In any machine as unwieldy as the justice system, there's bound to be a squeaky cog or two. The thing is, one little squeak during a criminal trial can mean you have to toss the whole thing out the window and call a do-over, because sometimes rules made up by 8-year-olds are the best rules. Reasons for a mistrial can range from the mundane to the laughably ludicrous, and for evidence from the latter end of that scale, we present ...

6 "Ladies and Gentlemen of the Ju- Holy Shit, Is that Tom Hanks?!"

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For obvious reasons, it is absolutely, positively, 100 percent forbidden for lawyers to talk to jurors when court is not in session. If you're serving as a juror and your car breaks down on the way home from the courthouse, leaving you stranded on the side of the road as packs of rabid chupacabras with a hankering for human pancreas snarlingly approach, any lawyer involved in the case cannot so much as stop to toss you a stick without having his or her entire case thrown out.

No exceptions. Not even if the juror is, ohmygodohmygodohmygod, Tom Hanks.

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"I'll remind the prosecution that we all remember how good Philadelphia is. Please proceed."

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You see, the thing about jury duty is any and every citizen can and will be called to serve it, from part-time janitors to full-time presidents. When Hanks got called in 2013, he actually decided to report for his citizen's duty rather than doing the celebrity thing and having his personal assistant try to figure out whom to pay off in order to get out of it, because by all accounts Hanks is, just, the best guy.

The trial went fine for about a week. Then, while on a lunch break, a member of the L.A. city attorney's office approached Hanks in a stairwell and proceeded to gush all over him about how thankful she was that someone of his stature would take time out of his busy schedule to perform jury duty, and holy wow Big was so great.