today's lesson

today's lesson is that cases aren't won on your skills as an advocate, or on the facts of the case, but on crazy juror bias. but sometimes, they're the kind of crazy that hands you the case. i mean, it's always good to know that justice was done.

today we did our trial ad trial, in a case involving a man who was either involved in a drunk driving accident or who committed suicide; if it was an accident, his widow and four children get the proceeds of his insurance policy; if it was suicide, they live the rest of their lives both destitute and w/o their husband/father. but here's are the facts: (1) five years ago, after he was passed over for a promotion at work, he finished his wife's bottle of valium, at least 12 pills. oh, and after this incident, when he talked about it, he said that he would not kill himself while his wife and kids were in the house. (2) he had been "severely depressed" and refused treatment ever since. (3) the day of his death he was fired from work. (4) right after being fired, he told his friend, with whom he had discussed his insurance policy in the past, that he was worth more dead than alive. oh, and he was a forklift driver with a shitload of insurance. (5) he went out to drink with his friend. he drank a lot. his BAC was .13. (6) the last thing he said before he left the bar, indeed the last words he was ever heard to say were, "say goodbye to the fellas at work for me," even tho his termination was not effective for another 2 weeks. (7) then he speeds up and plows into a tree and dies immediately.

from the very start, i have been ALL ABOUT THE INSURANCE COMPANY'S CASE. it somehow happened that i was assigned to give an opening statement for them, and every time we were assigned a direct or cross of a witness in class, it happeend that i was on the side that would be the insurance company. i mean, THE GUY KILLED HIMSELF! everything says so! it's not completely that i'm one of those people who isn't really swayed by emotion, but by facts, but in this case yes. i mean, ALL THE FACTS SAY THE GUY KILLED HIMSELF! and the widow hyde never spoke to me. not that i think she was a money-grubbing woman who was just out to take the insurance company for everything she could, but somehow, maybe b/c she was completely fictional, i just didn't see her as really sympathetic. of course, the fact that frank hyde was completely fictional didn't keep me from thinking that he was real and getting all worked up about him. i can't explain it.

anyways, when we get paired up for trial and are asked to represent a side, my partner wants to be the widow. and i figure that's fine. for starters, i just back down on things like this. and for seconders, i did know it would be good for me. since i am going to be a terrible lawyer b/c i am no good at arguing the thing i don't believe. seriously, i pick one side and then it is right and that is it. i didn't used to be this way, and the funny thing is that all of the problems they have given us in law school are specifically designed to be 50/50, so that no one side is actually right. and yet, i have always decided that one side is absolutely completely totally unquestionably correct and the other side is morons.

(tho today i was thinking about it and even tho i totally think the insurance company should win, i started to realize that i'm not actually sure they should. that doesn't make any sense, but it's just a preponderance of the evidence and i can't bring myself to think a lot of the things they say which just don't ring at all true to me (like that he had dreamed this whole "accident" scheme up to leave his insurance money to the family) and even tho i think he WOULD kill himself, and even tho i don't really think he was too drunk to drive, or at least not so drunk to explain the scene of the accident, i also don't think that 1.4 seconds really is enough time to do anything when you're plowing into a tree and i couldn't be convinced that there was no way that this wasn't an accident and that this IS him killing himself. so i suppose that i would actually have to find for the plaintiff. even tho the plaintiff's whole case just kills me.)

so today we do our trial and i pretty much sucked and it was painful and their key witness basically tore me apart on cross-examination, tho i would like to say that is not my fault, but it happened and it sucked. AND ALL OF THE FACTS SAY THIS WAS A GUY WHO WOULD KILL HIMSELF! and so on and so forth. so the jury returns a verdict for the widow. among the reasons they listed were the following:

1. cops lie. even unbiased cops. all cops always lie. (ok, so maybe that's an overstatement, but i can't recall what degree she said, and it was clearly overdone.)
2. people with three month old kids don't commit suicide. (i would like to give credit to the girl who pointed out that you don't think that people could kill their 3-month old children either, but they do.)
3. drunk people can't commit suicide.
4. a whole bunch of thoughts on whether or not this guy was drunk, which is exactly what you were supposed to wonder about, only our jurors were high school students, and while i know that high school students drink, many of the things they were talking about were clearly not based on what we had said but on their own thoughts, only their own thoughts were all over the board as to whether or not he was drunk.
5. that even tho you tried to commit suicide five years ago (which most of them agreed to), people change. now, this is all fine and dandy, except that all of the evidence was that this guy had only gotten worse since 5 years ago. and that the blow he had suffered at work the final day was even worse than the one that had caused him to take all the valium.

so maybe i suppose i could say there was something positive about our advocacy b/c i think that we spun some of those things pretty well, but mostly they were voting based on what they would have thought anyways.

but the whole thing was a really good experience and now i've decided i should keep going to school and be a jury consultant b/c i think that would be fun and i would also like to say that these kids really did do a great job of being jurors. they paid way more attention then i would have ever expected and they got really into it and i can't fault them for listening to my tear-inducing closing statement and being swayed. (ok, so my closing kinda blew and the kids actually told us they weren't crazy about how we argued a case.)

at least it's over!

oh, except that now that it's over, it's time for me to start writing my paper. which i am looking even less forward to than my week of 9 hours of class a day and having to stand in front of a room of my peers and try to make intelligent statements.