Juror 3 Quotes

8th Juror: Did you ever see a woman who had to wear glasses and didn't want to because she thinks they spoil her looks? 6th Juror: My wife. Listen, I'm telling ya, as soon as we walk outa the house... 8th Juror: Maybe the district attorney didn't know either. 6th Juror: Yeah, that's what I was just gonna say. 3rd Juror: Ok. She had marks on her nose. I'm givin' ya that. From glasses. Right? She never worn 'em out of the house so people think'd she was gorgeous.

8th Juror: Did you ever see a woman who had to wear glasses and didn't want to because she thinks they spoil her looks? 6th Juror: My wife. Listen, I'm telling ya, as soon as we walk outa the house... 8th Juror: Maybe the district attorney didn't know either. 6th Juror: Yeah, that's what I was just gonna say. 3rd Juror: Ok. She had marks on her nose. I'm givin' ya that. From glasses. Right? She never worn 'em out of the house so people'd think she was gorgeous.

8th Juror: Did you ever see a woman who had to wear glasses and didn't want to because she thinks they spoil her looks? 6th Juror: My wife. Listen, I'm telling ya, as soon as we walk outa the house... 8th Juror: Maybe the district attorney didn't know either. 6th Juror: Yeah, that's what I was just gonna say. 3rd Juror. Ok. She had marks on her nose. I'm givin' ya that. From glasses. Right? She never worn 'em out of the house so people think'd she was gorgeous.

the chain-of-custody document to the back of the search warrant application and was ready to go. “I’m out of here,” she announced. “You ever want to get together after work, I’m here, Amy. At least until the late show starts.” “Thanks,” Dodd said, seeming to pick up on Ballard’s worry. “I might take you up on that.” Ballard took the elevator down and then crossed the front plaza toward her car. She checked the windshield and saw no ticket. She decided to double down on her luck and leave the car there. The courthouse was only a block away on Temple; if she was fast and Judge Thornton had not convened court, she could be back to the car in less than a half hour. She quickened her pace. Judge Billy Thornton was a well-regarded mainstay in the local criminal justice system. He had served both as a public defender and as a deputy district attorney in his early years, before being elected to the bench and holding the position in Department 107 of the Los Angeles Superior Court for more than a quarter century. He had a folksy manner in the courtroom that concealed a sharp legal mind—one reason the presiding judge assigned wiretap search warrants to him. His full name was Clarence William Thornton but he preferred Billy, and his bailiff called it out every time he entered the courtroom: “The Honorable Billy Thornton presiding.” Thanks to the inordinately long wait for an elevator in the fifty-year-old courthouse, Ballard did not get to Department 107 until ten minutes before ten a.m., and she saw that court was about to convene. A man in blue county jail scrubs was at the defense table with his suited attorney sitting next to him. A prosecutor Ballard recognized but could not remember by name was at the other table. They appeared ready to go and the only party missing was the judge on the bench. Ballard pulled back her jacket so the badge on her belt could be seen by the courtroom deputy and went through the gate. She moved around the attorney tables and went to the clerk’s station to the right of the judge’s bench. A man with a fraying shirt collar looked up at her. The nameplate on his desk said ADAM TRAINOR. “Hi,” Ballard whispered, feigning breathlessness so Trainor would think she had run up the nine flights of steps and take pity. “Is there any chance I can get in to see the judge about a wiretap warrant before he starts court?” “Oh, boy, we’re just waiting on the last juror to get here before starting,” Trainor said. “You might have to come back at the lunch break.” “Can you please just ask him? The warrant’s only seven pages and most of it’s boilerplate stuff he’s read a million times. It won’t take him long.” “Let me see. What’s your name and department?” “Renée Ballard, LAPD. I’m working a cold case homicide. And there is a time element on this.” Trainor picked up his phone, punched a button, and swiveled on his chair so his back was to Ballard and she would have difficulty hearing the phone call. It didn’t matter because it was over in twenty seconds and Ballard expected the answer was no as Trainor swiveled toward her. But she was wrong. “You can go back,” Trainor said. “He’s in his chambers. He’s got about ten minutes. The missing juror just called from the garage.” “Not with those elevators,” Ballard said. Trainor opened a half door in the cubicle that allowed Ballard access to the rear door of the courtroom. She walked through a file room and then into a hallway. She had been in judicial chambers on other cases before and knew that this hallway led to a line of offices assigned to the criminal-court judges. She didn’t know whether to go right or left until she heard a voice say, “Back here.” It was to the left. She found an open door and saw Judge Billy Thornton standing next to a desk, pulling on his black robe for court. “Come in,” he said. Ballard entered. His chambers were just like the others she had been

At 3:45 p.m. the jurors finally began their deliberations. In the six week trial, 104 witnesses had taken the stand, 71 for Barnes, 33 for Roosevelt, and of them, 58 were former senators and assemblymen. The fully transcribed testimony, not including Judge Andrews’s charge, filled 3,738 pages. A member of Roosevelt’s defense team had even calculated that there had been a total of 934,500 words spoken in testimony—exclusive of the 252 exhibits, including letters, newspaper articles and other pieces of evidence admitted into the record. The fact that a former president would come before this jury of twelve common citizens, pictured here, created a sensation but surprised no one.

Examine the witness who will introduce the exhibit in a way that establishes competence and relevance and makes the introduction of the exhibit become part of the story of the trial. 2) Show the exhibit to opposing counsel, the judge, and the witness. Say to opposing counsel and the judge, “I’m going to show the witness the exhibit marked as Plaintiff’s Number 1.” Show them a copy. Say to the judge, “Your Honor, may I approach the witness?” Say to the witness, “I am showing you what has been marked for identification as Plaintiff’s Exhibit Number 1.” 3) Have the witness identify the exhibit. Show the exhibit to the witness. Say, “Please tell the jury what it is.” Or, “What is it?” 4) Lay any necessary evidentiary foundation: Authenticate the exhibit through testimony that shows that the exhibit is what you say it is. Complete the foundation with testimony that shows that the exhibit is not excludable on any other grounds. 5) Offer the exhibit. Say, “Your Honor, I move plaintiff’s exhibit Number 1 be admitted into evidence.” Or, “Your honor, I offer plaintiff’s exhibit Number 1 in evidence.” 6) Publish the exhibit to the jurors. Don’t forget to use it!

Antisthenes' learning from Socrates came to an end in the spring of 399 B.C., when Socrates was tried and executed. The charge was irreligiosity, which implied, as pointed out earlier, a lack of respect or fearlessness. He did not have the fear, respect, and reverential awe ( crif3ac;) toward the laws and their foundation-the gods-that were expected of law-abiding citizens. At least in word, he had challenged the structure of the State and, worse still, had taught others to do like-wise, according to the affidavit submitted by the prosecutors. He had stood apart from the people and had seldom taken part in their political affairs. He had shown little respect for Homer and other epic poets, from whom people learned their moral values. He had set up himself as a monarch and had claimed access to a secret voice that guided his conduct. For this, the Athenians found him guilty and sentenced him to die by hemlock poisoning. To make things worse, he had defended himself in what was an unusual way, neither asking for mercy nor producing his family before the jurors nor giving any indications of wanting to reach an accommodation nor showing consternation at the prospect of death. Socrates' execution must have had a profound impact on his associates. From Plato's seventh letter, for instance, we learn how it affected his assessment of the Athenian polity and, in fact, of every other polity. All human political and social arrangements, Plato concluded (Epist. 7.325d-326a), were almost beyond repair and could not be helped except by some miraculous plan and a streak of good luck. Later on, he would insist on the necessity of casting aside all existing political and social arrangements in order to undertake the task of reforming them as if on a new canvass, because those used hitherto were useless. Like an artist bent on correcting a painting full of flaws, who eventually decides to discard it, Plato envisioned the possibility of recreating society on a new foundation. His political dialogues, the Republic and the Laws, are the literary testament of his aspirations. Antisthenes, however, appears not to have sheltered such aspirations. The human world, which according to Plato was "almost beyond repair," was for Antisthenes truly beyond repair and there was nothing to do about it, except to tear it down, and Socrates' execution provided irrefutable evidence for this. Socrates had practiced what the Athenians regarded as an inviolable right-n:appfJ

People are perceived as more credible when they make eye contact and speak with confidence, no matter what they have to say. In a mock jury study, researcher Bonnie Erickson and her colleagues had people listen to a witness answer questions about a supposed accident-for example, "Approximately how long did you stay there before the ambulance arrived?" Some jurors heard the witness respond straightforwardly: "Twenty minutes. Long enough to help get Mrs. David straightened out." Others listened to the witness hem and haw: "Oh, it seems like it was about, uh, twenty minutes. Just long enough to help my friend Mrs. David, you know, get straightened out." What the witnesses said turned out to be less important than how they said it: the straightforward, confident witnesses were rated significantly more credible and competent.3

SOLOMON’S LAWS 1. Try not to piss off a cop unless you have a damn good reason . . . or a damn good lawyer. 2. The best way to hustle a case is to pretend you don’t want the work. 3. When arguing with a woman who is strong, intelligent, and forthright, consider using trickery, artifice, and deceit. 4. A prosecutor’s job is to build a brick wall around her case. A defense lawyer’s job is to tear down the wall, or at least to paint graffiti on the damn thing. 5. Listen to bus drivers, bailiffs, and twelve-year-old boys. Some days, they all know more than you do. 6. When the testimony is too damn good, when there are no contradictions and all the potholes are filled with smooth asphalt, chances are the witness is lying. 7. A shark who can’t bite is nothing but a mermaid. 8. When the woman you love is angry, it’s best to give her space, time, and copious quantities of wine. 9. Be confident, but not cocky. Smile, but don’t snicker. And no matter how desperate your case, never let the jurors see your fear. 10. Never sleep with a medical examiner, unless you’re dead. 11. If you can’t keep a promise to a loved one, you probably aren’t going to keep the loved one, either. 12. Life may be a marathon, but sometimes you have to sprint to save a life.

it is not uncommon for experts in DNA analysis to testify at a criminal trial that a DNA sample taken from a crime scene matches that taken from a suspect. How certain are such matches? When DNA evidence was first introduced, a number of experts testified that false positives are impossible in DNA testing. Today DNA experts regularly testify that the odds of a random person’s matching the crime sample are less than 1 in 1 million or 1 in 1 billion. With those odds one could hardly blame a juror for thinking, throw away the key. But there is another statistic that is often not presented to the jury, one having to do with the fact that labs make errors, for instance, in collecting or handling a sample, by accidentally mixing or swapping samples, or by misinterpreting or incorrectly reporting results. Each of these errors is rare but not nearly as rare as a random match. The Philadelphia City Crime Laboratory, for instance, admitted that it had swapped the reference sample of the defendant and the victim in a rape case, and a testing firm called Cellmark Diagnostics admitted a similar error.20 Unfortunately, the power of statistics relating to DNA presented in court is such that in Oklahoma a court sentenced a man named Timothy Durham to more than 3,100 years in prison even though eleven witnesses had placed him in another state at the time of the crime. It turned out that in the initial analysis the lab had failed to completely separate the DNA of the rapist and that of the victim in the fluid they tested, and the combination of the victim’s and the rapist’s DNA produced a positive result when compared with Durham’s. A later retest turned up the error, and Durham was released after spending nearly four years in prison.21 Estimates of the error rate due to human causes vary, but many experts put it at around 1 percent. However, since the error rate of many labs has never been measured, courts often do not allow testimony on this overall statistic. Even if courts did allow testimony regarding false positives, how would jurors assess it? Most jurors assume that given the two types of error—the 1 in 1 billion accidental match and the 1 in 100 lab-error match—the overall error rate must be somewhere in between, say 1 in 500 million, which is still for most jurors beyond a reasonable doubt. But employing the laws of probability, we find a much different answer. The way to think of it is this: Since both errors are very unlikely, we can ignore the possibility that there is both an accidental match and a lab error. Therefore, we seek the probability that one error or the other occurred. That is given by our sum rule: it is the probability of a lab error (1 in 100) + the probability of an accidental match (1 in 1 billion). Since the latter is 10 million times smaller than the former, to a very good approximation the chance of both errors is the same as the chance of the more probable error—that is, the chances are 1 in 100. Given both possible causes, therefore, we should ignore the fancy expert testimony about the odds of accidental matches and focus instead on the much higher laboratory error rate—the very data courts often do not allow attorneys to present! And so the oft-repeated claims of DNA infallibility are exaggerated.

judge flipped open the file, lifted his pen, and announced, “Court rules in favor of the plaintiff.” My jaw dropped. How could he? I could feel my temper flushing a shade of pink up my neck. How could I have lost this? I had clawed through law school on the belief that my gut instincts were generally right. Growing up poor in small Mississippi towns, I had learned at an early age to anticipate other people’s reactions. And when my gut failed me, I had my fists. Too bad I couldn’t throw a punch at the county judge. Darla Lamar was at my elbow, tugging on my secondhand jacket. I gingerly pulled away, afraid the fabric would pop a seam. “What does he mean?” Darla asked in a frightened whisper. Keeping my voice low, I said, “Darla, we lost. The judge found in favor of your landlord.” Darla’s face contorted. “Where does that leave me? And my kids? You said we was going to win.” Oh, no, I had not said that. My trial practice prof had beat

Colton Malone