Jury duty gets a bad rap and for good reason: It’s time consuming, disruptive, and often means being away from seemingly more important things. But juries are critical to the American legal system and to the concept of justice in America. The problem? The people making up juries are dumb. They have little civics understanding. Injustice prevails with biased juries. Injustice prevails when qualified jurors are so disgusted with the system that they try to avoid serving. Injustice prevails with dumb juries.

How important are impartial juries? Just ask any Jan. 6 protester spending years in prison for walking peacefully, at a police officer’s behest, through the Capitol. Is there a D.C. jury that would find any right-leaning defendant not guilty?

Some of the problems with juries are pure cynical malice on the part of prosecutors. Some are set up by biased judges. All the problems with juries have, at their root, ignorance of basic civics and the cascading effect that bad judicial outcomes cause a nihilistic belief that serving doesn’t matter. It does matter, though.

Last week, I went through the jury selection and then, shockingly, got seated on a jury for a felony case.

There were multiple reasons why people were excused from the jury pool. Some felt that they could not presume the innocence of the man based on past convictions. Some felt that the allegations alone made the man guilty. They did not believe that the prosecution needed to make a case. They believed that the defendant needed to prove his innocence. But the slate-clearing reason why people disqualified themselves: If the defendant didn’t take the stand, then, obviously, he was guilty.

A friend of mine said of the bandwagoning that happened when this issue came to the fore that the jurors just latched on because they didn’t want to be on the jury. That might have been true of a few. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the 40 or so who disqualified themselves gave long, vehement explanations about how people who are innocent will defend themselves and want to testify.

As I sat there, I could think of 40 reasons not to testify.

The judge in this case dismissed them all. That left a small pool to choose from, and I was one of them. The remaining jurors were intelligent, attentive, and sincere. It was a brutal case with heart-rending evidence scrupulously compiled by a crack team of prosecutors. They made the jury’s job easy and proved their case beyond a shadow of a doubt, never mind beyond reasonable doubt. This was a case where justice prevailed.

Leaving the courtroom, though, the responses of these jurors and the clear injustice being meted out in courtrooms across America because of dumb jurors brought disturbing thoughts.

What does it mean for justice when everyone knows the outcome of trials simply because of who is on trial and the venue where the trial took place?

Why, for example, was the venue not changed for the George Floyd cases? Does anyone believe that an untainted jury pool could be found anywhere in Minneapolis?

Riots just occurred in Philadelphia, and the prosecutor there is doing a character analysis of the criminals and won’t prosecute them. Meanwhile, a guy who stopped violence on a Manhattan subway is being charged with murder. These are problems of uneven prosecution. It all undermines the justice system. (RELATED: Daniel Penny, USMC: Unfairly Charged)

Then, juries are selected precisely to rig an outcome.

Fellow American Spectator writer George Parry has an excellent piece about “gagging Trump” and how judges are using their power to limit the speech of the former president so that he can’t say anything negative about his likely opponent, the current president. George says we’re in uncharted legal waters. Indeed. (READ THE ARTICLE: Gagging Trump)

The politicization of the judicial system is trickling down from the Department of Justice. The ignorance of law students and the fact that something as simple as a free speech code needs to be imposed on law schools demonstrates that the pipeline of attorneys is going to make things worse.

It was shocking to hear fellow Americans say out loud during jury selection here in Texas, “No, I cannot follow the law and allow for the defendant’s innocence if he won’t take the stand in his own defense.” Citizen after citizen said that they would not uphold the law. They said it out loud and were unashamed.

And, really, why not? The judicial system from the very top is destroying the rule of law. Why should the average citizen feel guilted into upholding it?

The American system of justice is a fragile thing. It’s built upon a basic understanding of the presumption of innocence and trial by a jury of one’s peers. What happens when all Americans decide that the law means nothing? Every jury will be a dumb jury.