SPEAKER_21: hear you. We got it.
SPEAKER_06: Okay, thank you very much for having me. Okay, thank you. Thank you, Julian. You're welcome. Bye-bye.
SPEAKER_19: Holy... Oh my God.
SPEAKER_16: Do you have the tape-sinker's number?
SPEAKER_16: Yes, I do. You want to just give them... I'm going to give them a call right now. When I talked to him, he never said anything like that. I'm so sorry.
SPEAKER_18: Wow. Yeah. What happened after that interview? Or at the tail end of that interview? So after we hung up, we felt we had an obligation to
SPEAKER_16: call law enforcement down there because he... It sounded very much like he was making a direct threat with a time and a place. And so that Monday, he and his friend Mark did show up. Neither of them were armed. Neither him or Mark... Did any of the other people he'd been wanting to show up? No. It was just the
SPEAKER_18: nobody else showed up.
SPEAKER_16: And the police say that somebody who works at the court and told him that he had to leave, that he was trespassing, he refused to leave, a police officer didn't also came, he was shouting things about shooting police officers. At one point, apparently, he attempted to hit the court worker. But he actually didn't. And he was charged with threatening public workers, a small amount of them. He was charged with threatening public workers, assault, and trespassing. So what happened then?
SPEAKER_24: So the charge for
SPEAKER_16: threatening public workers, that was dropped. The prosecutors dropped that charge. But he is still facing two misdemeanor charges of assault and trespassing.
SPEAKER_18: Did... When you were sitting there in that interview, did that change in any way your feelings? One way or the other about jury nullification? Because I kind of feel like it did for me a little bit.
SPEAKER_16: My answer would be really short. No. Why no?
SPEAKER_16: I think he's just sort of... Sounds like an angry, frustrated person. He's angry about people not letting him talk about what he wants to talk about in front of a courthouse.
SPEAKER_18: Jordan?
SPEAKER_21: Um... I guess not. I mean, I did hear when I was talking to him, I mean, partly because I had been thinking about jury nullification you know, sort of in the most heroic terms. It's like this chance to stand up against an unjust law. And this conversation just made me realize it also kind of gets twisted up with this really deeply anti-government idea. You know, like you talk to these people and you hear arguments that sound like burn it down. That's my problem. That burn it down instinct was always sort of at a distance for me and it felt just much, much closer. Yeah, that's kind of my, when I hear that
SPEAKER_18: tape I think, that's the strain and that's the kind of thinking that you bump into a lot that I find one of the most frightening things. I find it more frightening than almost anything. That idea that like we the people should be triumphant over everything. I find that to be a really scary idea that pops up. I think like Tracy, I've
SPEAKER_24: always thought of this as a checks and balance kind of thing. Like you have a system, we have a legislative branch, it passes laws. Sometimes the laws are ill-conceived or circumstances change or you find out a consequence of the law. You know, people of one race are constantly going to jail and people of the other race aren't or getting electrocuted or not. And then you get these ordinary people walking into these decision points and saying, you know what this doesn't work, this doesn't feel right. It's just wrong. And that's like if you don't have that, then the legislators don't get that little prick in their little bubble to learn. I totally hear you. I mean, I
SPEAKER_18: never advocate for going along with a bad law. And I think you're rife with bad laws right now. But there's something potentially corrosive about saying to a person you can just negate the law. Think about all the times when white juries in the South refused to convict people of horrible things. You know, it's like that's I mean, that's absolutely jury nullification. And that's like, that is the history of like post-reconstructions in the South, you know.
SPEAKER_21: Yeah, but you can make those same arguments on the other side. And we're going to get into that right after this quick break. Stick around.
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SPEAKER_18: I'm Jed Abumran. I'm Robert Krilwich. This is Radio Lab. And I'm Soren Wheeler here with Tracy Hunt. And today we are talking
SPEAKER_21: about jury nullification. And when we left, you guys, we were getting into a sort of a debate about whether a juror is having this power is a good thing or not because, you know, it can definitely let people sort of lean into their racial biases and make judgments based on race or gender or whatever, even in the face of the facts or against the facts, against the law. But next, I want to make the case that there are actually times when the jury having this power can prevent that kind of discrimination. Think about what juries did during the Civil Rights
SPEAKER_02: Movement. This is Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor speaking
SPEAKER_21: at NYU in 2016. If it weren't for jury nullification, we would have many civil rights
SPEAKER_02: individuals who would be convicted felons or other people who would be convicted of this. We would be convicted felons or otherwise for things that today we think are protected by the First Amendment. There is a place, I think, for jury nullification. Finding the balance of that and the role that a judge should or should not play. Our forefathers did not believe that juries necessarily always got it right. But it was, I think what they believed is that the jury getting wrong was better than the crown getting it wrong.
SPEAKER_08: It goes at some fundamental level to how we want as a people to be governed. Do we want to be governed by experts? Do we want to be governed by each other? What power do we want each of us to have over the other one? This is what this question really comes down to.
SPEAKER_08: It also
SPEAKER_21: puts hand, it concentrates power into mostly white hands. It concentrates power into mostly white hands. It concentrates power
SPEAKER_08: into the system when we're saying that one of the only benefits of jury nullification is to be a check on the system. If you look at it only from the perspective of the defendant then jury nullification seems like a great way to protest the system. But I've started to look at things more from the perspective of the victim. Which victims are getting justice and which victims are not. And when I start to look at it from that angle, what I see is juries nullifying cases when the victim is of color or when the victim is a woman. Try bringing a rape case. Try bringing a date rape case in this country. Try it. It's really hard. And one of the reasons why it's really hard is the jury. Is the jury sitting there talking about she was asking for it. Talking about what was she wearing. Talking about why was she out that late any damn way. That's a jury doing that to the woman as much as any other part of the system. So when I think about it from the perspective of the victim and how is what are the avenues of justice for the victims. If you're a person of color, if you're a minority, if you're an other, I feel like the jury makes it very hard for you as the victim to get justice. I feel better about the judge not caring if the people that you shot happen to be white or black. A jury cares a lot about that. If you can't convict a cop when you know he did it. When you saw him do it. When you can't convict the cop who shot Walter Cott. When you can't convict we can't even indict the cop who choked Eric Gardner to death in broad daylight. That to me requires a much more drastic rethink of how we do things in this country. And to me the first people to go have to be these G.D. jurors.
SPEAKER_18: I find that really persuasive.
SPEAKER_24: I don't. And I you know, maybe that's because I've served on a bunch of juries. I've been on about six now. And I have time and again been amazed. One time I was in a murder case. Some man had been accused of stabbing a woman 22 times and she died on a staircase. And the forewoman. And in New York they just picked the person who's picked first becomes the foreperson. So she came in. She sat down and said look, how many of you noticed like the defendant's lawyer was asleep a lot of the time? Every hand went up. We'd all seen this. And she said here's what I want you to do. Let's let's go back over everything that we know. And essentially retry the case. And we actually we went together through every bit of evidence. Looking for some doubt somewhere. We staged the stabbing. We went back over the distances. Could the guy have gotten from here to there in that amount of time? I live in that neighborhood. I don't think maybe you can. We basically did the job of the court all over again ourselves. And when we were done she said okay, let's let's vote now. And when it came clear to the forewoman that we were going to convict, because she was counting the votes and finally the 12th vote went to convict. She was shorter than her chair. So when she got off her chair she actually was smaller than when she was sitting in her chair. But she asked us all to hold hands. We just spent five days. We'd been sequestered in a hotel. Each of us had policemen guarding us because there was some violence about it. So we were all standing on the table. She asked us to hold hands. And then she looks up at the ceiling. And it's one of those ordinary rooms. And she addresses the the woman who was killed. And she says she says, we have spent the last few days trying to do something that is just. You know, you were there. You died at his hands or didn't. We decided that you did. And we hope and we pray that this is a system that works. And that you are getting justice. And then she said God bless America. Wow.
SPEAKER_18: That's amazing. Even though I think you're expressing a kind of faith in democracy that I think is in short supply right now. Big thanks to producers Soren Wheeler and Tracy Hunt. We should say a couple of thanks to first of all Jeffrey Abramson. His book is called We the Jury.
SPEAKER_21: And also Judge Fred B. Rogers in Colorado. Nancy Martyr, law professor at Chicago Kent College of Law. Valerie
SPEAKER_16: Hans, professor of law at Cornell Law School. Paula Hannaford with the
SPEAKER_21: National Center for State Courts. And I'm going to be talking about
SPEAKER_16: the National Center for State Courts. And Robert Lewis in the WNYC newsroom for helping me out with some public records stuff.
SPEAKER_21: So much of what we learned and the sort of spark for this whole story came from a video by CGP Grey. It was actually a whole YouTube channel and a ton of videos and they are all amazing. I watch them all the time. There's tons of great stuff in there. You should definitely go check it out. CGP Grey on YouTube. And one more quick note Laura Crejo, the woman from the beginning of the story, the juror who got punished, she actually passed away. And we just wanted to say what a pleasure it was to talk to her and how lucky we feel to have been able to tell her story.
SPEAKER_17: It's called Lided Dial and it is a deeply reported series. And it shares a lot of big themes and big stakes. Yeah, it basically looks at the rise of the sort of political rights domination of the radio airwaves.
SPEAKER_15: I mean, 12 out of the 15 top radio hosts lean right. And it looks at the ways in which this form, this form we all love, audio, radio, can kind of gain its power from having a slightly stealth imprint on the world. Like a lot of radio shows aren't archived and transcripts aren't searchable. So people can say things to millions of listeners without other people monitoring it. And it's just really well done. Every second of that thing is well written, well reported. It's hosted by the incredible reporter, Katie Thornton. The final episode is out. So it's a great time to go binge the whole thing, get a sense of the whole picture. And as a little teaser in that final episode, we do actually hear from the force behind many of these shows and stations. Phil Boiss, he is the VP of a company called Salem.
SPEAKER_00: The difference with Salem is even though we always want to make money and we do make money, we're in this to save America. Again, the series is
SPEAKER_15: called The Divided Dial. It's from On The Media, and you can find that wherever you listen to podcasts or on the website wnycstudios.org podcast slash otm. And there are also links to it in the liner notes for this episode that you are listening to right now or over at radiolab.org.
SPEAKER_32: Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Letif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Blum, Becca Bresler, Rachel Cusick, Beccetti Foster Keys, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz-Gutilleras, Sindhu Nyanasanbandhan, Matt Cutie, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sarah Khari, Ana Rascuette-Paz, Sarah Sandback, Ariane Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster, with help from Andrew Vinales. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton.
SPEAKER_27: WNYC Studios is supported by On Being with Christa Tippett. I'm Christa Tippett of On Being,
SPEAKER_23: where we take up the big questions of meaning for this world now. In our new podcast season, we're going to have a different human conversation about AI and also the intelligence of our bodies, grief and joy, social creativity and poetry, and so much more. A conversation to live by every Thursday.
