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- Is there an option for the judge to find the juror in contempt of court of something similar for this sort of behavior? This sounds like more than just "oops, sorry."
- Does a snooze-a-thon trial help the prosecution or the defense? It seems to me that it would help the defense because the prosecution should have had an "a-ha!" moment to prove "beyond a reasonable doubt" but I'm spitballing.
You'd think he'd want the $40 a day and free lunch.
Those that preferred sitting through the trial were dismissed for questionable mental health.
I thought this was funny:
Probably not so funny for the guy getting convicted of murder.
WHERE IS TEH OUTRAGE!?! WE THINK ROGER CLEMENS USED STEROIDS!!
A few hours in jail and a nice $500 fine would do wonders for this cretin.
Agreed. It's a pretty easy thing to do and actually is rather fun (at least the two times I've done it). You spend a few hours a day watching what is basically a much more orderly version of Jerry Springer and typically you feel pretty good at the end that at the very least your life isn't as ###### up as the people you got to spend the last few days judging.
I'm not sure how much good a few hours in jail is going to do, given that he'd almost certainly sleep through it.
edit...That was rude, seeing as Ray is here.
So I ask directly: Ray, how did you do it?
The more interesting question is why you think a resident of the Houston area would be seated as a juror for a trial that is in the District of Columbia.
Agreed. It's a pretty easy thing to do and actually is rather fun (at least the two times I've done it). You spend a few hours a day watching what is basically a much more orderly version of Jerry Springer and typically you feel pretty good at the end that at the very least your life isn't as ###### up as the people you got to spend the last few days judging.
Except here we're talking about the \"###### up life" of a guy who made $150 million playing baseball, won 7 Cy Young Awards, 1 MVP, and 2 World Series. I suppose you can be thankful that your life is better than McNamee's.
In general I would agree with you, but contempt is exactly what should be shown for this ridiculous waste of taxpayer money.
OK, so transpose DC for Houston.
Falling asleep during the testimony, however, is not as uncommon as you would think, and not just for jurors. You might think it is easy to stay awake, but if you have been through one of these, especially in an afternoon, you would not appreciate what a struggle it can be to stay awake.
Apparently "unbiased jury" is code for jury made up of slacker idiots who may or may not be narcoleptic.
Here's a quick sketch of the dismissed juror:
Sounds like promises were made to be broken, bro!
Sometimes you just can't help it. Boring things are boring.
Watch out, lady! You could be next!
This is true for regular people. So just think how hard it must have been for this particular gentleman, whose life evidently revolves around two things: (1) sleeping, and (2) attempting to weasel out of anything that interferes with sleeping.
A problem occurs when the judge is the one falling asleep. Happened in one case, where I saw his clerks signal each other and conveniently "drop" binders to help wake him up. Even saw him wake to rule on an objection (correctly) then fall back asleep on the next witness.
Personally, I'd rather have 12 people who've never heard of Roger Clemens** sitting on that jury than 12 people who have, for the simple reason that there's less chance that they would have made up their minds about the case before it began. I certainly wouldn't want anyone who participates in steroids debates determining the outcome of a case involving steroids, though I'm sure since we're all so honest we'd all voluntarily disqualify ourselves.
**And why would a person who's not interested in baseball have any reason to know who Roger Clemens is? There are high profile legal cases involving various entertainment celebrities or mysteriously missing little blond babies that are in the news nearly every month, and I doubt if I would be able to tell you two salient facts about any of them. Similarly, I'm sure that tens of millions of highly intelligent people who have no interest in American team sports are equally capable of not having any coherent idea who Roger Clemens is.
Is that the norm? I was due to report tomorrow (luckily my group was dismissed instead), but Arizona only pays $12 a day, no free lunch, and no free parking even.
It's county by county. San Francisco county is $15.00 per day for the second day onward (no $$ for the first day), and a flat $2.75 or something for mileage.
It varies quite a bit as I understand it. I think $40 is on the high side, but I don't really know. I know that the district has a problem with filling jury pools as there are a higher than average number of felons.
amazing thing about clemens: led league in k's at age 43, 9 yrs after twilight, yet only tiny wife & nice best bud did PEDs
F-Checked: Clemens finished 44th in K's (102) when he was 43.
pretty sure they're STILL making those movies.
I got called to the courthouse once. They sat juries throughout the morning, and around noon they dismissed the remaining half of the jury pool, including me. I got $25 for my trouble.
at age 42/43 he led league in era at 1.87 and had 185 k's. yr before at 41 he had 218 k's. your year he was 43/44
HA!
When I was called in NY suburbs, it was approx. $40, but only if you weren't getting paid by someone else for the day. So, salaried employees got $0, hourly workers, retirees, unemployed, etc. got ~$40.
We all got free parking after day one, and lunch depended on the length of the break. If you got a full 1.5-2 hour lunch break, you were on your own. If they needed you to stay close, they brought in free sandwiches.
Maybe Heyman was thinking of Nolan Ryan? Ryan actually did lead the league in Ks at age 43.
And at age 42, when he struck out 300.
And at age 41.
And at age 40.
But of course, according to Nolan Ryan the Truth Teller, PEDs weren't around when Ryan played.
I'm going to disagree heartily with this. I've been on three juries, two of which went three weeks and one that went two. My experience is of endless sitting there doing nothing while the lawyers and judge confer quietly, repetitious testimony, terrible lunches, and then a week or more spent deliberating with a group of morons (Actual quote: "He's a doctor! I'm not a doctor! I gotta believe what he says! But the other guy's a doctor too!"). My first trial was the worst experience of my life that didn't involve a loved one dying. Just pure hell. It's a citizen's duty, but it sure isn't fun.
Huh, complete opposite.
Sure there were delays, and I didn't agree with all of our verdict (civil trial so no need for unanimity), but I thought it was really cool to see how a trial works. Enjoyed it a lot; certainly better than working.
Would never try to avoid service, unless it was a huge long trial that would f-up my job.
I certainly don't think Ryan is above suspicion, but one thing playing in his favor is that he can still throw harder than Jamie Moyer.
I figure this is as good a place as any to bring up ol' BACNE: https://twitter.com/#!/NYDNSportsITeam is all about the questioning about Rocket's BACNE.
My experience of voir dire includes not getting long enough of a break to go out and get a terrible lunch.
And, what Andy said. If a pop star is on trial, I'm the ideal juror, unless it's a pop star from the 1970s. (In the latter case, I'm obviously going to vote the death penalty for Barry Manilow, even if the charge is jaywalking.) I live with someone who can no more tell you who Roger Clemens is than she could name the members of the Hungarian cabinet, but is otherwise a fully functional and news-acquainted adult. The news world is much more fragmented than we sometimes think.
Heck, all Nolan needed was some ibuprofen. "A couple-a Advil, and those muscle aches are all gone!"
Until you got to the part where he ruled correctly, I was thinking you must have been in Julius Hoffman's courtroom.
Heyman had a brush with fame when Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, who lived in the next room door at Willard Hall, passed him in the hall and may not have looked in the other direction.
Clearly you've never been in a grand jury.
I read the attorneys had to explain to the jury that the Red Sox were a team from Boston, and that starting pitchers do not pitch every day, but every fourth or fifth day.
It's quite hard to happily swallow the "citizen's duty" line regarding trip and fall cases and other civil trials, esp when the lawyers bill $500 per hour and the jurors make $5 per hour. (Criminal is a different story.)
/curmudgeon
Clearly you've never been in a grand jury.
5-day civil trial.
It's quite hard to happily swallow the "citizen's duty" line regarding trip and fall cases and other civil trials, esp when the lawyers bill $500 per hour and the jurors make $5 per hour. (Criminal is a different story.)
Disconcur. It's our job as citizens to send the ambulance chasers and shysters home without their contingency fees (no one is getting $500/hr. to sue on a slip-and-fall).
Because he's a famous person who has been in the news for twenty-five years.
You mean the sports news, which believe it or not, tens of millions of people tune out with impunity. To the extent that Clemens' name recognition extended beyond that, during the Mitchell Report, it lasted for about one or two 24-hour news cycles and then it was back to the sports ghetto. It's like asking the average American in 2004 to tell you who Jack Kemp was, or like asking them today who John Edwards was if his fame had consisted solely of running for Vice President.
There are high profile legal cases involving various entertainment celebrities or mysteriously missing little blond babies that are in the news nearly every month, and I doubt if I would be able to tell you two salient facts about any of them.
The latter are not famous people. They are people who get their 15 minutes of news coverage.
Well, some of those little blond babies have made the non-sports news for much longer than Roger Clemens ever has. And there's scarcely an entertainment "celebrity" whose current level of name recognition doesn't equal that of any retired athlete not named Michael Jordan or Muhammad Ali. My wife's heard of Joe Dimaggio and Mickey Mantle, but she had to be prompted to remember Roger Clemens, and she'd give you a dumbfounded look if asked to identify Hank Aaron or Randy Johnson. She recognizes "Barry Bonds" as of today, but I wouldn't bet on it five years down the road.
Similarly, I'm sure that tens of millions of highly intelligent people who have no interest in American team sports are equally capable of not having any coherent idea who Roger Clemens is.
They may not be able to tell you his ERA+, but they know who he is, even if at the shallow level of "baseball player."
You're seriously underestimating the degree to which tens of million of people pay absolutely NO attention to American sports. They couldn't tell you who Roger Clemens is any more than I would recognize the name of any soccer player other than Pele.
I'm not saying that they could pick him out of a lineup -- but any remotely aware person would say, "Roger Clemens? Baseball."
Soccer is hardly comparable, since even if you actually read the sports pages in the U.S., you wouldn't encounter much soccer news.
Based on my highly scientific findings, Tom Brady, Derek Jeter, A-Rod, Kobe, Lebron, David Beckham and The Rock are the only athletes who pass the Grandma test. Lady Gaga and Katy Perry pass the Grandma test, but Kesha does not. Barack Obama and Mitt Romney pass the Grandma test, but Gary Johnson and Cynthia McKinney do not. All pop culture figures must be retested from time to time to make sure they are within compliance with the Grandma test.
Based on my very recent finding during a phone survey, Roger Clemens does, in fact, pass the Grandma test with flying colors. The Grandma test also indicates that she thinks it's a waste of time and money to go after a retired ballplayer for steroids, and moreover, "who gives a crap?" about whether or not Roger Clemens committed perjury.
Hey-man was referring to my tweepointing out to him that "Clemens finished 44th in K's (102) when he was 43." (2006 - Age 43)
Obviously, Heyman doesn't use B-Ref for year/age.
My Grandmas have both been dead since 1999 and 2005, respectively. So pop culture figure x is in big trouble.
---
My Grandmas have both been dead since 1999 and 2005, respectively. So pop culture figure x is in big trouble.
Well, at some point it becomes a parent test (which I've used here before), and for some of us it's a "have I (or my friends down at the senior center) heard of 'em?" test.
I covered the courts for some 4 1/2 years in Little Rock, & I saw at least a couple of instances of this.
And having covered the courts for 4 1/2 years, I have no more interest in serving on a jury than I do in flying the moon without oxygen. Luckily, I've never been called. Not registering to vote in more than a decade might have something to do with that.
I was registered in Arkansas, where the jury pool is taken from those roles, but presumably my familiarity with most of the lawyers because of my reporting stint would've disqualified me. Then again, one of my education reporters wound up sitting on a jury that heard the case of a teacher who was stabbed (speaking of reasons I don't necessarily think so highly of jury selection at all times), so who knows?
In Alabama I think jurors come from a combinnation of voter roles & people with drivers' licenses. I do have one of of those, so maybe I've just been lucky.
On a regular basis? When would he have ever made the front page of any paper for anything unrelated to the brief news cycle of the Mitchell Report and the Congressional hearing? And even that was as easily avoided as any front page news story concerning a subject that a reader had zero interest in.
The only other time Clemens' name would have made it out of the sports section would have been when he left the Red Sox and then later when he went to the Yankees. But even then that sort of coverage was almost certainly kept in the sports ghetto outside of the cities directly involved. You're seriously underestimating the extent to which huge numbers of people deliberately avoid reading or listening to anything connected with sports, much as many others among us turn the page or change the channel whenever we encounter anything about some non-sports "entertainment" figure---or even when we hear the word "soccer" or "Olympics".
Same here. There was a thread here, maybe 6 months or a year ago where we were talking about dynamic sports figures or something. A guy was mentioned who I have never heard of and at least a couple of posters basically didn't believe that some of us hadn't heard of this dynamic, exciting soccer player.
People often think that everybody cares about what that person cares about. They know it's not to the same level a lot of times, but still they think it's there.
I have a friend who is about 45. He seems to have no knowledge at all about 80's pop music. He doesn't recognize songs that were very popular at the time. He says that nobody listened to that crap, you would get beat up if you said you liked it, etc. But when he talks about Led Zeppelin, it's "everyone knows that Jimmy Page did X". He seems to have no concept that other people felt differently.
That is of print papers, historically, and now includes online news sources like Yahoo or the print papers online or whereever people are getting their news these days. And then there's tv and the radio.
That said, I don't know which of you has the better claim. Some people really are clueless and tuned out. But, again, the point was not whether these people exist but was whether you want these people on the jury. I guess it boils down to what percentage of the public these people comprise.
Dunno. Depends on the papers one reads, especially the non-elite* (i.e. not in bed with whoever's in power in Washington; Judith Miller, come on down!) variety. My paper in Little Rock had a daily circ of around 195,000 & a Sunday circ in the 300,000 neighborhood, & I worked in news, not sports, but offhand I'd be surprised if we ran two 1A stories featuring non-local baseball players during my 2nd stint there from 2/90-2/01. The only reason I'm sure there was even one was that I wrote it myself -- a thumbsucker on the sport's return after the '94 strike, suggested by one of the guys I later succeeded as weekend editor.
*Though re-reading your comment I now suspect you're talking about elite players, not newspapers. Still, the point stands.
This. I don't have TV, of course, which I'm sure is a good part of it, but whenever I glance at MSN.com I'm clueless as to the alleged significiance of a hefty percentage of the names in the headlines. Hell, till I saw some offhand reference in, I believe, a column in my sub copy of Comic Buyers Guide a couple of days ago, I had no idea where the "Honey Badger" crap came from.
And of course my boss (who's older than me), who does have TV & in fact has it on all the damned time, makes me look like a walking encyclopedia of such stuff.
(Fondly recalled conversation from last year:
Her: Is anyone going to see the new Captain America movie?
Me: Probably not.
Her: What's it about?
Me: Captain America.
Her: Who?)
It apparently originated from some internet japery taking off on an Animal Planet show or website, or something, I guess possibly quasi-inspired by the Chuck Norris silliness.
In related news, small things amuse small minds.
Rihanna
Chris Brown
Anna Wintour
Ellen Pompeo
Russell Brand
Reese Witherspoon
Kris Jenner
Mariska Hargitay
Ali Wentworth
Miranda Kerr
Travis Barker
Giulana Rancic
Sean Bean
Juliana Hough
Vidal Sassoon
Same here. There was a thread here, maybe 6 months or a year ago where we were talking about dynamic sports figures or something. A guy was mentioned who I have never heard of and at least a couple of posters basically didn't believe that some of us hadn't heard of this dynamic, exciting soccer player.
There are entire sub-threads here that delve off into subjects like video games, fantasy writing, and pretty much any genre of non-melodic popular music, where I haven't the slightest clue as to who or even what is being talked about. And I'm sure that when I've mentioned names in arcane fields of my interest that other people have the same reaction. We increasingly live in separate worlds from one another, and more and more we deliberately choose to avoid worlds that either seem foreign or just plain moronic according to our particular idea of what's interesting and what isn't. You can chalk it up to a lack of curiosity, the invasiveness of popular culture that produces a visceral counter-reaction, or simply a matter of too few hours in the day, but in any case it's a fact.
-------------------------------------------------------
Andy, baseball players appear on the front page all the time. Particularly elite ones.
Sure, and those elite papers are read by what percentage of the population?
EDIT: And if you mean elite players, as opposed to papers, that's totally confined to the day after the Super Bowl, or the day after a player gets hauled before Congress. And even then, how many people who don't follow sports are going to remember that name two months later? Hell, I watched every pitch of last year's World Series, and I have no idea what the hero "Freese"'s first name is without looking it up on BB-Reference.
That is of print papers, historically, and now includes online news sources like Yahoo or the print papers online or wherever people are getting their news these days. And then there's tv and the radio.
Which have countless channels that believe or not, make no mention of sports, and many other channels that mention any particular sports figure only once in a blue moon, and then it's off to the next car crash on the highway or the next campaign development. How many astronauts who've been in the news over the past five years, for any reason, do you think have more than 50% name recognition?
That said, I don't know which of you has the better claim. Some people really are clueless and tuned out. But, again, the point was not whether these people exist but was whether you want these people on the jury.
Well, why wouldn't you? Since when is name recognition of a sports figure a legitimate requirement for jury duty?
I guess it boils down to what percentage of the public these people comprise.
I'd be willing to bet that two weeks ago, before this latest trial began, at least 40% of the U.S. population over the age of 10 couldn't pick Roger Clemens out of a police lineup, or that 20% of that group would be willing to bet five dollars that they could guess his former occupation without any prompting. Would you disagree with that estimate?
...
Regarding jury duty, the last time I was called for voir dire, I had a brief relationship the AUSA who was now prosecuting the pending criminal case. When the judge asked members of the jury panel if anyone knew any of the attorneys, I stood up. It was the first time she knew I was there. The look on her face when the judge asked me how I knew her was priceless.
...
The only one I am fairly sure I'd recognize is Witherspoon. I recognize the names of four others but wouldn't know who they are if they sat next to me on the plane tonight. I'm guessing Chris Brown isn't the Giants outfielder of the same name from the 80s.
Rihanna
Chris Brown
Anna Wintour
Ellen Pompeo
Russell Brand
Reese Witherspoon
Kris Jenner
Mariska Hargitay
Ali Wentworth
Miranda Kerr
Travis Barker
Giulana Rancic
Sean Bean
Juliana Hough
Vidal Sassoon
Witherspoon and Sassoon, and in the case of Witherspoon it's confined to "I've heard of him (or her), but have no idea beyond that". The rest of them might as well be living on the planet formerly known as Herschel.
AFAIC anyone who recognizes all of those names in #77 might as well sign a confession that his (or more likely her) life is a complete waste. Talk about mother's basements.
Specifically, you have posts saying
and then a post with
I'm not picking on anyone in particular, but this is a good example of how people assume that since they know something that everyone does.
She had never heard of Roger Clemens.
It certainly exposed him to her.
DB
The only one I do not know is Anna Wintour. However, I have a wife who leaves the People magazine in the bathroom and also has Extra on in the background in the afternoon, plus I have 4 kids under 15. I've picked up most of them through osmosis.
Oh, and Andy, I find it hard to believe you don't know who Mariska Hargitay is.
But ... but ... surely 100 percent of humanity knows who Curt Swan & John Cooper Clarke are.
Right?
I predict that by post #126 of this thread, Sean Bean's character will have died.
Who?
Your mother's basement is (a) capacious enough to accommodate a family of 6 & (b) has a bathroom?
Impressive!
As for the list:
Rihanna
Chris Brown
Anna Wintour
Ellen Pompeo
Russell Brand
Reese Witherspoon
Kris Jenner
Mariska Hargitay
Ali Wentworth
Miranda Kerr
Travis Barker
Giulana Rancic
Sean Bean
Juliana Hough
Vidal Sassoon
I recognize 10 of the 15. Not Wintour, Wentworth, Barker, Rancic, or Hough. But if any of them are as big as Clemens, I'd be shocked. In fact, most on the list are random or recent singers, actors, or "reality" stars. Only Vidal Sassoon is bigger than Clemens. And how many people wouldn't recognize the name Vidal Sassoon?
*bursts disbelievingly into tears*
Amen.
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