Drugs are bad, mkay

I had to report for jury duty this morning at 7:30. I didn't know how traffic is down I-15 in the morning commute so I left home at 6:25. I got there at 7:15. The orientation didn't start till 8:00 but they don't want to tell us to report at 8:00 because then we'd have stragglers missing important information.

There was only one trial starting today and there were a lot of people there. My chances of getting on the jury were going to be small. Heck, there was a chance that I wouldn't even be sent over to the courtroom. But I was among the people who were sent out to go through the jury selection process.

I got to watch the proceedings from the front row of the jury box.

The defendant looked like he is about 25 years old. He looked worried and uneasy. He allegedly was caught trying to smuggle something like 20 or 30 kilos of cocaine through the Calexico port of entry.

In the questioning of the prospective jurors we were asked if we heard that he had a prior conviction in a drug case whether that would make us assume that he must be guilty in this case.

After they questioned 40 of us (plus the few who replaced the people who were excused because they said that they were definitely going to be biased) they sent us out for a half hour. They did their peremptory challenges and took the first 14 people that neither side had tossed. I was tossed!

Now that I don't have to have an open mind I'm going to speculate that this kid was caught with the cocaine and that he knew what he was doing. And he hadn't learned his lesson from the first time!

If he looked as nervous while driving through the border checkpoint as he looked in the courtroom I'm not surprised that he got caught. But then maybe when the jig is up and you finally understand how stupid you've been and you realize what's ahead of you you lose your cockiness.

Anyway, I got out of there at noon and got to go back to work.

But I'm still on the hook for the rest of the month (or till I serve on a jury). They say that the second of our four weeks of being on call is our "prime week." There are few if any new cases starting this week so maybe I've done my duty.

Waste not

Our morning newspaper is delivered inside a plastic bag.  This keeps it dry in the rainy season.  The rest of the year the bag doesn't do anything that a rubber band can't do other than give us something more to store then haul to the recycling bin at the grocery store.

Today's newspaper's plastic bag had helpful water saving hints printed on it!

But wait!  The stop-wasting-water bag was an extra!  Inside it was the newspaper inside its usual plastic bag.

Let's hear it for reducing waste!

This just in from Mount Ararat!

Our water situation is getting back to normal. Since our flood, we've had a temporary, leaky repair connecting us to the city water. On Thursday morning I realized that I hadn't checked the little puddle around our water meter for a while. I wandered over to the meter and noticed that the road had had lines painted on it and that the asphalt had been cut. I dashed back into the house to get the camera. By the time I was walking out to take pictures of the progress a city employee had driven up. He told me that they were going to do the repair that day.

Here's the road before it got dug up. Our connection to the water main is under the orange cone.
By the way, the cars in the background are stopping. There are a couple of schools about a mile and a half down the road. Most of these cars are Mommies taking their kids to the schools, one student per car. That's the way I usually go to work. The last time I decided to get in the line of cars that backed up to our neighborhood it took me more than an hour to go that mile and a half. I took another route to work Thursday. It probably wouldn't have taken that long this time. The very slow day was a result of the road being closed at the schools so everybody had to detour past the schools and through Kit Carson Park.

Here's the progress that they made by the time Jerry got home from work Thursday.
They had to replace the pipes for us and two of our neighbors.

They took off our meters and hooked the water directly to our pipes. Free water! Too bad we didn't need to fill our pool that night. Wait, we don't have a pool.They got an early start on their work on Friday morning. As I was driving off to work they had taken up the steel plates from their trench and somebody was working in it. One of my neighbors on the far side of the trench was trying to drive somewhere and couldn't get across the trench. Our public servants didn't think to leave a way for the citizens to get from one side of the trench to the other while they did their work. I'm sure they quickly got our neighbor back on his way.

When we got home they were pretty much done except for repaving the road.

Whenever I see a "Steel Plates Ahead" sign I have a flashback to childhood. For some reason I had a feeling that there was a high likelihood that I had had some long forgotten head injury or disease that needed to be repaired by brain surgery. They probably removed some of my skull and replaced it with a steel plate. Jack got us a metal detector to let us search for lost jewelry in city parks for fun and profit. Finally, I had the ability to find out once and for all whether I had a steel plate in my head! I didn't. (Still don't. Wait! I don't have a metal detector. How do I know?)

Here are the steel plates (but they're not in my head!).

And the boxes with our reinstalled water meters.
I wonder how long it will take to get the road repaired.

(Thanks, Jerry, for taking some of these pictures!)

Here we go again!

The mailman left me a nice little surprise today...a questionnaire to see if I am qualified for federal jury service! I am. So it looks like I'm in for another round of civic duty.

Last time I was a candidate to be a juror in federal court I went through the voir dire process for a case where a woman working at the San Onofre nuclear power plant developed a form of leukemia whose only well-described risk factor is exposure to ionizing radiation. The power plant apparently had a problem with "fuel fleas" making their way into the workers' area where the woman was supposed to have breathed them in and caused the leukemia.

I was the first potential juror to be thanked and excused from the case. The judge said as I was leaving that it was my shirt. I was wearing a pink polo shirt that day. I wore my pink polo shirt to my first day of jury duty last year but it wasn't till the second day that I got called into the jury box. I couldn't wear the same shirt two days in a row so my unlucky shirt couldn't help me that time. I'll try it again this time.

The fuel flea case was settled before the jurors got their chance to decide it and the settlement wasn't made public. According to this account of a similar suit, that was the second time the case was going to be tried and was settled before the trial was started.

At least the federal court is in downtown San Diego where there are things to do during the long lunch recesses. And they pay better and they cover parking. (They did last time. I hope they still do.) More fun is in store.

Case Resolved

Yesterday, we were told to report to the courtroom as usual at 9:00 this morning. We were all waiting in the hallway at 9:00. And we were still waiting around 9:30. The bailiff came out and told us that there were things going on and that we could leave the area but to be back at 9:45. Some time after 10:00 we were told to hang in there. We finally got taken into the courtroom after 10:30 (our usual midmorning break time).

After we all got seated, the judge explained that the case had been resolved and that we were being dismissed. We are free to discuss the case now.

Jury Selection
I covered this earlier. After they thoroughly questioned, thanked, and excused dozens of other potential jurors my name was called to fill the empty seat in the jury box. They had had enough of the jury selection process and they didn't ask me any questions. The just wanted to get started after I was seated in the jury box so I was in.

Opening Statements
The Deputy District Attorney ("D.A." for short) told us that the defendant was on trial for a series of robberies. She told us that he and some other people would go to places where day laborers would gather and offer them work. He'd get his victims in the car and he'd take them to an isolated place, threaten them with a knife and demand their money.

In the opening statement, she played us a phone call he made to his girlfriend or sister. (I think it was the "one phone call" you're allowed when you're arrested. Apparently this one phone call is recorded.) In it he said he "did it" and that she shouldn't take any of the blame.

She told us that the trial was going to take a long time because there were 17 counts of robbery and kidnapping that we were going to have to decide. And that the victims would be needing an interpreter since they don't speak English.

The Defense Attorney seemed to say that this was a case of victims wanting somebody, well, anybody, to be punished and that the victims aren't to be believed when they say that it was his client who committed the crimes.

Testimony
Just like the D.A. said, testimony was slow. There were 15 victims of the 17 crimes and each of them needed an interpreter. I'm not sure if we heard from all 15 victims. I think there were a few who hadn't yet testified. But we heard from most of them. The attorneys would ask a question, the interpreter would ask it in Spanish, the witness replied, and the interpreter would reply in English. Most of the times the witness would not understand the question and would give an answer that was what they wanted to say but not a response to the question. So questions were usually asked many times. Sometimes they'd just give up and move on when it was clear that the witness couldn't figure out what was being asked.

Everybody in the courtroom except for the jurors had heard many of the questions and answers before. There was a preliminary hearing earlier in the year where all of them had given testimony about the case. The trial seemed to be a replay of that. (There were probably more questions at the trial since the preliminary hearing establishes that there probably is a case to be made against the defendant and doesn't have to have the whole case argued.) At times it literally was a replay of that hearing. When a witness gave an answer in the trial that wasn't quite the same as what came out in the preliminary hearing, the defense attorney would read from the transcript of the hearing and ask the witness if what he said back then was the truth or to ask about the discrepancy. These exchanges made my head swirl since there were interpreters and transcribers involved both times. He'd read a question asked in the preliminary hearing that was translated into Spanish, the reply was translated into English and all this was taken down by the court reporter. In the trial he'd read the question from the transcript, that would be translated by the interpreter of the day who would then translate the reply. Somewhere in these four interpretations (five if you count the court reporter) there must be something whose meaning changes. These rehashings of the preliminary hearing usually seemed to be splitting some very fine hairs.

One of the victims apparently was pretty good with English but gave his testimony through the interpreter. The D.A. started out by reminding him that even though he might understand what she's saying that he needs to wait for the question to be translated and to answer the translated question. That didn't always happen. She'd be asking a question and he'd jump in before she had finished asking (and long before the interpreter had a chance to finish asking the question since the question wasn't finished). He had to be reminded over and over again that he's to wait for the interpreter's version of the question.

It takes a fantastic memory to be an interpreter. There were times that the witness would go on and on and never pause so the interpreter had to store up the long response before giving it to us in English. She'd take a few notes along the way in some sort of shorthand, it looked like. She'd include pauses and shrugs. I'm sure that they told the witnesses how the interpreting worked but it got very confusing for them sometimes when the attorney would ask something like "what color is my hair?" and the interpreter would ask that question. The witness would usually answer as if the interpreter had asked the question.

The question "what color is my hair?" was asked of many of the victims. The D.A. has dark brown hair (and we were told that it is her natural color). The answer sometimes was "blond" (once they got it through to the witness that it was the D.A.'s hair, not the interpreter's, that was being asked about). Apparently the women who were with the defendant during the robberies were described as having blond hair. This apparently was to establish that some people from these foreign cultures say any hair lighter than black is blond.

We got to hear testimony from Deputy Sheriffs who had investigated some of the robberies. We heard from a deputy who had found some of the victims by going to the "stops" where they wait for people to come to offer work. We heard from a Spanish-speaking deputy who was assisting the first one. And we started hearing the testimony of the detective who was in charge of these cases. The D.A. had finished her questioning of him yesterday when we got our evening recess. We had expected to hear the cross examination this morning.

But there was a problem with the testimony of one of the victims yesterday afternoon. He had said that the robber was wearing a jacket with long sleeves. Later he said that the robber had a tattoo on his arm and pointed to his forearm just below the fold of the elbow. The defense attorney was all over him about how he could see tattoos when they would have been covered by long sleeves. The defendant does have tattoos where this witness said they were but couldn't have known that without hearing about it from someone else.

The People's case apparently broke an axle running into this pothole. If one witness could give testimony that obviously was not his own, how many of the others were similarly not telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?

Resolution
So The People decided to settle for guilty pleas for the three counts they basically had a recording where he confesses to the crimes and to drop the rest.

The creep is going to jail for 15 years. I forget whether we were told he has to serve 10 or 12 years of that since he's had prior a conviction. One of the counts (kidnapping) he pleaded guilty to could have resulted in a life sentence so he's getting off easy.

His girlfriend and the other woman pleaded guilty to some sorts of charges in this case. There was another man involved that we hadn't yet heard much about.

Here are some news reports about this case through the preliminary hearing (nobody was ever in the audience part of the courtroom so I doubt that this resolution will make it to the papers):

• Trio arrested on suspicion of robbing migrant workers
• Man accused of robbing day laborers faces trial
• Arrests Made In Connection With Day Laborer Assaults (this one, being a television station's site, has a video segment interviewing some of the victims)
  

Juror #10

Yesterday I said my chances of being seated on the jury were small. That was true. It's also true that chances are small if you have 10 pairs of socks in a dryer and not having a matching pair until you've found your 11th sock.

Because the chances of an event happening are small doesn't mean it won't happen.

The jury selection process is interesting. Well, dull, mostly. This is going to be a long trial so they collected a large pool of prospective jurors.

They put 12 people in the jury box and six on uncomfortable chairs in front of the jury box. They then asked all the people in the 18 seats many probing questions to try to find out whether either side thought anyone might not be a good juror for their side. They then executed their peremptory challenges, thanking and excusing potential jurors from the jury box. When someone was dismissed, the leftmost person in the row in front of the jury box took the excused person's place. When all of the front row people had been moved to the jury box and another person was thanked and excused, seven more people were called to fill the empty seats.

The seven new people were then asked questions. Fewer questions than before. Seven people were thanked and excused and they did it over and over again. Each cycle had fewer questions asked than before.

Just before lunch the second day of this long process my name was called as the person to fill the empty seat in the jury box and six others got called for the front row. The defense attorney asked my group simply whether we'd like a person like ourselves on a jury should we ever be on trial. The Deputy D.A. asked simply if anybody had anything to volunteer. They were as tired of the process as the rest of us. Or each side was satisfied with the other 11 people and that they'd take their chances with me.

I was sworn in.

After lunch they selected the alternate jurors and testimony began.

I guess that's all the jury experience you're going to hear about from me for three or four weeks.

Jury Duty

I spent two hours in the jury lounge and the rest of the day in a courtroom watching the voir dire process. They plan to have a jury seated by lunchtime tomorrow. They have a large pool of potential jurors since it's going to be a fairly long trial (probably going to last till September 5). My chances of getting on the jury are rather small.