Addressing the Issues - In a Jury Pool

You'll never guess what I did today, unless you read last night's entries, of course. Even if you did, you may be interested in the details.

I had federal court jury duty, for a very specific case. It was for the murder trial of a Mexican national. He was accused of murdering someone on the Tohono O'odham reservation in 2003.

The Federal courthouse - no cameras allowed!

First off, I was a day late and then some. I forgot to call the phone number over the weekend, and so missed my Tuesday reporting time. So I showed up on Wednesday instead. I missed the turn for the parking garage, because it was on the right side of the street and I was looking on the left. By the time I doubled back, parked and walked the city block to the courthouse, I was later still. Then I had to double back to the garage, to ditch my camera, which wasn't allowed in the building. I should have thought of that!

Anyway, I eventually arrived back at the courthouse, out of breath and coughing from the combination of heat, exertion, dehydration and the remains of my cold. It probably took me a good half hour to stop coughing, by which time one of the two other people in the room had moved far away for me. No problem otherwise, though. It was hours before anyone else joined us in the Jury Assembly Room.

Finally we got underway. This mostly consisted of filling out out a 15 page (or something) voire dire questionnaire. And oh, boy, the questions! Have I visited the reservation? (Yes, I photographed Mission San Xavier del Bac, and attended a Tony Bennett concert there in 2002.) Do I know the victim or the accused? (No.) How about anyone in law enforcement? (Yes, a retired judge.) Would I be disturbed at looking at graphic photos of the victim? (Yes - I can't even watch fake gore on House.) Have I ever been the victim of a crime? (Yes.)

Mostly, though, the questionnaire was about the whole immigration issue, through the prism of a specific murder trial. Would my attitude toward Mexicans affect my impartiality? (No.) Do I belong to or support any groups that want to change any laws, and if so what groups? (Does the Democratic Party count? I said I supported that subversive group, the Social Action committee at St. Michael's.) What is my attitude toward illegal immigration? Do I think the immigration laws are too harsh, too lenient or just right? And on and on!

I ended up writing and writing, lots of explanations of "Yes" answers. I wrote about my belief that unnecessary impedments to legal immigration lead to legal immigration. Enforcement of illegal immigration laws, including stupid SB 1070, use up resources better spent going after actual criminals such as drug runners. And so on. I was almost the last person to turn in my questionnaire.

Then we waited for an hour, when they said 20 minutes. Finally the bailiff came in and said, they were short on the jury yesterday, but as of noon today they had enough with one to spare. So we were dismissed. Relief! I probably wouldn't have been selected anyway, but I really, really didn't want to sit there contemplating graphic photos of a real, murdered person.

So I left the courthouse, and headed back to the garage with a stop off at the Arizona Geological Survey gift shop, which was on the way. From there I went to Tucson Botanical Gardens, splurged $6 to cover the RR Challenge for this weekend. The temperature was up in the 90s by then, and I ended up dehydrated and a little overheated, with only hot water from a water fountain for refreshment. Great place, though.

After that I met someone at church for lunch, followed up on some documents needed by our outside auditors, and went home. A distraught call from my disabled friend,  a mislaid piece of paper and every possible red light between here and Craycroft meant that I just barely missed out on reaching the local DES office (to file a form) before they closed at five.

So it's been quite a day. Especially on fewer than two hours of sleep!

Karen

Weekend Assignment #318: The Great Unknown

Weekend Assignment #318: The SCOTUS Choice

Recently, Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens announced that he will retire, at the end of his term, later this year, leaving the position open to be filled by President Obama. As you know, Obama has chosen Elena Kagan as his nominee. I would like to hear your thoughts about this. Good choice? Bad choice? Indifferent? Who would you like to see appointed to the high court? Are you happy with the justices currently serving, or do you believe they leave something to be desired? Tell me what you think!

Extra Credit: Write one paragraph about a supreme court decision you felt strongly about either positively or negatively.

I watched coverage of Elena Kagan's nomination on the day, and a few Comedy Central pieces about her as well. Tonight I did some Googling and some reading, and even founds a few articles she wrote as a Harvard professor, which I might or might not be able to access from the University of Phoenix online libraries (probably not):

Representative Publications

• Kagan, Elena. "Presidential Administration," 114 Harvard Law Review 2245 (2001).
  Full text: HEIN (Harvard Users) || HEIN || LEXIS || WESTLAW
• Kagan, Elena & David Barron. "Chevron's Nondelegation Doctrine," 2001 Supreme Court Review 201 (2001).
  Full text: LEXIS || WESTLAW
• Kagan, Elena. "Private Speech, Public Purpose: The Role of Governmental Motive in First Amendment Doctrine," 63 University of Chicago Law Review 413 (1996).
  Full text: HEIN (Harvard Users) || HEIN || LEXIS || WESTLAW 

The upshot of my reading and tv viewing is that because she has never been a judge and has expressed very little by way of personal legal opinion over the years, she's a largely unknown quantity in terms of her legal and constitutional views. She clerked for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1988, which is something in her favor in my book. On the other hand, she has argued in favor of Monsanto's genetically modified alfalfa and, more troublingly, indefinite detention without trial in certain circumstances (e.g. for a terrorist captured in a non battlefield situation). These are very much not to the good, in my opinion. But are these her personal opinions, or was it merely her job to espouse them on behalf of her employers (Monsanto and the government) in each circumstance? That is not clear to me, and it makes a difference.

There is a claim that she's a consensus builder, which could be good, and she seems likely to sail through her confirmation, because Republicans have been hard-pressed to find any dirt on her. Yes, good, fine; but what kind of consensus can she build on the Supreme Court as it stands now? President Obama may know, but I certainly don't. Nobody else seems to know, either. It could be that this bright legal mind will help balance out the right-leaning court, but there's precious little indication of that. My worry is that President Obama has gone for a safe, inoffensive choice here, rather than one calculated to start undoing the damage caused by the increasingly activist conservative court.

For example, apparently the Supreme Court substantially weakened the Miranda rights of accused suspects today, ruling that the suspect must specifically tell police that they are exercising the right to remain silent, and that even a one-word answer that self-incriminates results in waving those rights completely. Very, very dangerous stuff, this, opening the door for innocent people to be badgered into false confessions - and yes, it does happen.

On balance, I don't have a strong opinion about Elena Kagan. I assume she is as brilliant and as qualified as the President and others claim, and I hope the President knows what he's doing in nominating her. It will all depend on the stuff we don't know about her yet. Time will tell - it always does.

Karen

P.S. Meanwhile, I personally have to be in federal court five hours from now. I had jury duty today, and I forgot to call the phone number. So I'll be showing up a day late - yipes! Sorry!

Police Drama

You would not believe the day I'm having. It's a tale of police action, mystery and intrigue. Blog at 11. via Twitter - 1:07pm.

No one commented on this Twitter bombshell? My 89 Twitter followers and 25 Facebook friends are either remarkably incurious or simply inattentive today. Ah, well. I'm used to being ignored. [/selfpity]

The question now is, how much of the story can I tell you, given my self-imposed restraints, for reasons of both ethics and professional self-preservation, about saying too much about the places where I work? Well, let's start with something I let slip last night. My new job consists of sitting at a desk in a cash cashing store, as a seasonal tax accountant for a local CPA firm. (The firm does not own the check cashing business.) It being early days for the receipt of W2 and 1099 forms, I haven't actually done anyone's taxes yet, which is probably just as well. I'm still training myself for the job. (More on that anon.)

So. The work day is 10 AM to 7 PM, four days a week, and four hours elsewhere on Friday. I caught the lights wrong this morning, and it was about 10:01 when I reached the storefront's door. It was locked. Someone inside eventually came over, told me they were closed due to some unspecified problem, and would reopen in an hour. I should come back then.

Uh, okay. I called my recruiter to let him know, rushed home, gave my dogs a very brief, unscheduled morning trip to the dog park, rushed home again, and returned to the store at 10:59 AM. There were two police cars outside. I sat in my car and watched them coming and going from that same door I'd stood at an hour earlier.

My recruiter agreed with me that it probably wasn't a good idea to walk in myself at that point.

He made some phone calls for me, and was told approximately nothing. Fair enough; it's none of my business what "issue" the check cashing business was having. I don't work for them. But it was disconcerting. My recruiter suggested that I go to lunch and then return to work.

By this time, I was having a bit of a stress reaction, which pretty much kept me from lingering over lunch. Half a sandwich later, I returned. Still two police cars.

"Go shopping," my recruiter advised. "Buy yourself something at Macy's."

I went to a store called Catherine's instead. I found career slacks that both fit well and have pockets, something I needed rather badly. From there I went on to Barnes and Noble, where I ran into Kevin and told him about my day so far. He was agog.

Back at the storefront, one cop was still there. I left a phone message for my recruiter and went home. That's when I posted that tweet that has so singularly failed to grab your attention.

While I was home, a potential employer who first called me on the land line before Christmas (a call I failed to return until after New Year's) called me. He had a job opening at a hospital in the Arizona boonies. I mean, even boonier than the other job. Was I interested? I checked Google Maps. It's not sure there is such a place, but if there is, it's about 90 minutes from my house. I called John. "Absolutely not," he said. "Too much wear and tear on the car." So much for that.

Just before 1 PM, I called my recruiter yet again, and was connected with one of my other recruiters from the same business. She checked for me, and the answer came back: ignore the police and return to work.

So I drove back to work. No police car. No sign that anything whatsoever had happened. No comment, no verbal acknowledgment that I was making a late start on the day, nothing.

Aside from a brief, pleasant meeting with someone from the CPA firm, who brought me a tax book, supplies and instructions, I spent the rest of the day tackling the most difficult of the practice returns. I was determined to figure out the complexities of self employment, a home office, MACRS depreciation and other aspects of company car expenses. It was a lot of fun, and I mean that without irony or sarcasm.

Here's hoping that the most exciting part of my job tomorrow will involve practice returns, or possibly the successful completion of a return for my first real-life tax client. Am I ready for that? Gulp!

Karen

Lawyers and Agents and Writers and Young Adults

This is going to be brief and freeform, for two reasons. One, I just spent over an hour and a half reading about literary agents in general, one agent in particular, and the agent's court case, and writing an email on the subject that disappeared into the ether due to AOL Mail glitching out on me. Dang, I wish they would completely debug one or the other of their webmail clients and get it online. I never know from one refresh to the next which version of the page I'm going to get, much less whether I'm likely to receive my most recent email. And Google has been glitchy too, with many of my recent alerts based on entries to this very blog arriving as mailer daemon notices, and some of your comment alerts not arriving at all. If I don't comment right away on your Weekend Assignment or Monday Photo Shoot entry, that may be why. I'll find you, though.

But I digress. The point is, all that research has eaten up a fair amount of time, and I need to go to bed now.

The other reason I want to keep this brief is the twinge of paranoid fear that one of the subjects of this post sometimes give me. I'm going to talk about it anyway, but briefly and carefully.

First, though, the positive stuff. Sara directed me tonight to a post on Whatever, noting that YA fantasy is a fairly lucrative market nowadays for writers, more so that sf and fantasy for the adults. This tallies pretty well with my own observations in recent years, not so much the money angle as the large amount, variety and quality of fantasy in Young Adult sections of bookstores. Adult science fiction sections don't seem to have all that much new fantasy these days, and what is there seems to be primarily concerned with sexy young vampires or the dark destiny of the sorceress of Snog, who will take at least three books to achieve it.

Since I've always considered the Mâvarin books at least marginally YA anyhow, this is a good incentive for me to cut back on other obsessions for a bit and get on with finding an agent and publisher. I've never actually submitted Heirs to a YA publisher per se. The few I've researched took agented submissions only. Clearly I need to take action, submitting to the Young Adult market instead of the adult one. After all, the books are about three teenagers and their friends, and nobody has sex. The only thing that's stopped me from definitively calling it YA is the cannibalism incident in Mages. Perhaps I can get away with that; as Sara points out, the scenes aren't all that explicit or gory. There's a definite ick factor, though, and they aren't scenes I can cut from the story.

So I did a little half-hearted digging tonight on the subject of literary agents, and found out two interesting things. One, a well-known writer and critic who liked an early version of Heirs of Mâvarin at Clarion all those years ago is now a literary agent. I will definitely write to him soon.

And two, a certain less savory literary agent has been the subject of a legal motion this month from Wikimedia Foundation, the parent of Wikipedia. Their motion to dismiss her defamation case against them makes interesting reading. Well, you may not think so, but I do. For whatever reason, I've developed a minor fascination with legal principles, especially in the field of communications law. My favorite courses at the University of Phoenix, by far, were in Business Law, and Nina Totenberg, who covers Supreme Court cases, is my favorite NPR reporter.

The motion to dismiss thingy refutes Wikimedia's liability for defamation to Barbara Bauer based on a number of legal principles, the biggest of which is that an interactive website with user-generated content is protected from being held liable for one some third party posted on it. The injured party can only go after the person who posted the offending material. And that's the part where I get nervous, since I was only of a handful of principal editors of the article about Bauer on Wikipedia, which was later deleted. My main contribution consisted of trying to find positive (or at least neutral) material to balance the negative stuff, and I've tried never to call her names or insult her, although I don't absolutely promise that I never have done so. Still, there's a tiny chance she could come after me someday. But I hope not!

Anyway, other legal defenses against her claim include the fact that the article was citing another source, clearly labeled as such, and making no claim on its own authority; the fact that the article never calls her (as is claimed) the "Dumbest of the Twenty worst," which is the title of a blog post on Making Light; the right of fair comment in a matter of public interest (e.g. consumer protection); the lack of a claim by Bauer's lawyers that anything in the article is factually inaccurate, the fact that one of the things they say the article said was refuted in the article itself; and the lack of evidence that Wikimedia acted with malice, a knowledge that a damaging statement was false, or a reckless disregard for whether it was false or not. I'm not going to go into all this in detail tonight, but I agree with all of this.

I just deleted a further sentence or two. Best not say any more for now.

Karen