Natter Area 51: The Truthiness Is in Here
Off-topic discussion. Wanna talk about corsets, duct tape, or physics? This is the place. Detailed discussion of any current-season TV must be whitefonted.
A couple things from that VF article: It assumes that a candidate should be "sane enough to be President." Isn't wanting to be President kind of insane? And who was our last sane one? Carter? Before him?
Also:
Neither reporter—both of whom accompanied Rudy on his campaign trips—appeared to have asked the obvious question (it's a reasonable question for all politicians, but it's professional negligence not to ask it of Rudy): whether he's on antidepressants or any other pharmacological mood stabilizers.
Everybody who has a government security clearance has to answer questions about mental health and sign a release form for investigators to check with their doctors about prescriptions. This makes me wonder if presidential candidates have to pass a clearance investigation before being nominated? Or do we rely on the election process to be the investigation?
I've never tried to get out of jury duty; it keeps the system working. Once I got called and had a legitimate thing (college finals), last time I got called I went. About 10 or so they let us all go home, and they gave us $6 and validated parking. It's like I got a free day off work was taken downtown and bought ice cream.
Didn't suck.
Your experience was worse than mine, but when I was called a few months ago I was also surprised at how many people had been victims of crime or connected to it
I remember my close girlfriends and I having a discussion about abuse/rape. Out of the 7 of us two have been raped, one more than once, two sexually assaulted, two abused by boyfriends and one molested as a child. Out of 7 women 5 had had something like that happen to them.
Jesus, Dana, that sounds like a terrible case.
Damn, Daisy.
DC has an EXTREMELY small jury pool - I've been called every two years (plus a few days) since I got registered to vote. I've also gotten called for federal court jury duty twice, and that's a major pain - they keep you for two weeks, and can extend it if they feel it's needed.
I was told that, even if eligible, I'd be unlikely to be kept on a violent crime jury because of the whole krav thing and training cops and abuse victims and working part time for the ADA. Bogus?
Fred is right, it is presumed to affect how you will weight the testimony of law enforcement or how you will weight the fact that people were charged and arrested. Same with knowing people in jail, too. Your relationship with cops would not be enough for *me* to kick you off, though. It would have to be a family member or very close friend, or you work with them daily. I mean, jurors usually take their job pretty seriously.
Voir dire is different in every court though. In my trial a few years ago we sent out extensive questionnaires to the venire, about 200-300 people strong, did some quick removals in the entire venire based on whether they knew the people in the case, and then did individualized voir dire that lasted about 10-20 minutes per. It took four days.
When I was called a month ago, they seated 16 people in the box, gave us a laminated sheet with twenty questions (profession, education, connection to law enforcement or courts/trials, can you apply the law, etc.) that we read the answers to in sequence with some people being rejected for cause, and the lawyers had some unannounced time-- 12 minutes maybe-- to quiz us individually or as a group. It took a couple hours to seat the jury.
I've heard that, statistically, one in three females have been sexually molested in one form or another. As the 'one', it seems to me that is a conservative count. Then again, I'm a person people tell things to, so maybe I am just more exposed. But seriously? I don't know if I've ever met a woman who could say that nothing of that sort has ever happened to her or her close ones.
I guess to prevent us from being tampered with.
One jury I was going to be picked for took a break. I went to the bathroom and heard two women talking about the guilt of someone they were there for. As we went back into the jury room, I realized that one of them was the defendant's mother. I vowed to not let the bathroom discussion sway me...after all, they could have been talking about someone else, right?
Then, I heard the defendant tell his mother that he was going to fight the charge. She looked at him incredulously and shouted, "Why on earth would you do that?"
t hand raised like Hermoine Granger
Um. Your Honor? May I be excused?
When I was on a jury, we filled out a questionaire, and then for certain answers, you went up to have a more private conversation with the lawyers and judge -- I know I didn't have to talk about how I was a crime victim in front of everyone.
It's turtles all the way down!
Hee. I have just noticed bon's tag.
The victim's daughter was clearly nervous and scared. When they gave her crime scene photos to look at, her hands were shaking. These first three witnesses were obviously all about establishing the crime -- the fact that the knife, with a five and a half inch blade, had not come from their kitchen, they'd never seen it before, that the victim's bedroom door was open when they all went to sleep, where they lived, how the apartment was laid out, what happened when the victim started screaming, etc.
The victim herself was not particularly emotional, which was something else the prosecutor covered in voir dire, that we all agreed a victim of rape could act and react in many different ways. She identified the defendant in person as her attacker. She had also picked him out of a photo spread.
The next witness was the patrol officer who responded to the 911 call. She took the victim's statement and collected the bloody knife, and also the comforter. She said she was told a crime scene unit was not going to come to the scene.
After that, I think, was the nurse who performed the sexual assault kit on the victim. In addition to the bad cut on her hand, the victim also had some bruising and signs of trauma.
We heard from two people who'd tested the sexual assault kit and the knife. The first one basically did tests that confirmed the presence of blood and bodily fluid on these items. The second one actually performed the DNA test. This is where it gets a little graphic:
They found both sperm and semen on the vaginal swab and rectal swab. The rectal swab actually had more sperm, so they did the DNA test on that sample. Part of the test included separating ejaculate material from other material.
They got a DNA match to the defendant. The chances of an unknown person of Hispanic origin having contributed that DNA sample were something like one in 40 trillion.
If people wanted to, they could go talk to the judge & lawyers. Some did, some didn't.
God bless the victim. For showing up and standing her ground.
