Reading Time: 3 minutes
Todd Chrisley is doing more than just insist that he and wife Julie are “innocent.”
Despite their 2022 convictions for various financial crimes, the notorious former reality stars were released from prison by Donald Trump.
This renders their convictions powerless. No more prison time, no repaying their victims. hat’s not enough for Todd.
He’s insisting that their jurors were not their “peers” because they weren’t multi-millionaires.
Were Julie and Todd Chrisley not tried by a jury of their peers?
While participating in the The Chrisleys: Life After Lockup special that aired over the weekend, Todd Chrisley went all in on his erstwhile jurors.
During the interview, Juju Chang noted that many take issue with Todd and Julie having been convicted by a “jury of your peers” and getting out of prison.
Instead of taking this golden opportunity to discuss their remarkably stiff sentencing, Todd reminded everyone of the sort of person that he really is.
“Convicted by a jury of our peers? Were we?” Todd asked.
“I didn’t see multimillionaires in that jury box,” he then complained. “I didn’t see people that were in the film industry in that jury box.”
Just for the record, jury of your peers means that jurors are selected from the citizenry.
A jury is not a panel of judges or legal experts.
Crucially, they are not political appointees or members of any specific class or profession.
It gets worse than his ‘jury of the poors’ gripe
In addition to complaining that the jury was simply too poor to see his and Julie’s innocence, Todd Chrisley somehow made it even worse.
“I saw people in a heavily Democratic county,” he griped.
“And a judge allowed them to paint us as this white family who has white entitlement and who has money to burn.”
While that sounds like such an apt description of the Chrisley family that it might as well be the tagline of their former or future reality series, at best, he’s implying some sort of political persecution.
At worst, it sounds like Todd is implying that he and Julie went to prison because they are white.
We hope that we do not have to explain that this is obviously not the case. Among other things, systemic racism awards them massive structural privileges based upon race — not the other way around.
If Todd and Julie were saying that they received such lengthy prison sentences because they are reality TV personalities, that would be believable. It may even be true!
Sometimes, prosecutors push extra hard against celebrities over non-violent crimes in order to set an example and boost their own careers. (Martha Stewart, anyone?)
The Chrisleys aren’t looking for ‘redemption’
“I don’t really look at redemption because I know that what we were convicted of, we didn’t do,” Todd Chrisley asserted. “So I’m not trying to redeem anything.”
By the way, they have paid some of the $17 million in restitution that they owed to their victims.
The pardon voids that debt — and they now aim to get some of that money back.
Sometimes, people say that prison rehabilitates people. This is patently false. For an easy example, look no further than Todd Chrisley.
