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Training Prosecutors: It WAS Entertaining

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No, I didn’t get paid to trot downtown and spend 2/3 of a day in a mock jury trial orchestrated to train budding county prosecutors. Did it because an old friend, recent law-school graduate, worker at a grant-funded county project importuned. All volunteer…it was worth it. What a hoot!

So here was the scenario:

Boyfriend and Girlfriend go to a local casino to celebrate Boyfriend’s birthday. They have a nice dinner, imbibulating a few boozies to go with the food. After a couple of hours at the all-you-can-eat chow line, whereat Boyfriend scarfs up more BBQ’ed ribs than a starving African lion could dream of, they move on to the gambling room.

Girlfriend parks herself at a one-armed bandit. Boyfriend goes to the tables to play a game called Show Low, and as the evening and early morning wend on, he’s doing pretty well. He’s about $860 to the good, but more enticing to his feeble brain-pan, he’s now in the running for a chance at a lottery to win an expensive gift, and he’s also in the running to win a Bass boat, something he’s been coveting for quite some time.

She, however, is not faring so well. When she runs out of money, she applies to Boyfriend for a few bucks to continue playing the slots. As part of their live-in arrangement, they share incomes, so she regards this as a request for her own money.

He declines.

She throws a sh!tfit. The decibel level quickly accelerates. Just as quickly, the casino management asks them to depart. The argument moves into the parking lot.

In the ensuing discussion, according to Girlfriend, he throws her to the pavement, kicks her several times in the ribs, gets in his car, and drives away, thereby “abandoning” her in the casino parking lot. (In Arizona, that would be on an Indian rez, a good long distance from wherever the Belagana She and Boyfriend probably live.)

Nine-one-one is called. A cop arrives. As he’s interviewing Girlfriend, Boyfriend weaves his way back into the parking lot, where, despite creeping along at an ultra-cautious 5 mph, he knocks over three parking stanchions and inserts his car into not one but two parking spaces.

Girlfriend, meanwhile, has displayed several bruises to Cop, which she claims to be the outcome of the evening’s quarrel. Cop takes due notice but does not bother to photograph these alleged injuries.

BF staggers over and engages Cop in a quarrel, during which he expresses his suspicion that Cop, whom he calls “Mr. PlasticBadge,” is GF’s new boyfriend. Cop, not surprisingly, arrests the bastard for drunk driving and domestic abuse.

Fake Jury is asked to discern Boyfriend’s guilt in the matters of

a) driving with even a WHIFF of intoxication;
b) driving sh!tfaced (Arizona’s definition of sh!tfaced is a blood alcohol count of .08; Boyfriend’s was .094);
c) domestic violence in the matter of kicking the bedoodles out of the broad after he tossed her on the pavement.

Prosecution and Defense put on spirited cases. Fake Jurors learn a helluvalot about Arizona DUI and domestic abuse laws, after which we are despatched to a room to deliberate.

OK. In Arizona, it’s illegal to drive a vehicle if you’re even slightly impaired. (This would mean if you have the hiccups, to say nothing of having ingested the numerous hard-liquor drinks Girlfriend says Boyfriend consumed.)

In Arizona, it is believed that any blood alcohol count (BAC) over .08 indicates impairment. Boyfriend has registered over .09.

First off, Defense tells us Boyfriend is a Disabled War Hero, having sustained several concussions (six years prior…) and shrapnel to the knee in Iraq. The apparent unsteadiness on his feet and the inability to follow a point back and forth without jerky eye movements are the aftereffects of his war wounds. Next, Defense tries to insinuate that we have no way of knowing whether the crew of scientists who run the BAC tests have f*cked up said tests. Therefore, say they, we have a reasonable doubt.

Prosecution trots in a forensic chemist (called a “criminalist” in the dumbed-down language of the early 21st century) who bowls everyone over with her professionalism and expertise.

Girlfriend weeps on the stand.

Boyfriend,  limping in with a baroquely exaggerated stagger, proclaims his innocence.

All very informative. Soooo…

How do we hold in the matters of

charge 1: driving a vehicle with even a whiff of intoxication;
charge 2: driving a vehicle heavily under the influence;
charge 3: kicking Girlfriend while she was down?

When we went off to confer about this, I was amazed to discover that I was far from alone in thinking Boyfriend was three sheets to the wind when all these shenanigans occurred but that the evidence did not prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that he beat the bejayzus out of Girlfriend, once he had her in the parking lot.

We suspected the bruises could have been sustained earlier. We worried that Cop failed to photograph these wounds. Our suspicions were aggravated because Girlfriend didn’t go to an ER to see whether she had any broken ribs or internal injuries. Several of the younger members of the Fake Jury noted that casinos have video cameras coming out the ying-yang, and that Prosecution was remiss in not at least subpoenaing videos of the quarrel inside the building, to say nothing of the probable videos of whatever went on in the parking lot.

Verdicts:

Guilty on counts 1 and 2, DUI
Not Guilty on count 3, domestic abuse.

Here are a few things I learned:

• Police reports are not admissible as evidence. When an officer reports that X person said yyy, that is regarded as hearsay and is not admissible. Only what the officer actually saw and could measure on the scene is admissible.

• Imagining a police officer should document wounds from an alleged domestic violence incident with photographs comes under the heading of “CSI syndrome.” Lawyers should try to elicit these tendencies from prospective jurors and disqualify people who expect concrete documentation of violence.

• Even if you’re far from sh!t-faced, you can be convicted of DUI. Arizona, for example, makes it a felony to be driving to any degree impaired.

• A good lawyer can put on one helluva show.

Training Prosecutors…This Could Be Entertaining

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Today I’m supposed to perform as a “juror” for mock trials used to train brand-new county prosecutors. It should be pretty entertaining…

One of my former assistant editors at the Great Desert University, a young woman who at the time of the Great Layoff had  just completed a master of fine arts in writing as well as the graduate certificate in scholarly publishing, used the period of the Recession-That-Was-Not-a-Depression to go through law school. She recently finished, and while waiting for admission to the state bar is working for this grant-funded training program. She e-mailed a couple of days ago frantically seeking volunteers for today’s mock trials.

LOL! Apparently it didn’t occur to them that most folks have jobs, and even those who can spend a day at the courthouse on Friday are inclined to regard jury duty as an onerous task and imposition, not the privilege of a free people.

Have to be at the courthouse door at 8:00 a.m.  So, to race around…

Image: Bulloch County courthouse, Statesboro, Georgia. Richardeleanechambers at the English Language Wikipedia. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Gimme that old-time household junk…

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flyswatterHave you tried to buy a fly swatter lately? I mean, a real, old-fashioned screen-type fly swatter, not a piece of plastic that falls apart the first time you whack it against a counter, not an electronic gadget ironically tricked out to look like a tennis racket. You can order one at Amazon, o’course (that place is as good as The Country Store for carrying seldom-seen products of yore) — but only, we’re told, because it’s been made possible by the “Add-on program.” The Country Store, BTW, does not feature fly swatters in its online catalog.

Neither, in their brick-&-mortar incarnations, do Target, Walgreen’s, Safeway, Fry’s, or Albertson’s…least not so’s I can tell.

Nor do they sell a real, honest-to-God whisk broom, or a true dust-pan broom of the sort that actually picks up debris and is large enough to matter. Or a true, really tough scrub brush. Yeah, they have some stupid little brooms and brushes: flimsy imitations made with fake fibers that don’t have anything like enough substance to do the job.

flyswatter2Comes the Crate and Barrel catalog in the mail, and lo! They have exactly these items — real brushes and a strange little fly swatter that probably will do the job better than plastic and may work as well as a real one. They’re only available online, although you can call an 800 number and order through an actual human being. Through May 19, they’re offering a free shipping promotion.

Apparently this new department is meant to compete with Restoration Hardware, which, last time I was in one of those stores, no longer offers many of the dozens of extremely cool “hardware” items RH used to sell. All my fault, no doubt, for rarely ever buying the stuff: Restoration Hardware prices were out of my league, even back when I had a decent job. RH still offers some of those things online, but…well. A dustpan brush similar to Crate & Barrel’s $14.95 number goes for an amazing $38…and that’s with the 20% discount presently in place. The actual price is $45!!

Presumably it’s meant as a decorator item, something you hang on the wall in the kitchen to evoke homey days of old. You sure wouldn’t want to damage a $45 dust brush by actually using it.

Annoying, to have to pay ultra-premium prices for what used to be (and still ought to be) the most ordinary household products, available at every corner dime store. Well, I’m glad to see at least of few of them coming back, although it would be better still to find them widely and at more accessible retailers. Crate & Barrel is not only underpricing Restoration Hardware, its $9.95 price (!) for the fly swatter beats the $12 plus shipping at something called Nessentials.

When did the banal become the effete?

duspan

 

Preparing for Emergencies: Small, Big, or Catastrophic

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Summer is y-cumen in, and with it, presumably more catastrophic storms in the South and the Midwest and more catastrophic wildfires in the West. Most of us probably have thought about and made some at least cursory preparations for in acute emergency, such as a house fire, a power outage of a couple of days, or a temporary evacuation. For an event like that, it’s wise to have a “go bag,” holding important papers and identification, a credit card and some cash, prescription drugs, and maybe a pistol and ammunition. But have you thought about how you and your family would cope with a truly catastrophic, long-term emergency?

Several scenarios, some less unlikely than others, could wreak some very serious havoc and, over time, pose an extreme threat to individual safety. For example, a month or so ago the New York Times ran a report about the monster solar storm that occurred in 1859 and pointed out that if such an event occurred in the 21st century, it could take down a developed country’s electrical grid. Recovery could take anywhere from a week to several years. An ill-timed coronal mass ejection, known as a Carrington event, is thought not to be a “maybe” occurrence but a “sooner or later” one. John Kappenman, an expert on the effect of solar storms on utilities, says utilities will suffer severe damage to expensive transformers and other key components, resulting in outages that could last for months. “Think of Sandy magnified by a hundredfold,” he suggests.

We’ve already seen what Hurricane Sandy did. Many people are still out of their homes, and it remains to be seen whether the damaged development will be — or even should be — rebuilt.

Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, causing the worst engineering disaster in the history of the U.S. and leading to civil disturbances, breakdown of civil order, mass evacuations, and extreme threats to public health and safety.

Long-term drought and heat have brought catastrophic wildfires into cities such as Colorado Springs, Los Angeles, and and Oakland. Wildfire seasons seem to start earlier and be more intense each year. To those of us who believe in science, it’s pretty clear these are not flukes but events we can expect to see occurring with increasing frequency and severity. But even if you’re a climate-change denier, it’s impossible to overlook the fact that massive, catastrophic climate events have occurred in the past — one of them admirably chronicled by Ken Burns for PBS.

Be that as it may, we don’t need Mother Nature to cause trouble for us: we can do a pretty good job of that ourselves. A recent report from the National Academy of Sciences points out that a well organized and well timed terrorist attack on the power grid would cause cascading outages across North America that could take weeks or months to repair. Nor would a series of bombs be required to take down the power grid: a smart hacker could accomplish the same from the comfort of a desk chair. It is believed that countries unfriendly to the U.S. are already at work on building such a capability.

Consider what would happen if we had little or no electric power for an extended period.

We have, of course, the obvious issues: large parts of the American Southwest are habitable during the summer only by dint of air conditioning. The reverse is true in the upper Midwest and the North Atlantic states: people survive the winters because their homes are heated by electricity or by fuels that require electric power to produce and dispense them. Hospitals need electric power to keep patients alive. Airplane, automobile, and train traffic is made possible to a large extent by electric power. The vast computer system on which our commerce system depends runs on electricity. Even laptops and cell phones have to be recharged occasionally.

On an individual level, the ramifications are huge.

• You couldn’t refuel your car — gas pumps run on electricity, too.
• Most retailers couldn’t sell food, medications, or repair supplies to you: their computerized cash registers require electricity to operate.
• Electric stoves wouldn’t work, so if yours is one of those elegant glass-top stoves, you couldn’t cook food or sterilize water.
• Modern gas stoves, which have no pilot lights, also need electricity to run safely or, for many models, to operate at all.
• Not that you’d have food for long: whatever is in your freezer and refrigerator would spoil within hours or days.
• Without diesel or gasoline to power trucks, many parts of the country would quickly see food shortages.
• Absent air-conditioning or heating, the elderly and small children would be at great risk. In the event of an outage that extended weeks or months, people would die.
• Hospital emergency rooms would be available only for the most dire cases; obtaining medical care would be difficult or impossible.
• As conditions deteriorated, some of our honored neighbors would run amok, looting, robbing, and rampaging  with little to stop them. The difficulty of maintaining civil order in a large city would make conditions extremely dangerous for everyone.

So…even if you’re not washed out of your home by a flood, blown away by high winds, buried under earthquake debris, burned out by wildfire, or suffocated in dust storms, some very alarming scenarios are not only possible but even, to a degree, likely. It’s worth considering how you can be prepared for events ranging from short-term emergencies to catastrophic events that could disrupt commerce and services for days, weeks, or months.

Even a passing emergency could require you to evacuate your home. Your absence might be brief, or it could extend for quite some time. At a bare minimum, you should always have an emergency kit in your car. This should contain items such as these:

• water (at least a gallon per person)
• space blanket(s)
• towel
• toilet paper
• flashlight
• battery-operated lamp
• fresh batteries to operate these tools
• iodine pills or a water filter, or both
• first-aid kit
• jackknife
• matches/butane lighters
• rope
• twine
• jumper cables

Stored in a safe and accessible place in the house, you should have a grab-and-go kit containing certain key items; for example:

• important papers
• government-issued identification
• pictures you would like not to lose
• cash
• credit card
• prescription drugs
• a pistol & ammunition (assuming you know how to use a gun safely)

You should never have to make a mad dash for these things. Here, for example, we have a reporter describing just such a frantic search. You shouldn’t be running around trying to grab things as a wildfire is bearing down on you or floodwaters are climbing the front steps. Anything that you absolutely have to take should already be packed, preferably in a locked metal box.

Your gas tank should always be pretty close to full. Some people store gasoline in a safe place on their property; keep gas cans full and away from sources of ignition.

In case of a protracted evacuation, you might also want to store some gear that can quickly be packed in your car. This might include a full set of camping gear — if your car isn’t large enough for you and your partner or your family to sleep in, it would be wise to store a tent near the vehicle. In addition to the items listed for your emergency kit and your grab-and-go bag, you would need supplies like these:

• camp stove and propane
• lighter or store of matches in a waterproof container
• lightweight camping dishes & cookware
• knives, spoons, forks
• drinking vessels
• can opener
• rope
• twine
• soap
• detergent (liquid) for washing dishes and hair
• toilet paper
• towel(s)
• toothbrushes
• aspirin
• antacids
• anti-diarrheal agent such as Imodium or Pepto-Bismol
• sleeping bags or blankets
• jackets
• rainwear
• hats
• day packs
• camping food
• pet food, packed & ready to go
• pet dishes
• medications for pets, if any
• collars and leashes for pets (take steps in advance to deal with pets during an emergency)
• evidence of dogs’ immunization
• if you carry a gun, extra ammunition

If, on the other hand, you did not have to evacuate but instead faced lengthy power or water outages or had to “shelter in place,” as the new turn of phrase has it, you would want to have your home supplied for a period of self-sufficiency. It would be good at least to have staple foods and various tools and supplies in place.

• rice, beans, canned foods
• flour and bread-baking ingredients
• extra pet food
• propane
• propane grill, camp stove, or both
• crank or battery-operated radio
• battery-run lamp
• extra batteries
• bottled water in carboys
• barterable items, such as cigarettes, ammunition, alcohol, and the like
• pistol or shotgun, with appropriate ammunition
• gasoline, safely stored
• extensive first-aid kit
• supply of prescriptions
• OTC pain-killers
• OTC cough, cold, and allergy medications
• a land-line phone — not one that operates on cable, which requires electric power
• generator (either a small one or a whole-house system)
• fuel to operate the generator
• functional vegetable garden
• if you have a large enough yard: chicken coop & hens
• iodine pills, a water filter, or both
• a supply of cash — at least $1,000 stashed in a safe place (check your homeowner’s insurance: many policies provide coverage for up to $1,000 of cash)
• tools such as a hammer, screwdrivers, saw, hatchet, wrench, box-knife, and shovel
• fire extinguisher

If you have a camper or an RV, remember that some such vehicles have a propane fridge, stove and even a generator, all of which could come in handy. Be sure to have enough fuel on hand to run the RV’s features.

These are not exhaustive lists. But at least they should give you a start on thinking about emergency preparedness. With the three-pronged threats of extreme weather events, hacking, and terrorism now part of our reality, we all should have an escape plan and a stay-at-home survival plan that will tide us over for several weeks.

School’s Out!

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Yay! Another class down — just filed grades for the ten magazine-writing students who survived to the end of the semester.

That’s the highest survival rate I’ve seen since I started teaching these online courses — ten of the original twenty made it all the way through eight long weeks. And that, interestingly is pretty good for a community college course, especially one that’s mounted online.

Why? I mean, why would so many last, not why do so many drop. Community college students have so many headaches, problems, and challenges that at any give time in their lives they have to make choices, and when they get overwhelmed one of the easiest choices is to drop a course. I attribute it to the change from Blackboard to the new Canvas online courseware. It is so much less bloated than Blackboard and so much easier to use, I expect students found it far less onerous to figure out and navigate.

Every bit as much less onerous than I did, as a matter of fact. Once the course materials were online, running the course was ridiculously easy. This was the first time I’ve felt that $2400 was fair pay for a Heavenly Gardens course.

Interestingly, too, the grade curve came out looking more normal. Usually at the end of the semester my magazine-writing students have either As and Bs or Fs, with little or nothing in between. This term I entered 2 As, 4 Bs, 3 Cs, and 1 D.  And that, I expect, can be attributed to the relatively high survival rate — in the past, only the most determined and competent students have made it to the end of the term. If these students hung in there because simply navigating the course was pretty simple, that would mean more C-level students would have lasted.

Next semester instead of asking them to get all the course ground rules by reading the syllabus — something many of them evidently can’t do — I’m going to add a video in which I go over all the high points and show them how to find the materials on-screen and also where to submit papers.

Astonishingly, Canvas didn’t go down once. Not a single glitch made it impossible for classmates to find course materials or file assignments. Based on past experience with Blackboard, which always crashes at the worst possible moment, I had asked them to e-mail papers to me. That, of course, is a hassle, for them as well as for me. Several classmates quickly figured out how to submit their papers through Canvas, making it extremely easy to access, grade, and return the stuff. So, next semester turning in papers on Canvas will be required.

The community college district sent out a notice that they’re cutting part-timers’ hours so as to avoid having to provide health insurance for adjuncts. Instead of seven courses a year, you can now teach only six. They plead poverty. That’s ridiculous, of course: the district rakes in millions of dollars in tuition, grants, and taxes, and is about to raise our property taxes again. The real reason is right-wing dominance in county government, which, like the state and most city governments here, is run by the kookocracy. They hate Obama and hate anything even moderately progressive, so they’re sinking their heels in the sand in an attempt to sabotage the Affordable Health Care Act.

Doesn’t apply to me, thank God, since I quit teaching freshman comp. But it will harm every adjunct who’s trying to scrabble together a living while pursuing the faint hope of a full-time position, and of course it will harm the hoards of part-time clerical, customer service, and admin staff the district hires.

I probably should try to pick up an online course at the Great Desert University. GDU pays adjuncts a munificent $3300 per semester (oooooohhh! $206.25 a week!!) for adjuncts with the Ph.D. But GDU still uses Blackboard — decidedly, it is not worth struggling with Blackboard for $206. And there’s no way I’m going into a face-to-face classroom again. It’s just too stressful and too dangerous.

Moment of Fame: This week’s Carnival of Personal Finance appears at Wealth Pilgrim. Proprietor Neal Frankle included the rumination in which I decided to keep the Dog Chariot.

Link-O-Rama: First Friday Edition

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Great weekend under way! My friend Carol discovered a FREE First Friday concert last night, presented by the Arizona State University music department. So we raced downtown as soon as we could escape from our respective clients. Grabbed dinner in a cool little bistro/bar (more bar than bistro, I think, tho’ the food was excellent) and then flew into the concert just as they were about to start. They were incredibly good, and the thing we really loved about it was how eclectic it was — music from the 1700s to just yesterday — two of the pieces were composed by young men who were sitting there in the hall.

Gorgeous evening. Weather was beautiful and we had a fine time. Spring is now in its “late” phase here, as in it would be your basic summer anywhere else in the world. This afternoon I was able to get into the pool and swim about a half-hour or forty-five minutes, making up for the many hikes and bike rides I’ve failed to take over the past week or ten days.

Around the Internet, all sorts of cool things are going on. I ran across something called called Longreads.com, an extremely neat site that aggregates articles with — if can imagine! — actual substance. If you enjoy reading something you can really wrap your mind around, check it out.

In the rich get richer department, I’m sure most of us have already gotten wind of the most recent clues to the demise of the middle class.  Here’s the report from the proverbial horse’s mouth, and an interesting tabulation of related data at the Washington Post.

Since we’re all going to be doing menial work for a living, we might as well know the secret to getting rid of toilet stains, revealed (where else?) at Lifehacker.

And in the don’t worry, be happy department, Wired posts an entertainment about Google Glass.

The semester is finally winding up, and now so I can tell you about one of my (fully adult! not a kid!) students’ blogs. In a recent post she shares an discovery she and a few others have made about a possible cause for childhood eczema. And as a matter of fact, a couple of experiences I had when M’hijito was little tend to back up this theory.

At My Journey to Millions, Evan contemplates an amazing idea: start your own family credit union! Apparently this scheme is not beyond the means of any reasonably affluent group with something in common: check out the how-to at NCUA.

Romance is in the air at A Gai Shan Life, where Revanche reminisces about the first six months of a certain relationship, in New Zealand, where eemuse is about to tie the knot, and at I Pick Up Pennies, where Abby & Tim  celebrate their 5th anniversary with a mini-honeymoon.

Crystal offers an incredibly easy and delicious-looking recipe, complete with photos, for scalloped potatoes. Yum!

Mrs. Accountability relates a jaw-dropping tale of a young mother who contrives to get food stamps despite earning a decent living and living, all things considered, fairly high off the hog.

Donna Freedman celebrates her fourth blogiversary with links to great past posts at Surviving and Thriving and elsewhere.

I don’t remember if I linked to this April 24 post at Money Beagle; if not, you should read it because it’s it’s very funny; if so, more comments accrued–worth revisiting While you’re there, check out today’s to-do list for balanced living.

Paula at Afford Anything debunks an old chestnut, to entertaining effect.

At Planting Our Pennies, Mrs. PoP posts the April balance sheet, complete with cool graphs. As she says, you can generate reports like this at Mint; and you also can do it in Excel, with a little formula manipulation.

Over at Frugal Scholar, once again Blogger won’t let me sign in to add a comment to FS’s interesting post on the nature of innumeracy and the idiocy of students’ perceptions of grade scores. Today it demands either that I establish a Google+ profile (no, thank you) or that I create a Blogger site (why?). The comment I craved to post:

Not surprising. One thing I learned is that attaching numeric values to rubric items to come up with a total point value equivalent to a grade on a paper quashes complaints that one’s grading is “subjective,” even though you use the exact same rubric standards as you do for letter grades. To some people, numbers hold forth the promise of cosmic truth. Hence, I suppose, numerology…

I personally am innumerate. I cannot and never have been able to do arithmetic competently, because I simply can NOT keep the “math facts” in my brain. I do well at algebra (for example), because it’s about logic, not about regurgitating numerals. But anything that has numbers in it just flummoxes me.

 Recently, after only 66 years on this earth, I learned that this is a congenital condition related to a genetic flaw that caused a type of (allegedly) benign tumor called a “neurofibroma” to arise on one shoulder. As it develops, people who have this hereditary ailment often suffer from dyscalculia.

 I was lucky a) that the condition isn’t worse and did not manifest itself in infancy (it can lead to serious mental handicaps); b) that I was born to a navigator who could teach me how to use a slide rule when I was in grade school; c) that someone invented the calculator not long after that; and d) that Excel or Numbers is available on every computer in creation.

Whatever the causes, discovering a biological reason for the seeming obtuseness has given me a lot more empathy with students who can’t write a literate sentence to save their lives.

Frugal Scholar will be gratified by Free Money Finance’s latest spin on decisions related to selecting a college, and especially on the “any college they want” parental ambition.

And finally, in the WTF!!! department, don’t miss this astonishing report at the Volokh Conspiracy.