A Jury of His Pears
No, that’s not a typo in the title. I’m paying homage to the Fresno Bee’s latest story about “juror misconduct.”
Frankly, I’m grateful that Pablo Lopez is a Fresno Bee reporter, and not a judge, lawyer, or juror on any of the cases about which he reports.
Judge Oppliger: Living the Nightmare
I struggled, picking the title for this article, briefly considering “Much Ado About Nothing.” Then I decided to play off a quote from the story itself.
But before I start, I want to offer a shout-out to a new blogger. So far as I know, he becomes the second law-focused blogger (after me) in Fresno. (If anyone knows others, drop me their info and I may add them to my list.) Terry stopped me on the way out of court today, although he got my name slightly wrong: he called me “Blogmeister.” He said he wanted to start a blog, but wasn’t sure what to write about. We talked awhile and I gave him a suggestion, saying I was planning to write about it also, and encouraged him to join the party. Here’s the post he wrote after we talked.
Welcome, Terry!
With that out of the way, what follows is my riff on the story.
Slashbucklers
Recently, the Fresno Bee reported that the “S.F. crime lab [was] overwhelmed.” (Terry Collins, “S.F. Crime lab overwhelmed” (March 31, 2010) Fresno Bee, p. A9.) The link, by the way, provides the same story as the print version, but dated a day earlier and with a different title.
A couple of days ago, the Visalia Times-Delta, which is apparently a newspaper intended as a local daily equivalent to the National Enquirer, or some other piece-of-crap rag, trumpeted the complaint that a new “[l]aw frees some violent inmates.” Of course, you can’t completely blame the Times-Delta for the sensationalism on this story: it’s a slight modification of the headline accompanying the online version of the yellow journalism of the AP story. Like the Bee story, by the way, the online AP story is dated one day earlier than the print version.
Both stories demonstrate the effects of budgetary meltdown; both hint, at least inchoately, at the cause: too many crimes (thus too many criminals) and all our money is being spent on prisons instead of providing education so people will be less likely to commit these crimes. This is a non-sustainable path to anyone’s idea of a better society. We simply cannot keep building and staffing prisons, no matter how badly we want to create new jobs.
The big problem is that the Slashbucklers, who aim to deal with the problem by increasing spending on law enforcement, crime labs and prisons (but not lawyers for the indigent or more judges) instead of schools and other “social” programs, are only going to make it worse. Inevitably — and this is why I’m calling them Slashbucklers — they will bring all our systems crashing down.