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June 23, 2009
Hello. City Desk? Get me rewrite, doll. This is Juror No. 8.
And stop the presses. Here's something you don't see every day--but then you wonder why more jurors aren't taken to task for texting, tweeting, phoning, blogging and otherwise messaging. Milwaukee's Anne Reed at Deliberations has this one from March we almost missed, and there's nothing stale about it: "The Fourth Circuit And The Juror Who Called The Press". And see U.S. v. Basham, the Fourth Circuit's March 30 opinion reviewing claims of errors in the grisly 2004 murder trial of a defendant sentenced to death.
It starts out when a producer from a Greenville, South Carolina television station contacted the district court judge right after the verdict came; he told the judge that during deliberations a juror had called to inquire why the station was not reporting on the trial, and to offer a few observations on the proceeding. No big deal, maybe, right? But then, as Anne Reed notes:
When the phone records came out, there was even more. "Wilson [the jury foreperson] made a six-minute call to WSPA, two one-minute calls and a four-minute call to WHNS Asheville, a two-minute call to WYFF in Greenville, a two-minute call to the Greenville News, and a one-minute call to the Spartanburg Herald. These latter two calls to newspapers had not been reported by Wilson during her initial testimony."
And more: "seventy-one calls between her and two other jurors from September through October 2004," including calls on days of critical testimony.
Read Anne's post to learn the Fourth Circuit's take on the foreperson's misconduct, and whether a new trial was warranted.
Posted by Rob Bodine at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)
It hovers, takes hostages, and moves on to the next town.
"I see defeated people. They're everywhere. They walk around like everyone else. They don't even know they're defeated." It's a choice--in your life and in your work. You always know if you are "there". You just don't know how you got there. You started compromising on things you once embraced as essential. Redford sent us this short Seth Godin post called "On the Road to Mediocrity" about "settling along the way". Avoiding mediocrity? Keeping the monster at bay? WAC? is no Seth Godin. But our take is that great habits learned early on difficult work is step one. Step two is vigilance. The fine thing about posts like Godin's? If it bothers you, you needed to read it.
"I see people who keep mailing it in." (Buena Vista Pictures)
Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)
The National Journal: Team Obama
The "people who run things" in the new administration are carefully collected for you in this interesting and useful article cataloguing what looks like a talented, credentialed and hard-working Team Obama. See by James Barnes and the National Journal staff "Obama's Team: The Face Of Diversity". It's marred only by a trumpeted and somewhat lame observation that less than half of the senior posts are filled by white men. Can we get past that, please?
Posted by JD Hull at 12:11 AM | Comments (0)