Sigh

I would like one day to be a juror, but am terrified of the people who end up on jury duty. Being around people that dumb can’t be good for you.

Same story, different aims

It’s amazing that Fox News has any quotation marks left, as they’ve used what seems like a week’s worth in this article about the Justice Department’s lawsuit against the state of Arizona.

Also, the Washington Posts’s take.

Los Suns will come out tomorrow

I think it’s pretty great that the Phoenix Suns will wear jerseys that say “Los Suns” tomorrow, Cinco de Mayo, in light of the awful immigration law that just went into effect in Arizona. I still don’t care who wins that game, but at least now I will remember to look on Thursday to see who won.

It made sense to me

Proving that the law  1) doesn’t have a sense of humor and 2) isn’t always about fairness, a judge who made what I thought was a pretty brilliant ruling was censured yesterday. Los Angeles County Judge Brett Klein ruled that the plaintiffs’ lawyer in a class action case, a man who stood to make $125,000 while the members of the class each received a $10 gift card good only at one store, should also be paid in $10 gift cards. That would have given him 12,500 gift cards for women’s clothing store Windsor Fashions, who also happened to be the defendants in this case. The judge thought that if it was legal and fair for the plaintiffs to have to use gift cards to the defendants’ store in order to receive anything, the same rule should apply to their lawyer. I can see where he was going with this, but apparently the state of California disagreed, and Judge Klein, who’d retired before this decision was made, was found to have shown “a failure to be patient, dignified, and courteous to those appearing before him.”

Bollocks. I think his original ruling was a good one, and that the courts should think about it: if it’s not fair for an attorney to be paid in a way that makes him spend gift cards in order to reap a benefit, then plaintiffs in similar class action cases should not be paid in this way, either. It seems wrong to rule that a company has done something wrong, and then reward it with money received from the plaintiffs’ gift cards. How are you going to teach companies that bad behavior will not be tolerated, when it actually ends up being rewarded?

Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot???

Protip: When a country deports you, they generally mean for you to stay out. Forever.

Say that you were convicted of smuggling drugs in Thailand and sentenced to death. And suppose that sentence was the changed to 25 years in prison. And what if, four and a half years after you got to prison, you were pardoned by Thailand’s king and sent back home to the UK, where you were from? To recap: what if you’d been sentenced to death and then imprisoned in a country, and were later kicked out of it, never to return?

Would you then go back to “tie up some loose ends?” You are probably not a moron, so I’m guessing your answer would be “No.”

You learn something new every day

I hate it when The New York Times uses terms without definition, as if anybody should automatically understand exactly what is meant. It’s pretty lazy, especially considering the fact that they often link to more information about terms, people, places, and events that are mentioned in their articles.

I was reading this article today, which speaks about the Supreme Court revisiting the exclusionary rule, which states that “evidence obtained by police misconduct cannot be used against a defendant.” That definition was provided by the Times. Anyway, The Court is recently ruled that not all types of police misconduct should automatically exclude the admission of evidence into legal proceedings.

I found the article to be fascinating, but I was a little confused by the phrase “Warren Court,” which was used several times through the article without any background information being given. I kind of knew that there had been a chief justice named Warren, but I didn’t know when that was or why it was significant to this particular issue. Enter Wikipedia. I know, I know. Librarians should not get their information from a web site that can be edited by anybody (at least for now), but I find it to be a good starting point, and if I really needed more in-depth information, I have tons of databases at my disposal. So anyway, according to Wikipedia, the Warren Court “represents a period in the history of the Supreme Court of the United States that was marked by one of the starkest and most dramatic changes in judicial power and philosophy. Led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, the Court expanded civil rights, liberties, the judicial power, and the federal governmental power in ways previously unseen.”

The article also talked about the current and former compositions of the Supreme Court, and how the this ruling may signal a change in other exclusionary rule cases. For more information on the doings of the Supreme Court, you can visit SCOTUSblog.

So dumb

So Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey believes that ‘not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime.’ How convenient that Mukasey, a Republican Bush appointee, doesn’t think it necessary to prosecute other Republican Bush appointees for systemically failing to hire those suspected of being: Democrats, otherwise liberal, or -gasp- homosexual! No crime’s been committed here, folks! I’m kind of pissed off anyway about people not accepting accountability for their actions, so this just makes me angrier. The No Justice Department can go suck an egg.