Martin Shkreli Getting Destroyed During Jury Selection Restores My Faith In Humanity
Source - More than 120 potential jurors in the fraud trial of kesrtin Shkreli were dismissed Monday, with some calling him “a snake,” “the most hated man in America” and “the face of corporate greed.” Mr. Shkreli is on trial at the Federal District Court in Brooklyn, charged with eight counts of securities and wire fraud. He denies the charges, which relate to his time running two hedge funds and at Retrophin, a drug company. But he is much better known for instituting steep price increases on lifesaving drugs as a pharmaceutical entrepreneur.
Several potential jurors on Monday blamed Mr. Shkreli broadly for the problems of the pharmaceutical industry. Three, for instance, castigated him for raising the price of the EpiPen. (He did not.) Others said they had been affected personally by Mr. Shkreli’s price increases. A man said both of his parents took Daraprim, a drug for a rare parasitic infection. Mr. Shkreli raised its price to $750 a pill, from $13.50, overnight in 2015 while running Turing Pharmaceuticals.
Further, the man said, he has several friends with H.I.V. or AIDS — people who may use Daraprim for infections — who cannot afford their drug. Other potential jurors had bad reactions to Mr. Shkreli himself. One said she had not known what the trial was about when she walked in and saw Mr. Shkreli. “I looked right at him, and in my head, I said, ‘That’s a snake’ — not knowing who he was,” the woman said. The negative comments built up to the point that Mr. Brafman began to signal to Judge Matsumoto when potential jurors had said enough that he could challenge them for cause, to stop them from going “on a tirade against Mr. Shkreli.” After the potential juror had stepped down, Benjamin Brafman, a lawyer for Mr. Shkreli, said, “So much for the presumption of innocence.”
Jury selection is good for one thing; weeding out normal people. From the looks of it, there were a lot of normal people at the Shkreli jury selection. Especially this woman:
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“I looked right at him, and in my head, I said, ‘That’s a snake’ — not knowing who he was”
She wasn’t the only one who spoke her mind. Apparently all one hundred jurors were dismissed after repeatedly ripping into “the most hated man in America.”
“The negative comments built up to the point that Mr. Brafman began to signal to Judge Matsumoto when potential jurors had said enough that he could challenge them for cause, to stop them from going “on a tirade against Mr. Shkreli.”
It’s great that people are ripping into him but it’s also problematic. If they really wanted to “make a difference” they should have kept their mouths shut until they were in the deliberation room. Everyone knows if someone’s accused of a crime, they’re guilty of it. You learn that in school. What they don’t teach you is in order to convict someone, you need to pretend to be unbiased. It sounds terrible but it’s true. That’s why the most painfully obvious guilty verdicts always turn out to be the opposite- because idiots are in charge of making the decision. Makes sense- what human with a functioning brain would willingly want to sit through a months long trial? No one.
That being said, it would be nice if “an educated” would take one for the team every once in a while. I know sitting in a court room sucks but it’s going to suck even more seeing that weasels smiling face when he leaves the courtroom a free man. If there was one smart person on the jury for the first OJ trail we wouldn’t have had to go through three more. Not to mention the disaster that was the Bill Cosby mistral.
The people who say Martin Shkreli “didn’t do anything wrong” or “it’s capitalism” can take a fucking hike. The guy bankrupted families and put peoples lives in jeopardy in order to make a buck that he didn’t need. To make it worse, once he had the buck cheated on the back end. What a scum bag.