Song suggestions!

I've been listening to a lot of good music lately due to my husband's tendency to buy me good music. (I love him so much.) Anyway, here's some songs you should check out, they are my favorites of the moment.

Vince Gill - Oklahoma Borderline
Joe Walsh - Rocky Mountain Way
Buddy Guy - Sweet Home Chicago
Jimmie Vaughan - Six Strings Down
J.J. Cale - After Midnight
John Lee Hooker and Bonnie Raitt - I'm In The Mood
Z.Z. Hill - Down Home Blues

That's all for now. I have to go sleep, got work at 7am.

Enjoy.

So, I got married...

I'm sure there's no one still checking this blog, seeing as how it's been several months since I've posted here.

But I came to take off the wedding cake layout, and I figured I should drop a note here, even if no one ever sees it, seeing as how it's kind of a big deal and all.

On Friday, May 1, 2009, I married the love of my life, Jon Thomas. Now I'm getting on with spending the rest of my life with him. :) The wedding was very beautiful, but I'm not feeling quite able to get it written down in detail at this time. Maybe it'll all smooth out in my head later and I can give it a shot.

In the mean time, enjoy the new bland generic Blogger template, until I find a new cool one.

(A side note: I also finally got my first character ever to level 80 in Warcraft. The night before my wedding. ;] Yes I'm aware how huge of a nerd that makes me. That's ok though, because Jon loves me anyway!)

Jury Duty

So, a month or so ago, I got a jury summons in the mail, for February 16th, 2009. The night before I was scheduled for duty, I had to call the courthouse to hear if my juror number had been selected to show up on the day of. It had been selected, so, I had to be at the courthouse in downtown Winston at 8am, this past Monday morning.

I showed up that day with a huge paperback novel and plans to spend a nine hour day doing not much but reading said novel. Every person I've ever known that has had jury duty has either not had to go to the court house, or has spent the day being bored to death and never even seen the court room, or has been dismissed from duty for some reason or another. I had no particular reason to believe it would go differently for me.

My expectations were met for the first seven or so hours on Monday. The only interesting point was lunch, when I walked across the street from the courthouse and had a very tasty philly steak sub with fries at the Courtside Diner. I was coasting through the last few hours of the day, my thoughts already on getting home and going about my life, when (around 3pm) a group of jurors was finally called to the courtroom, and I happened to be one that was called.

I was not one of the first twelve jurors called up to be questioned, but through the process of elimination I managed to make it to the box as juror number five. The attorneys asked me a few questions, and I answered them honestly. No one objected to me, and I was officially selected for the jury. It took all of the rest of Monday, and part of Tuesday morning to get the rest of the jurors and alternates selected, and then we launched straight in to the trial.

The charges against the defendant were two counts of rape of a child under the age of thirteen, and two counts of taking indecent liberties with a child.

The state's case included a lot of testimony and some circumstantial evidence, but very little hard evidence. No DNA, no particularly compelling medical evidence, and so most of what we had to go on was the word of a ten year old and an eleven year old, about things that had happened about three years ago. The defense didn't even put on a case, they rested immediately after the state rested. Had that been all there was to it, despite the fact that I believed the girls about what had happened to them, it would have been very difficult for us to convict the defendant of anything.

However, the very last piece of evidence presented by the state was a taped interview that the detective handling the case had taken from the defendant. That tape was the most horrifying thing I've ever heard in my life. In summary, the bastard admitted to having sexual contact with both girls, but it was so much worse than that. He tried to claim that he would just be lying about his brother's house naked, passed out from alcohol or drugs or both, and that these seven and eight year old children would come into the room and try to have sex with him. Clearly he didn't understand that even if we believed him, it would still be considered rape that he 'allowed' the children to do what they supposedly did. There's no way I can really describe the horrors of that tape to you without you getting to hear it, but it was really terrible. When a detective asked the defendant why he hadn't come forward to tell someone what these children had been up to, he claimed that he knew he'd get kicked out of the house and he didn't have anywhere else to go. He proceeded to explain what bad children these were and how no one but him ever saw their true selves. He laughingly explained that the only reason he never actually completed the sex acts with these children was that he 'was just too enormous' and 'it wouldn't never fit'. It made me sick to listen to it.

And then we heard closing arguments in which the defense attorney tried to focus our attention on the small inconsistencies in the state's case, things that could have easily been attributable to bad memories or the underdeveloped mental capacity of young children. And then he called his own client a liar, stating that said client was probably drunk or high when he gave his taped statement, and that he only said 'what the cops wanted to hear' when he confessed his terrible crimes.

After that the case was given to the jury for deliberation. And I'm thinking, open and shut case, let us just get in the room so we can find the bastard guilty and send him away forever. It didn't happen that way.

The initial vote had ten out of twelve jurors already ready to find the guy guilty on every count. The two holdouts were concerned with not rushing the decision, making sure we gave the guy a fair consideration before we put him in prison for life. Now. That's not a terrible way to feel, if either woman had had any arguments or questions whatsoever against the evidence or anything at all, but they didn't. They just sat there for an hour refusing to vote and refusing to say why. Eventually they started talking, and continued to talk at length, about every aspect of the case, from whether or not the children were lying, to why we didn't have any DNA evidence. I kept trying to tell them, it didn't matter, because the guy had confessed. If he had been coerced or anything of the sort, then the defense would have made a case out of it instead of just deciding not to present any case at all. At very least they would have put him on the stand to refute the statement on the tape. The two holdouts eventually agreed with me, but wanted to argue the legal definition of 'rape' and whether or not the sex acts described during the trial constituted actual rape. By the end of the day yesterday, we were still working on the two holdouts, and one other guy, who they had managed to convince to question his decision. So, we went home.

This morning, we walked into the jury room, and not ten minutes later, everyone had reached a unanimous decision that the guy was guilty on all charges. What happened over night? I can only imagine that the three holdouts spent the night coming to terms with sending a man to prison, based on his own taped confession, as the rest of us had done the minute we heard said confession.

So, we went in to the courtroom and gave our verdict to the parties and the judge. The defense attorney tried one more tactic, polling the jury, so that we each had to get up individually and attest to the fact that the verdict as given had been our choice, and that we still chose accordingly. But we all held firm, and the verdict was entered against the guy.

Afterward, the judge and the ADA came in to the jury room, to chat with us about some aspects of the case that we didn't get to hear during the trial (which explained all of the extended recesses we kept having to take, so that they could have hearings with the judge on the facts without us present.) Turns out this sick bastard has two more pending rape charges against him, not to mention he has AIDS. They assured us that the two children involved in this case have so far come back negative on their AIDS tests. They also assured us that the least amount of time this guy could get in prison based on our verdicts is twenty years, and it will probably be closer to forty. Considering he's already fifty years old, has AIDS, and is about to go into prison as a child rapist, chances are he'll never be outside of prison alive again. The judge also assured us there was nothing about the case that could be appealed successfully. So. One child rapist off the streets for life.