Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater
My replacement chest freezer has finally arrived, and more on that later, but I wanted to note that the little dorm fridge has settled down to an average daily consumption of 321 Wh per day, or 117.2 kWh/year. That's vastly different from the EnergyGuide label, which says 328 kWh/year.
As a point of comparison, a 2 W clock consumes 48 Wh/day, or 17.5 kWh/year. My stereo stack, if left powered, consumes 8 W when off, for 70 kWh/year (fortunately I turn it off its power supply when I'm not using it, for zero kWh/year). The watt-meter goes on the new fridge next, but I'm curious to get some long-term numbers on my computer, and one or two other things around the house.
Posted at 17:17 permanent link category: /gadgets
If you're one of my half-dozen readers who knows me personally, then you'll be aware that I've been in jury duty. Since February 6th. That jury service finally concluded last night, and this is your preview to what will eventually be the whole story.
On an important note: this story will necessarily include some fairly gruesome descriptions (not so much this entry, but later entries) of awful things done to people. If that doesn't sound like your cup of tea, you may want to skip them. The defendant was not sitting in court because he was a pleasant man.
For this installment, I'm just going to go over the setup, some of the players, and an outline of the charges. As I did the last time I was on a jury, I will be changing the names of everyone involved, including my fellow jurors if and when they come up. In this case, I'm actually concerned that one of the defendant's friends could find these stories and figure out how to get to me. All will become clear, but I expect the story to unfold over the course of the next month or two in this particular forum.
It all began late last year. I got a jury summons for December 26th. Although I was all set to jump into action, as the date got closer, I realized that I'd be literally flying home from California the night before jury service, and that trying to be at the courthouse at 8 am would put me in a particularly bad mood. So I went to the handy juror website, entered my number, and deferred it to the (as I thought at the time) clever date of February 6th. This was just after a show opened at Annex, so my schedule would be relatively clear, and I figured even if I got on a jury, it would be a 3-week trial, max. That'd have me finishing up just as the show finished, so I could wrap it all up, close the show, and get on with my life.
So, I turned up at the courthouse on the 6th, and commenced what I figured would be my requisite two days of sitting around before being dismissed. I did indeed sit around, but before terribly long, I was called for Judge Johnson (remember, names are all changed), and picked up my juror number -- 74, as I recall. They picked around 200 jurors initially, and it quickly became clear why: they expected the trial to go until March 16th! Five solid weeks of trial, and (as I didn't realize at the time) deliberation after that. Interesting side note: we finished on March 15th. Not bad, judicial prediction system!
Instead of sending me up to the courtroom, I was instead handed a questionnaire. It was a bunch of questions I answered "no" to, along the lines of "Have you ever been the victim of an armed crime?" or "Have you or anyone you know ever been the victim of sexual assault?" Comparatively speaking, this was very generic stuff, and didn't say much about the case. I believe that was Tuesday, the 7th.
I was excused for Wednesday, and told to come back Thursday. I didn't realize why, but they were selecting the remaining hundred or so jurors for the pool.
On Thursday, I came back as instructed, and did a bunch more sitting around. It's a key feature of jury duty that you spend a bunch of time cooling your heels (or, as I read in one of the Raymond Chandler stories I've been going through recently, "practicing your foot-dangling"). Finally, I was called up to the courtroom itself. With about fifty other people, I trooped into an elevator (not all the same elevator, of course; we're not hyper-flexible professional clowns or anything), where we were lined up in the elevator foyer. The bailiff got us lined up in order, with the initial twelve people separated out, as they would be in the jury box itself. I was perhaps 20th in the "not in the jury box" line. I assume that all the people who disappeared between #1 and #74 were culled either by the questionnaire, or by having a big obvious reason for not being able to do a 5 week trial.
Once we were all in the courtroom, the judge ran through some preliminary information: here are the charges in the case, here are a raft of names, do you know any of them? Some of the people raised their hands, and there may have been one or two people who actually knew the person involved, as opposed to simply recognizing a relatively common name.
The charges numbered 8 total, and I couldn't remember exactly what they were through most of the trial, but knew they were all more or less in line with "being a pimp." As it happens, they were three counts of promoting prostitution, two counts of rape, one of robbery, one of kidnapping, and one of unlawful firearm possession. I'll get into them in more detail later.
We went through the "I can't afford it" folks with comparative dispatch, and moved on to Voir Dire, which is the process whereby the attorneys get to know the potential jurors, and can assess their fitness to be on the jury. Questions came out about prostitution. What did we know? What had we experienced? What about movies like Pretty Woman? I'm sure there were other questions, but those are what I recall.
There were a few stand-outs in the selection process I wanted to mention, although I have to do some set-up first. The defendant, who I'll call Matt, is black, and 21 years old (although he looks older, and I would have guessed he was in his mid to late twenties, at first). He was dressed in a button-down plaid shirt and khaki pants, and sitting next to his defense attorney, who reminded me of nothing more than an aged leprechaun, with a bald head and a thin white beard over crooked teeth that smiled easily. I ended up calling him The Elf in my notes, and that's as good a name as any for these pages. The prosecuting attorney, when we got a good look at him, reminded me of Stephen Colbert, although I realized as we went on that my first impression was largely made on superficial points: rimless glasses, dark hair, nice suit, general build. I referred to him as Colbert in my notes, and I'll keep that for here.
The first stand-out juror really stood out. He was in the jury box, sitting in seat #4 or 5. I have no idea what his name was, but I ended up thinking of him as Piggy. We were all asked these various questions, as I was saying, and when it got to be Piggy's turn, he revealed that he had been in the military, he was now a security guard somewhere, etc. This is a man who was probably in his late 30s or early forties, significantly overweight, with little porcine eyes behind square, metal-framed glasses, and a bristly little mustache punctuating a swellingly fat face. He positively dripped "ex-military." Asked about potential problems he might have being objective in the trial, he described when he was an MP somewhere, and was jumped, making it clear without saying so that he was jumped by a group of black men, and that that might cloud his judgement regarding Matt. Then, he leaned forward a bit (I think he was talking to the Elf), and said, "May I speak frankly?" I could sense him translating "Permission to speak freely, sir?" into civilian-ese in his head. The Elf nodded, said, "Go ahead," and Piggy leaned forward, pointing at Matt from his shoulder to the tip of his slightly quivering finger.
"I dunno what he did, but I can tell you one thing. I know his type, and he's guilty! I dunno what he's guilty of, but I know he's guilty of something!" Everything in his manner screamed, "That black kid there is guilty because he's BLACK!" At that point, Judge Johnson held up her hand (interesting side-note: Judge Johnson looks like she has significant black ancestry, and there were very nicely sketched portraits of Martin Luther King Jr and Malcom X hanging opposite the jury box; probably not the most conducive environment to pull out your petty racism, Piggy), and said, "That's enough! I'm going to excuse this juror for cause. Any objections?" Both attorneys shook their heads no. There was a palpable reduction in tension as Piggy made his waddling, porcine way out of the jury box, and rollingly stomped out of the courtroom, his mustache bristling with impotent anger. As I commented to some friends after relating this incident, there are lots of ways to get yourself off a jury without making everyone around you think you're a racist asshole.
The other interesting juror was #124 (or so). He diverted nearly
any question asked of him into a haranguing lecture on the abomination of
the for-profit prison system, and how he would be unwilling to commit
anyone to such immoral torture imprisonment. His manner
bespoke exactly the kind of
screeching trustafarian, libertarian (because no government
interference in our lives would be COOOL, man), entitled rich-kid nature
that I came to despise at Evergreen, lo these many years ago (my fellow
juror Hal refreshes my memory: #124 claimed he was actually in favor of
more and bigger government; my impression of him as having the smug
self-satisfaction I'm referring to stands, though). He
wasn't excused that day, but when we were called back next, he was told
he could go, to exultant fist-pumping on his part, and a collective
sigh of relief (expressed as nervous laughter from some) on everyone
else's part.
That was more or less the end of that day. We were excused for Friday, which is the normal day off for trials (which is to say, I think everyone's working hard on Fridays, they're just not doing jury trial work).
Watch this space for further updates. I won't be going into this kind of day-to-day detail for much of the trial. At 24 (or so) days, that would be far too much writing, and it would read like a very dry transcript. I think I'm going to aim for a more episodic style this time around.
Posted at 10:30 permanent link category: /jurisprudence
Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater