Yes, it’s a piece on a celebrity! Bear with me. Here at Liberal America, we love when celebrities do good deeds, bring social awareness to the table, and when we can see them as the normal human beings they are in every day life.
So, when we heard that the Nazi killin’, zombie fightin’ Brad Pitt had been summoned for jury duty and showed up dutifully, it caught our attention. How many readers out there would use whatever pull they had to get out of jury duty, civic duty or not?
Pitt arrived at the Los Angeles Criminal Court on December 19th prepared to be selected for a court case. According to The Daily Mail, after waiting several hours the court turned him away citing he would be “too much of a distraction.”
Well, no duh. God help that man if I were a fellow juror sitting next to him. There are not enough Alabama Slammers in the South that could keep me calm.?That’s all I’ve got to say about that.
Sources spoke with The Daily Mail and shared that Pitt was hoping to be picked for a quick case stating he thought it would be interesting. However, he would be required to stay as long as the case lasted?which could possibly have interfered with his busy schedule.
Jurors are chosen randomly based on driver’s licenses, state IDs, and voter registration lists, so a person’s celebrity status is usually unknown until the day of court. According to William R. Lively, an LA attorney, once the court knows who they have in their court room they dismiss them. Lively shared with the Daily Mail why celebrities are usually dismissed:
“You just can’t stick Brad Pitt in a jury box and expect 11 jurors to ignore him. It’s only natural that those jurors would be watching to see how Brad reacts to what’s being said and that they could be influence by his opinions once the jury goes behind closed doors to render a verdict.”
It may seem odd that anyone would think jury duty could be interesting, but it’s still awesome that Pitt showed up like a regular citizen prepared to serve. I imagine all he had to do was make a phone call and have it taken care of. Regardless, I bet there were a lot of happy possible jurors in court that day!
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Liz Lee considers herself an uppity Southern woman and the only sane person left in the swamps of South Georgia. She has all her teeth and knows how to spell fairly well. She graduated high school and has some college learnin?. She is a wife to a man that ain?t her cousin, mother of one human child, mother to one furry American Bully, and also your typical everyday Wonder Woman. When she hangs up her cape, you can find her curled up in her office sewing while gossiping, writing, playing World of Warcraft, or practicing banjo in hopes of being the greatest at pickin? and a grinnin?. You can follow her on Facebook to see what she is up to. She also has a Twitter she can’t figure out how to use and is?the owner of a defunct website she is slowly working on in between all of her heroic awesomeness.
