I was called to jury duty Thursday. A guy was arrested for 3rd degree assault in the parking lot at a local Taco Bell. He plead innocent and requested a jury trial.

The court brought in 30 people for the 12 seats. They put 12 people into the jury seats and the rest into the audience seats. The lawyers questioned us for about 45 minutes. Then they selected 12 people from the group. The 12 people in the jury seats were the first choice selections. After the lawyers rejected some of the people in the jury seats, they were filled with people from the audience seats. It was all interesting. I found myself wishing that I would be selected so I could find out what happened.

A lot of people brought books to read and stuff like that while they were waiting. I purposefully didn’t. I wanted to spend my time smoozhing, just chatting with people. I met a lady who is a manager of an adult foster care home. She was older than me, and maybe a little eccentric. I think she was Catholic. She talked about attending baptisms and she wore a Catholic hair style. She worked in a business where she took care of others dutifully.

I met a guy named Charles. He wore a long sleeved cotton work shirt over a worn out white tee shirt. He was tanned and older than me. His hair was short, almost crew cut length. I pegged him as someone who did a lot of manual work, maybe driving heavy equipment. It turns out that he worked at a manufacturing company making equipment for the lumber industry. His company was being shut down. There wasn’t enough demand for lumber equipment because there wasn’t a demand for lumber because of the state of the housing industry. He was deciding whether to retire or not. He was considering working part time as a school bus driver. He looked like a school bus driver.

The lawyers asked the group about things like "What do you think ‘reasonable doubt’ is?" and "Could you find the accused person innocent or guilty?". The idea of "reasonable doubt" was kind of interesting. What do I think that means, "beyond a reasonable doubt?" Reasoning is thinking. So something that is reasonable is something that can be thought about. In other words, it is something believable. American culture is based heavily on reason. The first person on record as using the name "United States of America" was Thomas Paine, the famous Deist.

Paine, like a lot of American founders, believed wholeheartedly in reason over religious faith. That was one of the great concepts behind the American Revolution, the rejection of theocracy in favor of democracy. Theocracy holds that certain people are God’s representative on earth, so their rule cannot be questioned. The revolutionaries wanted to reject British rule. To do so, they first had to reject the Christian theocracy supporting the king.

The revolutionaries were throwing off the yoke of unreasonableness that came from having a Christian godhead, and they were replacing it with a government based on reason. You can read this in the Declaration of Independence where God is referred to as the deist "Nature’s God."

Nature’s God is not the Christian God. Nature’s God is the creator of nature, the author of the natural universe, not the caricature from the Christian myths. Even today, we still practice deism in government. We put "In God we trust" on our money. We begin certain ceremonies with a ceremonial prayer. American government today is essentially deist. It accepts the God of Nature, and it accept reason, while not embracing any church based form of religion.

The American founders held that a single and unquestionable head of government was unacceptable. When the king was mad, as king George plainly was, the government acts contrary to the happiness of the people. The founders reasoned that it was better to have the rule of government come from a group of people because it is much more difficult to a group of people to go mad and become destructive, than it is for an individual. And they recognized that people are happier when they have control over their own destiny. This is the foundation of the American democratic government.

This belief that a group decisions lead to better outcomes is the foundation of American reasonableness. Reasonableness is not logic. Logic is mathematics. With logic, you have a given set of facts, you apply some exact principles to those facts, and you get a consistent outcome. In the human world, facts are generally grey, and principles fuzzy, so we make our best guess, come to an informal consensus, and call it reasonable. Reason doesn’t always produce the right answer, but it does come close enough to make things, such as a society, work. This is reasonableness. It is common opinion as truth. It is a close enough guess. It is thought as cause.

While this may not be a mathematically perfect system, it is the most perfect human system. America reasonableness rejects a justice that comes from divine revelation, aka from "the church," and it accepts the natural goodness that results when people are allowed to try to do on their own what is best for their society and themselves.

So back to the question of what constitutes reasonable doubt. A reasonable doubt is when credible facts don’t support a legal accusation in the minds of a juror or jury.

Because human beliefs are involved, it is also the ability to question whether something a figure of authority says is true.

One of the big topics that came out during jury selection was the defense attorney’s question of who knew someone in a police department. Every potential juror who admitted to having a social relationship with a police officer was dismissed. The next time I’m a potential juror for a criminal case and I want to get off jury duty, all I have to do is discuss my past social relationships with police, and how wonderful I think the police are. But next time I’m a potential juror I will probably want to see the case through. They normally take no more than a day. Rarely more than three days.

Stumble it!