f13.net

Despite the fact I work for the local courthouse where the trial is going on, and that I know the prosecutor and defense attourney, I ended up getting selected for jury duty.

I had to waste the whole of today listening to police and lab techs bury Cracky McCrackFiend in evidence. According to the judge we should finish up tomorrow. I sure fucking hope so.

I doubt you're supposed to discuss this elsewhere.  And its nice how you have your mind made up before the defense has apparently presented its case.

Nothing I've said is anything I can't talk about, unless you count sarcasm.

It'll be over tomorr~today anyway, so I'll be able to fully discuss it then. I don't really care if you think I've made up my mind or not.

So do you think he did it?  I couldn't tell.

Hell, maybe after the defense presents Fabricated will be talking about Innocent McPure getting set up by his scumbag roommate or some crooked cops or something.

Geez, y'all jumped on that. I'm sure that jurors swing back and forth throughout the trial. Then they hash it all out at the end once they've heard EVERYTHING.

Besides...Cracky McCrackFiend. How can you ignore the funny and go straight to the "YOU MUST NOT BE TAKING THIS SERIOUSLY?"

I'm pretty much exempt from jury duty for the rest of my life. Yay me.

Actually, I'm somewhat interested. I used to want to be a lawyer....And I'm sure if I withheld certain information, I could probably get in.

And no, I'm neither a felon or a nursing mother.

One of the benefits of being a lawyer = instant disqualification.  I'd actually not mind being on a jury as I would probably see through most of the bullshit, but having someone who could do that would "pervert" the process.


Unless you are sequestered you can usually talk about the case with anyone except other jurors.

If I ever find a Pokemon in the woods or whereever and nourish it back to health, I'm so naming it Cracky McCrackFiend.

I was kinda returning the joke with another joke, but I guess following Triforcer's post set a specific tone that, unfortunately, colored my post in a different way than I intended.

Oh, yours was fun, Llava.

I was specifically referring to Triforcer.

Sorry that was unclear.

Let me clarify.

Triforcer: Light up plzkthx. That was fucking funny. Let's not just assume that people don't take their responsibilities seriously.

Did you have to take the jury duty notice to work to get the day off for...jury duty?

I'm going in here in a little bit to finish the trial, and no I didn't actually. Pretty much everyone in the courthouse knew I had been called. The employees that knew me cracked up that they had actually picked me for the jury.

And I'm happy to see that some people get sarcasm. There are definitely two sides to this case, but that'll have to wait for 3-5 hours tops hopefully, provided we don't get any more long-winded witnesses.

Welcome to the American Juror, or something?

Really, Fab, if you really didn't want to do it you could have gotten yourself DQ'd easily by just saying "hi bob, how's the wife?" or somesuch to the prosecutor, since you know him.  If the Defense didn't toss you off after that, I don't see how he could keep his job.

Court appointed?

Plenty of ways to avoid getting picked, but most of those are not things you want to say when you are surrounded by coworkers.

You could be a wealthy white man. That should pretty much cover it without saying a word.

Um, the prosecutor actually said that he knew me when I got called up to sit after they knocked off another half-dozen jurors.

Thanks to both sides burning up the jury pool like idiots, we ended up with:

-Me, a courthouse employee.
-A brother and sister.
-A teacher, after they made special efforts to knock all the previous ones off since it involved the 1000-feet-from-a-school satute. Bonus: The teacher in question is one of my little cousin's teachers.
-An older woman who had a son that had gotten messed up on drugs.
-A younger guy who had a friend with a $1000 a day cocaine habit at one point.

The rest were well, pretty forgettable.

Short Story: Police have warrant out for defendant. They get an anonymous tip that he's living at such and such a house. The police actually knew of the place due to getting many e-mail complaints about drug dealing and had already been watching the house. They wait until an large coke party gets underway, and pounce on the place.

Shitloads of junkies busted, including Mr. defendant, and thanks to that warrant and tip they get a search warrant and ransack the place. Cocaine fucking EVERYWHERE, and a stoner den in the basement with a neatly arranged toolchest of crackpipes, where the defendant supposedly slept (the house was not his). The defendant has 28 or so grams of coke on him (that's a lot), a bit of weed, but he also is the only sober person there without a pipe or other device.

6 Counts.
1: Possession of Narcotics (coke, and a Class A felony since it was within 1000 feet of a school and park)
2: Possession of Narcotics (Weed, ditto on the Class A)
3: Intent to deal (coke)
4: possession of paraphernalia with intent to use (coke)
5: possession of paraphernalia with intent to use (Weed)
6: Maintaining a common nuisance.

Ended up finding him guilty on counts 1, 2, 3, and 4. Not guilty on 5 (there wasn't a single thing in the house that could've been used to effectively smoke the stuff, all the pipes were specifically made for crack),  and we had a hung jury on 6 since two people couldn't decide what "maintained" meant, and there wasn't a hell of a lot of evidence he lived there outside of testimony from people who had a great interest in putting the blame on him.

Well, that, and it was pretty much a slam dunk on the possession and intent to deal.

Took fucking FOREVER.

Too bad, so sad, next time don't hang out at a drug dealer's pad.

Almost any household item can be used for smoking dope if one is resourceful.  Have you never seen the crazy contraptions high school kids and people nowhere near a proper head shop construct in order to smoke weed?

Sounds like he was hosed enough without going down for owning some tinfoil and a toilet paper roll though.

Not in DC.  There are so many of us per capita that we don't get excluded here.  I get called every 2 years.  I usually get off with the (true) "I don't think drug possession should be a crime" line.  I actually got picked for a panel once (a good, old fashioned stabbing, which I do think should be a crime) but the case settled before we even sat down.

I'll have to remember that for a couple years from now when they call me for jury duty yet again.

23 and I've been called twice.  Meanwhile my parents are over 50 and have been called... twice.  :x

The last time I actually got called to the courthouse for jury duty, it was the start of summer, I was still in college, and the trial was expected to go for months.  I was able to get out of it on the grounds that if I was on a jury all summer (i.e. not working) I wouldn't be able to pay tuition the following fall, would have to drop out of college, and would eventually end up dying in a gutter.

I just check the box that says, "Not a US Citizen" and dance around my American wife while she glares at me and mutters about deportation.  8-)

I've also heard that mentioning knowledge of right to nullify (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification) can get you tossed out of selection. It was explained to me as returning not-guilty verdicts because you disagree that it is a fair or just law the defendant was accused of. Whether it works or not as a real law anymore, it's enough to scare most lawyers away from selecting you.

Righ has never received a jury summons... but then, he doesn't dance.

One of my teachers had a pretty cool jury duty story. He got called up for a trial where a gang of guys were accused of conspiracy to deal drugs and launder money. It was apparently quite a big deal, had witnesses being called refered to as "Mr. X" and shit. Case lasted a long time but to cut a long story short one of the guy's got off scot free because noone was quite sure what conspiracy to deal drugs entailed. The guy apparently very young and the women in the jury insisted that he had been led along by the others and sending him to prison would destroy his life and lead him down a bad path.

After the case finished they got to find out he had already been in prison several times for violent assault and was a fair bit older than he looked.

I've been summoned for jury duty three times, had to go down to the court house and wait around twice, and got picked to serve on my third summons back around 2000. I'd recommend that you *not* try and get yourselves excused from serving on a jury if you can help it -- I found it to be an eye-opening and very educational process.

My first summons was one of the ones I had to go down to the court house and wait around. I made it to the part where they select the jury members but I was too far down the line to even get close to being picked. I was kind of hoping I would though, since it was a drug possession charge, and by that time I had been out of school long enough to have started thinking for myself and wanted to see the look on the prosecutor's face when I told him that, among of things, I was (and still am) in favor of legalizing marijuana.

On my third time myself and the guy next to me where the last two picked to serve so we just barely "made the cut" so to speak. One interesting factoid was that ex-Secretary of State George Schultz was in my jury pool. He tried to get himself excused by talking to the judge privately but for whatever reason the judge wouldn't allow it but of course one of the lawyers (I forgot which one) excused him. We ended up with a pretty well-educated jury, which was not surprising given the area that court house draws its pools from. Given that this is a gaming site I'll add that one of the jury members was a women from EA working on Majestic though she didn't tell me the name of the game at the time (it must have still be in early development given the timeframe).

The things I learned from being on a jury:

• There really is pressure to reach a verdict quickly because the jury members don't want to be there. It wasn't as overt as, say, the portrayal in 12 Angry Men but the feeling was there.
   
• You don't need to be smart to be a lawyer. Okay that wasn't really news to me but I was surprised how badly both sides presented their cases, the defense especially since the defendent had his own personal lawyer rather than a court appointed one. The prosecutor could've speed up the jury deliberations a lot by just tidying up a lot of loose ends with regards to the physical evidence. This was before CSI and the popularization of forensic science but even back then I could tell both sides had done a crappy job of presenting or refuting the physical evidence. I kept having to write notes to the judge to try and get some obvious evidence questions answered.
   
• Cases based mainly on circumstantial evidence are really tough to decide. The case I was on was basically one of a "peeping Tom" and most of the evidence was indirect though there was some eyewitness testimony. The police had evidence of this guy in the areas where people reported seeing and/or hearing somebody prowling around but had no physical evidence that linked him to being at those houses at that exact moment where somebody heard or saw something. So a large part of our time was discussing this evidence and trying to decide which were relevant for determining innocence or guilt.
   
• Everybody is lying on the stand. Well maybe not everybody but even with the "Do you swear to tell the truth..." stuff a large part of our job was trying to decide who was telling the full truth and who wasn't. Even the police in this case were somewhat suspicious because of their history with the defendent (he had other prior incidents with this police force). We spent a lot of time trying to decide which statements from which people were credible or not. The eyewitness's testimony was suspect as well given the lack of physical evidence to back up her statement. Was she just trying to be helpful to the prosecution or did she really see that exact person in her window (late at night, when it was very dark)?
   
• The whole "reasonable doubt" thing is, just, ugh! WTF does that really mean? I wrestled with that personally since this guy, if we found him guilty on any of the felony charges, was going to fall into the three strikes category so he was potentially going away for a long time.
   
• Judges are not very helpful. We had questions about certain rules of law while deliberating and the instructions we got back from the judge after going back and forth through the written messages rigamrole did very little if anything to clear things up. So basically we just had to make our own judgement calls about what the laws meant.
   

Edit: fixed typo

Don't take this personally, this is just my thing.  Pet peeve.  Button.  Whatever you want to call it.

http://www.apostrophe.fsnet.co.uk/index.htm

My bad. Don't even know why I tried to make it possessive in the first place.

Conjunctions are my most abused grammar rule. 

And whatnot.

Conjunction Junction, what's your function?

That used to be my sig.  And I want to know the answer, too.

}} Conjunction Junction, what's your function?
Hooking up words and phrases and clauses.
}} Conjunction Junction, how's that function?
I got three favorite cars
That get most of my job done.
}} Conjunction Junction, what's their function?
I got "and", "but", and "or",
They'll get you pretty far.

"And":
That's an additive, like "this and that".
"But":
That's sort of the opposite,
"Not this *but* that".
And then there's "or":
O-R, when you have a choice like
"This or that".
"And", "but", and "or",
Get you pretty far.

}} Conjunction Junction, what's your function?
Hooking up two boxcars and making 'em run right.
Milk and honey, bread and butter, peas and rice.
}} Hey that's nice!
Dirty but happy, digging and scratching,
Losing your shoe and a button or two.
He's poor but honest, sad but true,
Boo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo!

}} Conjunction Junction, what's your function?
Hooking up two cars to one
When you say something like this choice:
"Either now or later"
Or no choice:
"Neither now nor ever"
}} Hey that's clever!
Eat this or that, grow thin or fat,
Never mind, I wouldn't do that,
I'm fat enough now!

}} Conjunction Junction, what's your function?
Hooking up phrases and clauses that balance, like:
Out of the frying pan and into the fire.
He cut loose the sandbags,
But the balloon wouldn't go any higher.
Let's go up to the mountains,
Or down to the sea.
You should always say "thank you",
Or at least say "please".

}} Conjunction Junction, what's your function?
Hooking up words and phrases and clauses
In complex sentences like:
{"In the mornings, when I am usually wide awake,
 I love to take a walk through the gardens and down by the lake,
 Where I often see a duck and a drake,
 And I wonder as I walk by
 Just what they'd say if they could speak,
 Although I know that's an absurd thought."}

}} Conjunction Junction, what's your function?
Hooking up cars and making 'em function.
}} Conjunction Junction, how's that function?
I like tying up words and phrases and clauses.
}} Conjunction Junction, watch that function.
I'm going to get you there if you're very careful.
}} Conjunction Junction, what's your function?
I'm going to get you there if you're very careful.
}} Conjunction Junction, what's your function?
I'm going to get you there if you're very careful.

You know articles?  "A" "an" and "the"?

They're considered a separate part of speech, but I disagree.  I consider them adjectives, because they always describe a noun.

I am going to the train station.

Which train station?

The train station.

They're very nebulous descriptions, but they are descriptions of a noun.  And look at numbers, they're considered adjectives.

Example:
Bring me three plates.

So we can be less specific and say:
Bring me some plates.

So wouldn't the singular version:
Bring me a plate.

also be considered an adjective?

I think they're considered separate because they function solely to differentiate specific and general things, they're not really related to anything describing the object itself per se. Also because languages tend to come with and without articles, they've always got adjectives.

Articles are adjectives, according to my son's third grade teacher last year.  I wasn't taught that, but it certainly makes sense.

Jury duty:  I've been called every year for the past 9.  I've been excused due to being the "regular caretaker of someone between the hours of 9am and 5pm", but it's not a permanent excuse, more like a courtesy the county extends to me, and then they call me the next year.  At some point the excuse will wear out - when my children can get themselves home from school by themselves, I suppose.

I've been called twice, served once.  Have no real desire to serve again.  Was challenged by the prosecutor the last time I was called due to my local personal relationships with the lawyer/judge community (I worked as a legal assistant, and my attorney brother works for the local court).

A friend of mine, a lawyer, was called for jury duty.  During voir dire, she was asked if she thought she the defendant was guilty.  She said that she figured he probably was guilty of something or he wouldn't be sitting there (she thought she would never have to serve).

She got picked for the jury.

Hmmm.  Were the rest of the applicants weilding chainsaws ?