2024 LC Thread #1 - Elder Fraud Advice

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1245

This could be all in my own head, but… I think most people here (in USA#1) are brought up with the idea that “we won the space race,” mostly based on the Apollo moon missions. We’re also indoctrinated into the idea that we do everything first, and if not first, better than everyone else. We’re the world’s only superpower and we’re the ones who do the really hard stuff, because we’re the only ones who can.

With GYNA and another non-white/European country having success with moon missions, it’s maybe a little difficult for some USA people to accept, since it undermines that USA#1 worldview.

Plus there’s the ongoing pushing of anti-China hysteria, so in that context, jingoistic USA-uber-alles types could see it as another sign that China is getting too big for its britches. (Which of course, diminishes the USA’s stature, since everything is a zero-sum game for that type of person.)

Anyway, I’m not trying to downplay the success of the US space program. They’ve had some fantastic wins over the last decade+. Just saying it would come as a surprise to some people that other countries are also doing new and important stuff in space.

1246

The play is to call them two days after you were supposed to go to jury duty and tell them you just realized you missed the reminder for it. I’ve done this entirely honestly (I really did forget I have adhd sending me one note in the mail two months before I’m supposed to be doing something is not a smart way to get that thing done) like 4 times and never gotten in any trouble at all.

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1247

I think it’s a little in your head. Outside of maybe some olds and nerds I don’t think majority of Americans give a shit about space or who is doing or has done what there

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1248

Serving on juries has been an incredibly interesting and enlightening experience both times I’ve done it and I wish I could do it more often (In 35 years I’ve probably gotten 10 summonses, had to actually appear 4 or 5 times, and ended up serving on two criminal juries). But I have a long-standing interest in the criminal justice system that probably not everybody shares.

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1249

on the one hand, I would love to get some low-level drug offender off, but

A) it seems those kind of cases are probably the most likely to get pled out (just guessing here)
B) I still have to sit in a room with a bunch of people of unknown vaccination status

I’m approaching 50 years old and I’ve only been called once before, by the city of little rock (maybe the county, idk) but I got the summons literally 2 weeks after I moved out of town.

1250

I’ve also done this twice and found it really draining. (particularly the second time, a civil trial for the wrongful death of an early 20s woman who was run over on her bike by a delivery truck and was just depressing as hell to sit through for two weeks)

1251

In my mid 40s and have never once received a notice for jury duty.

1252

I’m probably lucky I’ve never had to do a civil case. I can imagine it would be pretty hard to sit through a week of boring financial crimes or whatever.

My last case was an armed robbery. People used to do private gun sales through backpage. The victim arranged to meet a buyer in the Bass Pro Shop parking lot. The buyer pulled his own gun and took the guy’s rifle, cell phone, and keys. The victim pulls out his pistol from an ankle holster and starts blasting across the parking lot (missed everything lol).

There was a lot of weird and confusing evidence presented on both sides, but one thing I remember was a recorded jail phone call from the defendant to a relative telling them to find the phone in his truck and destroy it with a hammer. :harold:

He was convicted.

1253

I’ve only ever been called up three times, never had to actually sit on a jury, which is a shame because it does sound like an interesting experience to go through once.

1254

The only time I’ve ever been in for jury duty, we sat around and waited in a big room before I could even have an opportunity to try to get out of it, and then they sent us home after 2 hrs.

1255

I basically lied that I hated cops so I wouldn’t have to sit on a murder trial of some guy clubbing someone to death randomly. Don’t think I could handle it

1256

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1257

Been called to jury duty twice. Once when I was doing attending a university out of state, and that got called off obviously.

The other was when I was even younger. The damnedest thing is I got called for Grand Jury duty. I actually felt Grand Jury duty was extremely interesting, for example…

Felon 1-Passes a note to a bank teller, no funny business, pass me the money
Felon 2-Steals a pair of shoes, employee chases felon into the parking lot, felon takes his knife and harms employee

They have Felon 2 dead to rights for robbery 2nd degree. Stole something, and caused harm. If felon doesn’t knife employee, it is just a 2nd degree misdemeanor. The slashing of the knife now has you as a second degree robbery you dumb fucker. Employee was fine afterwards, but yeah

Felon 1, they are at least trying to get him for a robbery third degree because of the implied intent of a weapon. But it wasn’t as a surefire case of robbery 2nd degree of shoes, because there wasn’t a weapon, and no harm

Grand jury, I sent them both through, because it wasn’t my job to determine the degree of the crime. I don’t know how those cases were decided.

Also in the most Kentucky case ever, there was a criminal conspiracy case that revolved around stealing farm equipment.

Also learned from cop pulling up to a street corner and saying you are looking for “Hard Work” is yeah…

But…I swear I had two alarms set…and yeah…

Fuck apparently a grand jury has to be a full 12. Yeah I had 1 or 2 cops come into to give their testimony, that they had to move to a future date just because I slept in.

I didn’t suffer any consequences beyond getting chewed out. But I did get chewed out.

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1258

Since we’re doing jury duty stories…

I’ve been called twice but actually did a trial one time. It was for a woman accused of DUI, and the trial was in a local district court (six jurors with one alternate).

The case itself was kind of interesting. She was saying she wasn’t guilty (i.e., she wasn’t intoxicated/impaired when she drove), but she was also backstopping that with an “affirmative defense.”

Basically the law says it’s okay to drive drunk in certain circumstances, something like “if it’s an emergency and you don’t have any other choice.” Her version was that she was “sleeping” in her car (at 2:00 am in the nightclub area of downtown) and a strange man tried to get in the car and attack her.

So there were basically two parts to the trial, one was the prosecution trying to prove that she was drunk when she drove, and the other part was the defense trying to establish that she drove because she was afraid of getting attacked.

The whole thing was complex enough that all the testimony took a full day, then we adjourned and came back the next day for deliberation and the verdict.

One thing that has stuck with me was how impressed I was with the other jurors. There’s this persistent narrative that the only people on jury duty are people who can’t get out of it, and that degrades the quality of the jury pool, but I found the opposite. We had a good diversity of people, in a number of ways (sex, age, race, occupation, etc.) and they all took their responsibility very seriously.

This case had some complexity to it as well, since the two facets of the trial had different standards of evidence: the DUI guilty/not-guilty part was “beyond a reasonable doubt,” and the affirmative defense part was “the preponderance of the evidence.”

We had a respectful discussion of all the evidence presented, people understood the nuances of the different facets, everyone got to speak their piece, and in the end we arrived at a verdict that everyone was on board with.

In spite of not having a blood alcohol reading in evidence, we found her guilty. (She was driving the wrong way on a one-way street and when she pulled over showed all the signs of being intoxicated.) As for her defense, we decided it was bullshit. What did that in for us was that she never mentioned anything about the mystery man to the police at any point. It only came up later. The women on the jury felt pretty strongly that they definitely would have let the cops know about the guy on the scene.

After the trial, out in the hall the prosecutor let us know she had a 0.14 BAC blood test that wasn’t admitted. So we were right about that. And I’m pretty comfortable with our conclusion that the defense was made up.

And to bring this back to the origin of this discussion, @pvn, in voir dire, we got asked if we had ever had a bad experience with police. I had a story about getting pulled over for “driving too perfectly” and was pretty unhappy about it, but still got on the jury. So I don’t know what it would take to get disqualified. Probably something more extreme than that.

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1259

More jury stories

First case attempted murder, three counts of rape, kidnapping and one other charge similar to kidnapping. The defendant was obviously guilty. After the verdict, the victim and judge came back to the jury room to thank us. Later the main detective came back and told us that since the defendant had been picked up the “so and so hill“ rapist rapes had stopped. Why the guy didn’t plead out was because he had another rape trial coming up and had to roll the dice.

Second case was many years later about a decade ago. Defendant looked like Charles Manson’s father. His name was Mr. Johnson. I remember the case as “Mr. Johnson was waving his johnson down at the Howard Johnsons” (but it was really a Motel 6). Interestingly the defense counsel explicitly used the Seinfeld nose scratch defense as in the witnesses didn’t see what they thought they saw. Guilty!

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1260

My other trial was a criminal trial in SF, between two residents of an SRO in the Mission. An older white guy (50s?) who I think previously had substance abuse problems and seemed like the type to be in and out of homelessness was charged with assaulting a small, older Chinese man (50s-60s?) who didn’t speak English. He didn’t deny it but said he was acting in self-defense, so we needed evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that he hadn’t acted in self-defense. There were no witnesses to the fight, so all the evidence was

  • photos of the victim, who was beaten up pretty good
  • the victim’s testimony, who said through an interpreter that the defendant attacked him
  • the defendant’s testimony, who said that the victim attacked him
  • 1 or 2 witnesses who said they heard a commotion but didn’t really see anything useful
  • a cop who was called to the scene and also didn’t have much useful to offer
  • the prosecution was kind of a clown show, and alluded to the presence of a chair that the defendant allegedly used to hit the victim, and at one point tried to bring the chair in as physical evidence but the judge didn’t let them because they failed to establish evidence from testimony that the chair was used?

So, it’s not very satisfying, but even though the guy was probably guilty (hard to imagine the victim starting this fight he was extremely unlikely to win) we mostly voted not guilty; there were several charges of varying severity, and we hit not guilty on the more serious ones.

On the less serious ones, we hit some problems with this part:

There’s two jurors in particular I remember:

  • One woman really struggled with the idea of “beyond a reasonable doubt”. She could not shake the fear of letting the guy totally off, like, “but what if he did it?” Sometimes the job of juries is to let a guilty person off if the prosecution didn’t make a good enough case, but she was very hard to reason with about that. I think she refused to vote not guilty on a couple of the lighter charges.
  • Another guy (maybe in his 60s, dressed like he’s well off) got bad vibes from the defendant and also didn’t want to let him off on the lighter charges. He said (I forget how explicitly) that the defendant reminded him of the kinds of bullies he’d run into in his life and for that reason, he thought the guy was guilty. Unlike the woman mentioned above, he was more self-aware about the fact he was being pretty intransigent and somewhat irrational, but he was like “sorry, this is how I feel and I don’t think I can change my mind”. So he refused to vote not guilty on a couple of the lighter charges.

One other random thing I remember, the judge gives explicit instructions to not look up stuff about the case (or any of the parties involved, including lawyers) on your own outside of court. So we get into deliberation and one of the jurors is immediately like “this is the defense lawyer’s first case lol, I looked it up”. :person_facepalming:

So, we were not guilty on like 2/3 of the charges and hung on the less severe ones.

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1261

life hack: ignore jury duty summons

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1262

India’s lunar rover has rolled out. Pretty cool stuff, good to see humanity get an occasional W.

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1263

India’s moon mission cost about $70M, incredible. They landed on the moon for about half of what it cost to make the Barbie movie.

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1264

That seems ridiculously cheap, if they can do that consistently they could own the satellite launch industry. That’s probably close to what it costs the US to move a satellite to the pad.