LOL! Depends on whether I’m on my early “face-down with a thunk” schedule or the late one..

FWIW I was metaphorically referring to the entropic decay of society as represented by Zane’s escaping Dragons.

(However I’ve been known to see REAL Dragons cavorting around after liberal administrations of various mixtures of certain congers. It’s the congers man, it’s the residual congers dancing around that’ll do ya in the next day–although I’ve also known certain “Cougars” that”ll give you a run for your money on that score as well… )

Jury Selection is a strange beast. The jury I was on acquitted the defendant – the Policeman changed his story between times he was in the witness chair. It took less than 5 minutes to return the verdict.

I was still in the pool when the same defense attorney had a case, and he threw me out the next time. I saw him later at the post office and asked how the case turned out. He said he got whipped, and I told him he shouldn’t have thrown me out. We both laughed at that one.

Civil case are a different world. I think much of it is a case of putting the screws to business. Most people haven’t really been screwed, they just didn’t like the rules both have to abide by and blame the business man for it. It’s a shame, but they are cutting their noses off to spite their face as it’s going to come back and haunt them. The they’ll whine about the consequences. I’m sure there will be people who will tell them “I told you so,” but they won’t want to hear because they would have to acknowledge responsibility for their idiocy.

That was the reason the Greeks believed that one could not support a viable democracy in a city much over 50,000 in pop. That the civic culture which bound everyone in a like-minded enterprise was dissipated once populations grew larger. And further, their view of juries was the polar opposite of ours as their was a system of direct–as opposed to representative–democracy. As such, they believed that ALL the evidence–hearsay, rumor, innuendo, etc., would be allowed as it would be in the juries mind anyway as the concept of the “blank-slate” citizen so divorced from the daily warp and woof of the life of the community was totally unthinkable–unlike our concept in which information is selectively fed to juries thru a complex “rules of evidence” which screens out rumor, hearsay, etc. so as to concentrate the juror’s minds on only a highly selective set of “facts.”

The Greeks, I am sure, would consider our system unrealistic insofar as those un-admitted facts are swirling around there anyway on the outside of the courtroom and ever-present in the juror’s mind anyway–unless the “citizens’ are so detached from reality as to be the sort of blank slate (in every sense of the term) that was the case in the North trial–in which case I’m sure the Hellenistic Greeks would say the whole enterprise is at that point a lost cause anyway…

The Best/

Virgil

(Just sittin’ here watching the Dragons roam…..)

They used to be all of a kin–own property, pay taxes on the property, be responsible for family and schooling of children, thus a voter, hence a citizen of the district who had an interest in upholding the law. The anti-Federalists warned that Madison’s vision wouldn’t hold, and that democracies couldn’t survive in other than small, relatively insular communities. Madison trumped them in the short run (and created the longest suriviving democratic republic in history), but the dragons are escaping.