Maybe I’m reading this wrong, but this seems both a harsh (and undeserved) indictment of the OP and also a misunderstanding of the OP’s role in all this. Speaking as a lawyer, if I’m making an ineffective and wrong-headed argument to the jury, I deserve to be called on it by the jury. And that’s precisely what the OP, as a juror, did: listened to the argument, used common sense and basic math skills, and determined that the argument didn’t hold water.
As I read the OP, there’s nothing wrong with trying an argument. And, as I’ve said before, the arguments that the defense made are (at least in the abstract) appropriate. But in this particular case, with the facts as they are, the defense attorney would have been better served to take a different tack. Not sure what tack that might be, but pissing off the jury doesn’t seem to have done the trick.
Maybe so, but I see the OP hammering this guy, over and over, and I’m thinking maybe there’s something we’re not getting here. It is one person’s opinion and we’re only hearing one interpretation of the events. If thiis lawyer was so far afield, where was the judge in this scenario?
IANAL, but I am a big fan of Law & Order. I do not believe it is the judge’s role to tell an attorney how to argue the case, just whether or not he can follow a line of questioning (this is allowable, that is not) or what evidence can come in.
You know, I have read your post several times, and I’m still not exactly clear on what you’re saying and how it relates to my mini-rant. You discuss being on a case and how severe an impact the verdict would have on the defendant, and how you ensured a mild sentence was imposed. Great, but again, this does not relate to my OP. I wasn’t there to issue the sentence, just determine guilt or innocence, and I had no issue with determining that.
My beef is with a lawyer who used repeatedly flawed logic to argue his case–not to mention a ridiculous amount of redundancy. I had to sit there and listen to his laughable arguments for 5 days without breathing a word. With the trial over, I am free to vent…and the SDMB is a good place for this kind of vent.
I don’t get what I should have done, in your opinion. Sat there and believed the defense lawyer? Ignored his flawed logic? Disregard what I know and accept what he says? Find the defendant not guilty because I’m a teacher, and I should let the lawyer be a lawyer? I don’t get it. I thought it was my role as a juror to listen to both sides of the argument, weigh them, and reach a conclusion.
I agree with you, however on this point: no one else here on the SDMB was there in the box with me (well, that I know of), so you are getting only one side of this story. You are right to be skeptical and try to see the whole picture through your own point of view, filtering my words through your logic, experience, and reason. That’s precisely what a person with good critical thinking skills does, and that’s what I did.
Someone at some point was going to criticize my OP–it looks peculiar around here to have a thread where everyone agrees. You know the saying–“If everyone agrees with everything you say, they’re not listening to you.”
Oh, and as far as the judge…it seemed it wasn’t her role to correct the defense lawyer. “Mr. So-and-So, use better logic,” that whole thing. Instead, it seemed to be the prosecution’s role to keep this dude in line. There were plenty of objections–we heard a lot of “counsel is testifying,” “counsel is arguing with the witness,” and “lacks foundation.” Most of the time, the objections were sustained.
And FTR, the defense attorney was a third-stringer. The public defender was unavailable, as was his alternate. Apparently this guy was next in line. I’m not sure why he told us this, but he did, on more than one occasion.
Regarding the juror wanting a free lunch: That wasn’t the case, but I was amused by a few of the jurors on the day deliberations began who said, “Let’s stretch this out until tomorrow so we don’t have to go to work!” That is what indeed happened–and the verdict was delivered at 10am the next day. Hmmm…somehow I think they didn’t all go back to work…
When I first read the OP, I was empathetic, although I did find the comment about the atty’s clothing a bit unnecessary, but no big deal.
By the time I got through the third lengthy post, repeatedly raking the guy over the coals and gratuitously labeling the dissenting juror an “attention whore”, I was wondering about the possiblity of what the targeted atty. might have to say in his own defense. Of course we’ll never know and I’m left to speculate. Then, in your rebuttal to me, you reveal that the atty. is a court assigned public defender, not only that, but he may have been assigned this case at the last minute w/ little time to prepare. Seems to me that this is very relavent to your criticism and should have been included in the OP, but of course it makes your story juicier if there’s nothing to suggest that the atty. might have some excuse for his behavior.
I related my experience as a juror to give my comments some perspective and to show that dissenting in deliberations isn’t necessarily always just about being rebelious, or an “attention whore”. Since your panel decided to find a ‘not guilty’ on the Battery charge (arguably the most serious), it may be that the dissenting juror had some influence after all.
Maybe this atty. was inept, but I’m not ready to jump in line behind you holding the rope. In the end, you protested a bit too much, and changed my original empathy into skepticism.
As someone whose job used to be trying DUI cases, you win by confusing the shit out of the jury. Most jurors aren’t very good at math, and you may end up getting one that just says “let’s call the whole thing off” because they can’t understand how the damn things work. It didn’t work with you because you’re smarter than the average juror. My guess is that this is either a case that never should have gone to trial, or the defendant wasn’t getting any sort of plea bargain offer from the prosecutor. Did the defendant testify? If not, you can probably guess that there’s a reason for that, and that reason is probably the fact that he had at least one prior OVI, or some crimes of moral turpitude (theft, falsification, etc.) on his record. If he did testify, my guess is that the plea offer included a high-test DUI (that’s why you had to say what his BAC was) AND the assault. And since he wasn’t convicted on the assault, the jury trial was an overall win. Sometimes your goal as a defense attorney isn’t to win on everything–it’s to do better than the plea bargain offer.
Also, if nobody actually witnessed the guy driving, you’d be DAMN sure that as a defense attorney, I’d be hammering on that point. Whether or not the defendant was driving is an essential element of the offense. Remember, all you have to do as a defense attorney is get ONE juror who believes you. And this guy almost did.
Now I’m no mathematician, but isn’t the “equation” as you are calling it a “formula” as defined above? It seems to me we are solving for the driver’s blood alcohol in the same sort of way we solve for the area of a rectangle. That looks like a formula to me, the layman.
Is it possible that you (and the witness) are using a narrow, technical definition of the word, while the attorney has a less-technical understanding of its meaning?
I heard the “they’ll dismiss programmers because they’re too logical” a few times before I was called to jury duty.* I’m not sure that’s true any more (if it ever was). Probably a result of the large number of programmers wandering around in public, these days, who could not draw a logical conclusion or recognize a logical fallacy if it was not directly related to the syntax of a specific language. Many of my associates are logical people. A huge number of them are not.
*(I was body 17, so after one woman said she would always believe any police officer in any situation and the lawyers dropped another juror for their own reasons, I was still too far back to be seated even as an alternate.)
Heck, I thought they’d never pick lawyers or paralegals for juries, till I worked with one of each who served. Granted, the lawyer was on a federal grand jury, which is a little different – plus he was a corporate lawyer, about as far removed from criminal work as the average citizen.
I’ve often wondered if I’d get picked for a jury. As a court reporter, I have hundreds of hours of sitting in courtrooms, and while listening to what they say have learned to assess their credibility pretty well. In fact, in bench trials, I’ve had judges ask me my opinion of a lawyer’s tactics or a witness’s credibility – not that the judge necessarily agreed with me, but just that they recognize that our work puts us in a good position to see through most lawyerly ploys and lying witnesses. (And anyone who thinks that a surprising number of people don’t lie on the witness stand? I’ve got this nice bridge you’d be interested in.)
But alas, I’ve moved enough that I seldom get picked for jury duty, and the one time I actually went down and sat there for a day, I was so far down the panel I never even got called into the courtroom for voir dire, let alone seated.
MamaTiger, eligibility in the circumstances depends on the jurisdiction you live in. Where I live (Saskatchewan), as a lawyer, I am excluded from sitting on a jury. The exclusions in Saskatchewan are contained in *The Jury Act * and are as follows:
I have personally witnessed lawyers advance stupid arguments and/or advance arguments stupidly. The urge to :dubious: or :rolleyes: was almost irresistible.
In 1995, the State of New York removed all jury duty exemptions, so that police officers, lawyers and doctors aren’t automatically excused. In fact, in 1999 Rudolph Giuliani was summoned and served on a jury even though he was a former prosecutor, currently the mayor of NYC and a candidate for the US Senate.
I proofread transcripts for court reporters (overwhelmingly civil litigation and regulatory hearings, yawn), have for two decades now, and so far have never been seated on a jury. The one time I came close to empanelment, it turned out to be a case I’d proofed depositions in, and neither side wanted me on that jury.
My reporters tell me my comments to them on lawyers and witnesses are so spot on you’d think I’d been sitting in on the deposition. It would be difficult not to :rolleyes: or :dubious: or :mad: in person at observing a number of the lawyerly tactics I’ve seen on paper over the years.
DrainBead! Wo-Man! Okay, this is not the thread to extend proper return greetings…but girrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrl, how you doin’? It’s great “seeing” a familiar face, so to speak. FTR, the defendant in this case did not testify–I was wondering if maybe there was something else in his history that would make him fight the pretty-darn-clear DUI charges.
Regarding the battery–all 12 of us voted “not guilty” on that within 10 minutes of beginning deliberations. Without going into details, it appeared both parties were at fault for what happened, and the defendant may well have been acting in self-defense. This verdict was reached before the DUI discussion and the holdout 12th juror made herself known, so she played no part in that.
I would like to say it was a cheap shot of me to call her an attention whore, though. That just plain isn’t fair, and I have no real way of knowing her true motivation. I found it odd that she held out in the way she did, and that she changed her mind so suddenly and seemingly without reason. The foreman of the jury actually turned to me as we were leaving the jury assembly room and said, “Well, she sure changed her mind awful quick…” I shrugged my shoulders and said I was just glad she did.
MamaTiger, you’re a court reporter?? Okay, the whole jury was dying to know how the stenography machine works. We actually asked the court reporter that when she came in to read back testimony; she said she’d been doing it for so long it’s all muscle memory now. She said it’s mostly phonetic, and that a word like “stationary” is just two key strokes: “stay” and “tionary.” Our reaction was more or less, “Um…huh?” but we had to get started reading the testimony and left it at that.
The exemptions that were eliminated were the ones automatically granted to certain professions, like lawyers and doctors. Presumably if one is overseas due to military service, out of state attending college or otherwise unavailable, one can get a postponment.
I do not believe it is the judge’s role to tell an attorney how to argue the case, just whether or not he can follow a line of questioning (this is allowable, that is not) or what evidence can come in.