Excused

I have been excused from the jury. They only kept two alternates on for the deliberations. I did not keep a good record during the trial. I did included some things I wrote down on a couple of occasions. I have also included a couple of news paper links to the case. I have not gone through the news articals yet, and there may be more. It has been a long drawn out play, with quite an assorted cast. The witnesses ranged from lifetime criminals and family to fire investigators and police officers. All of the witnesses were for the prosecution and their case lasted until last week. The defense’s case only lasted about an hour for all three. They only read in some stipulations. Closing arguments was rather interesting. The Prosecution’s arguments were very structured and they used Power point to present it. The defense got up there and proceeded to attack all the witnesses and to say that none of them could be trusted because they were all criminals and they got a deal from the government for there testimonies. One of the lawyers even said that they do not deny that the events happened, but the testimonies of liars was not enough to tie their clients to the events. During the prosecution’s rebuttal, he got up there and just tore right though the defense’s comments. It was great. Then the judge went through the charge to the jury. That seemed to take forever. It took more than a full day to go through all the indictments, what they meant and what needs to be met to convict on them.


19 October 2007

There are three defendants, each with their own lawyers. Two of the defendants are brothers and they sit at the same table with their lawyers, and the other is their cousin and he sits at another table with his lawyer. The brothers seem well educated and appear to have been well coached. They are constantly writing and counsel with their lawyers often. All of them seem to have been coached to not show emotions, and I caught one holding back a laugh after one of the judges jokes.

So far it has been a well structured argument. Each of the lawyers have very different personalities and tactics. The government lawyer seems to want to present his case in a clear, organized way. He brings in a witness and presents everything relating to that witness. The other lawyers very rarely object to anything he says or presents. Two of the defense lawyers just rub me the wrong way. One of them really does. His attitude really gets to me and I think the judge is starting to get annoyed. His way of disproving the witness is to try to discredit them by showing that they are lifetime criminals and therefore are probably lying to us, or that they have something to gain by lying to us. He asks the same question over and over for no apparent reason but to change the flow or drag out the process. He has not been able to trip any one up in their testimony. The Prosecutor has been objecting to his questioning a lot. He has be objecting that the questions have been asked and answered (at one point the judge’s response was that we got the same question five times and it was time to move on), that he has been looking for the witness to give an opinion, and what he was asking was not relevant.

There has been a few time that they have dismissed us so that the judge could talk to the lawyers. Sometimes they had us take a recess and other times they just had us go across the hall into the other courtroom. I am not sure what they had to discuss, but one time it was definitely about the one defense lawyer’s way of questioning.

29 October 2007

Another one of the defense lawyers started to bug me. She talks down to everyone. The way she speaks to people, her tone and the words she chooses really gets me. If she were to speak to me that way she probably would get a reaction out of me. She even asked the witness at one point if he could read (in her high and mighty way). [During closing arguments, she completely changed her manner and she did not talk down at all and put us on an equal level.] There have been a lot of witnesses already. One day they had the recording out of a police car that had one of the fires recorded on it. There was no sound and it was 30 minutes of watching a building burn. [It ended up being a different fire than the one the witness said it was, but was one of the other fires in the case.]

http://buffalo.fbi.gov/dojpressrel/pressrel06/extortion050806.pdf - origianal arrest
http://www.redorbit.com/news/health/1113158/rural_racketeering_case_is_a_backwoods_version_of_the_sopranos/index.html?source=r_health
http://www.redorbit.com/news/health/1127537/witness_details_how_vandalism_ruined_his_business/index.html?source=r_health
http://www.buffalonews.com/cityregion/niagaracounty/story/214567.html - buffalo news 11-25
http://www.buffalonews.com/cityregion/niagaracounty/story/217567.html - buffalo news 11-29
http://buffalonews.typepad.com/inside_the_news/2007/10/the-cain-trial-.html - buffalo news 10-22
http://www.buffalonews.com/cityregion/niagaracounty/story/218299.html - buffalo news 11-30