It is refreshing to see someone literally using the word literally to literally mean literally.
Glad you said this. I recall learning this many years ago when I first served on a jury for a murder case. When this bit of instruction was given to us, I found it surprising for the reason you make above. In courtroom dramas and cop procedurals, circumstantial evidence is always portrayed in terms of “only” as if it were lesser. I recall writing this in my notes because I found it fascinating.
Of course the majority of the other jurors didn’t believe me when we got into deliberations. They either hadn’t been listening or had been so hard-wired by watching TV shows and movies that they simply didn’t believe me. “We were told this,” I said. “Look, it’s here in our instructions too.”
They waved me off. I realize it shouldn’t have been, but it was surprising how little they paid attention to the evidence in the trial. It was pretty frustrating.
-xtien
Heh. The whole “judged by a jury of your peers” thing sounds great until you’ve served jury duty. The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if jury duty was designed as a form of crime deterrent.
My first jury duty experience involved a man accused of sexual misconduct with young kids - and lordy, were there tapes. It was difficult after watching the footage to judge him for the charges based on evidence when half the jurors wanted to throw the book at him. He was an awful person, but that didn’t mean we got to make things up.
We ended up finding him guilty on all counts, but I never felt good about one of them. It was comparatively minor count so probably didn’t affect the sentence much; he was an older man and the other charges were enough to put him away for the rest of his life. In my mind it was likely that charge was true but the evidence didn’t meet the threshold of reasonable doubt. So it really hurt my perception of the whole process.
The jury duty I served on was similar to this. Luckily there were no tapes on my case, just a pretty difficult to watch tape of the victim telling the story to police, which was very difficult because the girl was very deep on the autistic spectrum.
But the defense was basically, “her mom coached her to say this, becuase I dumper her, and she wanted me to go to jail forever” The evidence was fairly scant, and I think when we went to deliberation we all had no clue what to do. And the direct evidence stuff came up a lot, and we too were told to look at the evidence presented to us. We weren’t allowed to view tape again, or other things, we just had to go off on what was said in court, and the medical examiner’s notes.
We went from majority undecided/not guilty to majority guilty over a few hours, and then to unanimously guilty. Having a pretty strong personality myself, it was crazy to see how easy it would be for a jury to go either way, depending on who is picked. I pushed pretty hard for guilty early on, and everyone came around.
I strongly disliked the DA’s presentation of the case, he was pretty theatrical playing up a lot of the motivation, the disability aspect, etc. Also, the girl’s mother was not going to win mother of the year, and that didn’t help. And I think the defense lawyer did a great job with a tough case, but we as a jury decided that there wasn’t anything holding back conviction that was a “reasonable” doubt. The judge stressed this, without a lot of direct evidence, there always would be some doubt in this case, but we had to determine if our doubts were reasonable. And that any not guilty verdict should be based on reasonable doubts in the case.
The defense’s argument felt very weak, even though the public defense attorney did a grat job. There were experts from the prosecution side, as well as caregivers that said coaching someone in her mental state to lie to police and report something like this would be very difficult if not impossible. To me, that felt like a weak defense, there was no good alibi, there was a small amount of DNA evidence.
I still wonder if we made the right call to this day. But the entire process left me fairly positive on the whole “jury of your peers” thing. As basically every one of us during the 4+ hour deliberation went from one side to another at some point, and we ended up arriving at a verdict we all agreed on. It was a very difficult, but rewarding experience.
Cohen’s saying all kinds of terrible stuff about Trump, but it’s gonna matter not a whit, because it’s stuff we all already know.
I enjoy that Indy-1 remarked that his own large adult idiot son a person “with the worst judgement in the world.”
insert nelson here
Apparently Jr signed one of the checks.
We’ve known that Junior has been in deep shit for a long time. Confirmed. Deepest. Lose a boot in there.
I dunno, I think Cohen telling us that Stone told Trump about Wikileaks’ pending email dumps is new, especially now that CNN is reporting that Trump denied that in his written responses to Mueller.
That aside, what this hearing does is reveal the extent of the rot in the GOP. So no, not news I guess.
The strength of the Cohen testimony isn’t in it’s revelations of new information, it’s in it’s confirmation of things we pretty much knew or suspected all along. Now, instead of being able to shrug much of this terrible stuff off as conspiracy theory, WITCHHUNT and fairy tales made up by overzealous Trump critics, America is being shown evidence by someone who was on the inside that much of what was rumored is actually true. Plus, while Cohen may not be the most reliable witness on his own, his testimony is being backed up by plenty of documentation and other evidence taken from his office, home and personal communications.
Cohen was never meant to be the “smocking gun”…he’s just setting the stage for what’s to come.
Yeah, because that’s going to matter.
Maybe not to Fox News zombies, but in the grand scheme of things, especially in terms of how it’s framed in history, it absolutely does matter. The Nixon Presidency is a good example of this. Facts and evidence matter, even if a certain subset of people have no interest in believing them at the time they’re presented.
It’s not about convincing Trump’s base. It’s about convicing Dems that they need to win the damn election, not tear each other apart in the primaries over relatively small differences.
And also ‘moderate independents,’ to the extent there are enough to swing anything.
A little light relief…
Peeps gotta eat!
“I mean, I have absolutely no idea what’s going on at any time, so I assume that’s how it works with all leaders.”
That is simply amazing.
Next up Stalin didnt know that people were being sent to the gulag and died.
To spare us all the damage of watching Hannity’s show tonight, the Fox web site has the highlights.
Hannity also asked Trump about border security and Republicans who voted against the wall.
“If we had a wall, we wouldn’t have to apprehend. People wouldn’t come into our country. Drugs wouldn’t come into our country,” Trump said.
So there.
They also make sure you know what it is really all about, in the very next sentence:
“Hannity” finished the month of February as the top-rated cable news program, averaging 3.2 million viewers.