Mostly female jury seated for Roger Clemens trial

Submitted by anthony on Wed, 2011-07-13 03:30

Article here. Excerpt:

'WASHINGTON - (AP) -- An overwhelmingly female jury with little interest in baseball will decide whether former pitching star Roger Clemens lied to Congress when he said he never used performance-enhancing drugs.
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The two sides threw out the maximum number of 20 people before the jury of 10 women and two men along with four alternates were seated. The jurors themselves were not told who among them are alternates but they were told to avoid news and sports programs. To keep the panel from encountering the dozens of journalists at the courthouse, the judge told them they will meet off site each day, ride a bus to a back entrance and use nonpublic corridors. They will be served breakfast and lunch in what was once a judge's chambers so they don't have to use the cafeteria where reporters, attorneys and Clemens himself take their meals.'

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First they are assuming these women have less interest in baseball as a sport than do men. Second, the idea that women will be more disinterested in the trial's outcome than men for whatever reason and thus be more dispassionate is more of the same kind of claptrap that could cause women to be serving on juries as majorities thereof (does anyone know of a source of info on juries in the US vis-a-vis breakdown by sex?). When you see this sort of thing in the media, there seems to be no outcry or objection to it when if it were the opposite it would be front-page news. Amazing.

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Submitted by Matt on Thu, 2011-07-14 01:00