Why you should never say stupid stuff to get out of jury duty

When they stop locking people up pending trial, I'll stop believing that arrested people are probably guilty.

 

That doesn't make a pile of sense.

Ever cover a trial, including preliminaries? Lots of lawyer B.S. there. It's a quick way to lose respect for the system.

 

"Lawyer B.S." = Representing your client, who is paying you to do so, to the best of your ability.

I think a great book to get some idea of how trial lawyers strategize and why certain things matter is the Jeffrey Toobin book on the O.J. Simpson trial, "The Run of His Life." Shows why things that we might think are important actually become major sticking points. Best portion is the stuff on the maid, who was going to flee the country instead of testifying. There was all this wrangling and finangling to get her in court. And then it didn't even end up being used (they had to tape the testimony so as not to interrupt the prosecution's case). It didn't end up mattering in the end, but that's hindsight. A lot like journalism, actually.

 

I've always thought that was a huge reason for the extreme anger that O.J. got off -- that we all saw "Mister Yonny" lying through his teeth and trying to shuttle the maid out of the country, just the blatant game-rigging dishonesty, but the jury wasn't privy to that. (Well, that was one reason for the anger, the other being that he so obviously did it.)

 

B.S. wasn't meant literally for all cases, but definitely for some.

You don't have to push hard to get some defense attorneys to admit they defend guilty clients.

 

Why would you have to push them? The guilty are entitled to a defense, too.

 

I think Cochran actually wanted her to testify, because he thought that she would be able to help Simpson with her timeline, i.e. she was a possible alibi. In his opening statement, he actually told the jury that she would be able to place him somewhere else while the murder was taking place, I think. That didn't actually end up being the case, but I know she was a defense witness, because they had to interrupt the prosecution for like a week and sequester the jury during that time because Clark and Darden, etc., etc., didn't want their case interrupted (understandably), as was their right.

I might have a couple of the specifics of the facts wrong, but I think I'm on the right track.

Yeah, it ended up looking like a fishing expedition. But at the time, the defense thought her testimony might help and probably would help. So they had to run her out there. Of course, it is an indictment of Corchran and Shapiro and crew that they would not know exactly what she was going to say. And it is particularly so since they put it in their opening statement for the jury like it was fact.

 

Only got called for jury duty once. A large group of us were sworn in, then sent to a waiting room.

An hour of reading magazines later, the Commissioner of Jurors came back in, said the case was settled, and sent us home. That was it.

On the topic of this Brooklyn woman, I think the judge is an idiot. If that woman serves on any jury on a case involving a black or a Hispanic, I'd think their lawyers would move for a mistrial in a New York second. That's if she's picked.

Plus, she answered honestly. Would the judge have the woman just lie, and then end up on a jury?

 

Ninety-nine percent of a defense attorney's job is protecting the integrity of the process. Something like 2 percent of cases actually go to trial.

I'm willing to accept a few guilty people walking free to ensure that the process ultimately protects the innocent. For example, conservatives flip the holy fuck out over the exclusionary rule, which suppresses evidence that was obtained illegally. But the whole point of the exclusionary rule is to deter illegal searches and seizures of innocent people. The guilty people who get to walk are just collateral societal damage that we are willing to accept to that end. (That being said, there is certainly a lot of evidence that in practice it doesn't deter illegal searches at all because police are judged on arrests, not convictions. They could frankly give a shit whether a conviction occurs).

 

True. As Dick said, the goal in most of those cases is to cut a deal and avoid a trial.

A few clients won't take the deal, though. And sorry, but I do have a problem when people with deep pockets continually escape punishment when it's pretty clear they did something. One of the du Pont heirs comes to mind immediately.

 

You're not allowed to complain about this and then complain that government employees get paid too much. (Meaning the royal "you," not you personally). Pay prosecutors more. Get better prosecutors. Real easy.

 

Having recently sat through the better part of a prosecution's case where a plea deal was accepted before the defense even started, I don't want any part of being on a jury. Ever. Ever. Ever.