Discussion for article #232022
So what if there is another attack in a month? And another one a month after that?
This is a BS delaying tactic and the judge should not fall for it.
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And the judge ruled against https://twitter.com/DMAnews1/status/555369881689137152
PLEASE!!! There are so many absurdist elements of our judicial system, and apparently NOTHING to constrain them.
What to do to someone when you have smoking gun video footage of them placing a bomb next to little children? Carefully select a jury sympathetic to the notion of blowing up little children? You wanna find 12 childless psychopaths? Check the Republican voter rolls.
The right to a trial by your peers is not an absurdist element of our legal system, it’s the basis for it. Most importantly, it’s a check against the behemoth power of the state. No one thinks he’ll get off and his defense isn’t trying to find jurors to acquit. They are trying to find jurors who will spare his life after conviction.
Right or wrong, the defense is concerned that the heated emotion from the Paris terror attacks will make it more likely the jury will vote to execute him. It’s their job.
Well yes, but as a practical matter, this approach would mean that a Nazi spy captured getting out of a boat on Long Island in January 1942 couldn’t have been tried until after WWII was over, and perhaps not even until it was forgotten entirely. Or maybe you’d have to have found jurors who were unaware that there was a war going on.
You can’t delay the trial of someone simply because other people are out there doing the same bad things.
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Agreed. I’m not saying the judge should do it, I just don’t think their request is absurd. It’s their job.
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Yes, technically then ALL trials could be delayed since ALL types of crimes keep happening.
Thanks for the lecture–as the son of a retired attorney who grew up listening to individual case details over the dinner table, I needed to hear that, even though I said nothing about the right to a trial. If you think our justice system is so great, then how come so many people get let out of prison decades later after incontrovertible evidence reverses a flawed Jury decision–many of them from death row? Mostly of the lawyers I know spend hours if not days strategizing what jury profile to look for in the selection process. They bring in experts on the subject. So please, spare me the sermon–save it for the choir.
It wasn’t a lecture, it was a viewpoint from a practicing attorney. If you weren’t discussing the right to a trial, your initial post was a bit incoherent and I didn’t say anything about the remainder of this current post. It’s clearly a flawed system so I’m not completely sure what your issue actually is and how it relates to the defense request to postpone the trial…
Let me break it down for you, since the context seems to have escaped you. The defense attorney was concerned about the potential impact of the attacks on Charlie Hebdo on prejudicing a potential jury pool–when in the aftermath of the Boston bombing, the media displayed videos of him leaving a bomb next to little children, then a violent chase with law enforcement, then law enforcement converging on his bloody body under a tarp in a boat, with a political diatribe written in his own blood on the side of the boat and fireworks artifacts in his apartment. Yet the defense attorney wants to pretend that, given the public exposure of this trial, there is a jury pool available who has been exposed to none of this, who has no feeling one way or the other about blowing up little children, who NOW might be influenced by an attack on septugenarian political cartoonists in Paris. If you still fail to see the absurdity of this–then NO amount of coherency will put you in the picture. There once was a new testament platitude about specks of sawdust vs great planks as obstacle to clear perception. And if you are a practicing attorney, I hope I never need to rely upon your services.
First, it’s called irony and second, forgive me for not divining this:
“The defense attorney was concerned about the potential impact of the attacks on Charlie Hebdo on prejudicing a potential jury pool–when in the aftermath of the Boston bombing, the media displayed videos of him leaving a bomb next to little children, then a violent chase with law enforcement, then law enforcement converging on his bloody body under a tarp in a boat, with a political diatribe written in his own blood on the side of the boat and fireworks artifacts in his apartment. Yet the defense attorney wants to pretend that, given the public exposure of this trial, there is a jury pool available who has been exposed to none of this, who has no feeling one way or the other about blowing up little children, who NOW might be influenced by an attack on septugenarian political cartoonists in Paris.”
From the incoherency of this:
""PLEASE!!! There are so many absurdist elements of our judicial system, and apparently NOTHING to constrain them.
What to do to someone when you have smoking gun video footage of them placing a bomb next to little children? Carefully select a jury sympathetic to the notion of blowing up little children? You wanna find 12 childless psychopaths? Check the Republican voter rolls.""
And your need to bring this down to the level of personal insults says significantly more about your character than it does about mine. I wish you the best and I hope your year gets significantly better than it is apparently going at this moment. That might allow you to be a little bit nicer to others. This conversation is over.
Well, incoherence is often in the mind of the obtuse. But calling someone’s reaction to an absurd situation incoherent–oh that was so very nice–and certainly not a personal insult–and then lecturing that same person regarding their presumed character defects, also nice and certainly not insulting–but if your character takes the form of a supercillious scold, I am sure you will find the happiness you expect, the rest of the world being filled with so many imperfect characters for you to publicly correct and pass judgement on. Happy hunting.