Crime & Federalism

Actual venire members ( N = 764) completed the Big Five Inventory before going through the jury selection process for 1 of 11 criminal or 17 civil trials. In the 17 juries that deliberated to a verdict (n = 285), high levels of juror extraversion were associated with not guilty verdicts or verdicts for the defendant, especially in criminal cases. Extraversion was also associated with being selected as a jury foreperson, and foreperson extraversion was associated with longer jury deliberation times and perceived foreperson influence in criminal cases.

Michael Jackson died, Bernie Madoff got 150 years, and the United States Supreme Court sided with the white firefighters.  Life would be unintesting if everyone stopped talking about the same things as everyone else.  And if everyone else decided to stop being interested in the same things, life would be a bore.  Because there is nothing quite as exciting as sameness.  Now please excuse me while I take my MacBook to Starbucks where I'll send text messages from my iPhone about Michael Jackson, Bernie Madoff, and the United States Supreme Court's white guys.

An ignorant 19-year-old from a farming community, I found Pascal's Wager reasonable.  "Pascal's Wager (or Pascal's Gambit) is a suggestion posed by the French philosopher Blaise Pascal that even though the existence of God cannot be determined through reason, a person should wager as though God exists, because so living has everything to gain, and nothing to lose."

Leaving people free to make choices means that some will make choices we don’t like under pressures we deplore. Libertarians tend to advocate making drug use and prostitution legal, but that doesn’t mean we like to see women become prostitutes or people engage in heavy drug use — we just think that the alternative, letting the state treat us like children, is unacceptable. Some Muslim women will wear the burka under threat of pariah status at best and physical violence at worst.

In the most recent Los Angeles Lawyer is an article exploring the legal and ethical issues of having a private investigator, investigate jurors.  (It's here.)  It's written by two associates from the best investigative firm in California, Batza & Associates.  This ancedote was especially interesting:

As part of the effort to profile jurors, some litigators hire investigators to perform what is sometimes called a drive-by. This involves a visit to, and careful observation of, a juror’s residence and neighborhood. While an investigator cannot directly contact a juror or a juror’s family members or interview a juror’s neighbors or acquaintances, a drive-by is permissible and can sometimes yield valuable information regarding the juror’s economic, cultural, and social environment. 

One investigator, for example, performed a drive-by of a juror in a high-profile tobacco industry case and observed a vehicle parked in the driveway of the juror’s home bearing a bumper sticker that read, “Cigarettes Kill!”

It's one thing to say, "I wish you were dead!"  It's quite another to post your photo, work address, references to colleagues of yours who had been killed, etc.  Details here.

California is broke. It's going to start issuing IOUs to creditors. Article One, Section 10 of the United States Constitution provides: "No State shall ... emit Bills of Credit []."

Is an IOU a "bill of credit"?

I don't know. Do you?

Saying this deeply offends people, as the truth often does: If you are the best at what you do, you'll always have a job. People go home, drink beer, and watch televion.  They are then shocked to lose their jobs.

Awesome, A+, fantastic, must-see review here.  The .pdf feature is what sold me on the DX rather than the Kindle 2.  The DX is larger, though.  With the Kindle 2, you must convert .pdf files.  Not everyone has had good luck with the conversion.  Most of my day is spent reading trial transcripts.  It'd be nice to take my "office" to the dog park.  Looks like that will be much easier with the DX.  I can probably justify it as a tax write off, too.  

I was up too late last night reading Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs.  People from every job imaginable (or unimaginable) give a first-person narrative of what their jobs are like.  Each entry is a few pages.  Easy to skip from one profession to another.   Great insight into how people think about what they do for a living.

It doesn't get more overt than this.  The New York Times and every other media outlet refused to cover a story involving a kidnapped Times reporter.  They had good reasons.... If you believe that it's the job of a media outlet to decide when to cover something that is clearly newsworthy.