FAQ: Why Bother With a Trial, Anyway?

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[NOTE: As this column was going to press, the jury came back with a verdict of guilty to second-degree murder. Robert Stewart was sentenced to a minimum of 142 years in prison--effectively a life sentence without parole. More thoughts on this next week.]

As of this writing, the trial of Robert Stewart for killing eight people and wounding Michael Cotten and police officer Justin Garner at the Pinelake Nursing Center in Carthage is about to go into closing arguments.

By the time you read this, the jury will likely be in deliberations. Or they may already have reached a verdict.

I don't comment often about local trials. The reason for this is simple: They're not my cases. As I pointed out a few weeks ago in reference to the Casey Anthony trial, unless you're really involved in a trial, on a day-to-day basis, seeing what the jury sees and being excluded from the stuff they don't, it's hard to comment on them with any degree of real authority (although there are plenty of people who pretend to that authority).

The Stewart trial, however, is inescapable, and if you're in the legal business around here, so are the questions from a concerned, occasionally annoyed, and once in a while downright cranky public. While I'm not going to comment upon specifics, there are some frequently asked questions that I can answer, just from a general knowledge of how things work.

The question I see and hear most often is this: "Why do we even have to have a trial? Why are we paying lawyers to defend him? Everyone knows he did it!" The answer is simple: because the U.S. Constitution says so.

The Sixth Amendment reads: "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed ... to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence."

That's in all, repeat all, criminal prosecutions. There's no exception for "really bad crimes" or for defendants who "everyone knows" are guilty. All means all.

Which leads us to the next question: "Why doesn't Stewart just agree to take life without parole?" Yes, I have actually seen this question raised. Friends, I haven't discussed the matter with Mr. Stewart's attorneys, much less with Mr. Stewart, but I would imagine they would take a plea to life without parole in a hot second - if it were offered.

But, like the tango, it takes two to plead, and I haven't heard even a shadow of a whisper of a suggestion that such a plea was even being considered.

Well, you may ask next, why not? Why won't the state just offer life and get this over with?

There are a number of factors that go into the decision by the state whether or not to seek the death penalty and whether or not to consider backing off it. The strength of the particular case is one. The potential public backlash from pleading out a high-profile, emotionally charged case is another. A huge factor is always the wishes of the families of the victims.

But why does it have to take so dadgum long? Believe me, as one of the many folks who have had to navigate around enhanced courthouse security and the courtroom shortage created by this trial, I've asked the same question.

But remember: This is a death penalty case. It's going to be examined and re-examined and re-re-examined by courts, probably all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. Neither side's going to cut corners here to save time.

There's also a concept that comes into play called "harmless error." This is a phrase that crops up in some appeals court decisions in which the court concedes that yeah, maybe the trial judge made a mistake in letting in a piece of evidence or some error of law, but they're going to let the conviction stand because "the other evidence of guilt was so overwhelming that this error was harmless."

As for the defense - again, it's a death case. So neither side, prosecution or defense, is going to leave any horses in the barn.

I'm not going to get into a discussion pro or con about the death penalty here, because, let's face it, no one's opinion ever changes on that. But I'll say this, because it's the answer to a lot of questions about this and other trials: If the state's going to take someone's life for breaking the law, then they need to do it according to law.

Otherwise, we're just a well-dressed lynch mob.

Jon Hunstman: Dead Man Walking

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"To be clear. I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy." In a sane world, this sort of pronouncement wouldn't be necessary. In a sane political party, it wouldn't be an item of controversy.

But we don't live in a sane world, and Jon Huntsman, who expressed those sentiments a couple of weeks ago via Twitter, doesn't belong to a sane political party. He's running for the GOP presidential nomination, a race in which being a member of the reality-based community is an actual handicap.

You know, if he had a chance of getting the nomination, Barack Obama might have something to worry about in Jon Huntsman. He's smart, articulate and fiscally conservative, and he's got some serious credentials, as well as good hair. Not as good as Romney's, but still very presidential hair.

He's also worked in the Obama administration as ambassador to China, which would certainly cut the legs out from under any attempt by the president to attack Huntsman's judgment and/or character. ("Well, Mr. President, if he's that much of a boob, why'd you hire him?")

Fortunately for the president, however, Huntsman is far too rational for the Teahadist fanatics who can be counted upon to swarm the early primaries. They don't want to hear anything about no fancy science stuff or any of that "bipartisanship." They'd rather chow down on the sort of red meat served up all fresh and bloody by demagogues like Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann.

In an interview with ABC's Jake Tapper, Huntsman stated that he didn't think that calling Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke "traitorous" made Perry sound "serious" on the issues. In the same interview, Huntsman also criticized Bachmann and other wingnuts for their willingness to allow this country to default on its debts.

Huntsman was, on both counts, completely correct. He is, therefore, completely doomed.

I mean, really. Trust scientists? Why should we, as good Americans, give any credibility at all to people who actually make a career out of studying an issue, like the 98 percent of the scientists actually working in the field of climate science who believe in man-made climate change?

 Why believe in the clear empirical evidence, including striking photo after striking photo of glaciers and icecaps retreating?

In the words of the guy who got caught in bed with another woman by his wife: "Who you gonna believe, honey, me or your lyin' eyes?"

Trying to reverse or even slow down the clear damage being done to the environment would be hard. It might be expensive. It might even, horror of horrors, cut into the profits of the oil companies, reducing said profits from "totally inconceivable by the brain of man" to merely "mind-boggling."

Why go through all that when you can just wave a hand, say a few magic words ("Al Gore owns a big house!" or "It snowed last winter!"), and make all those uncomfortable facts disappear from the minds of your loyal followers so they'll pose no threat to your corporate donors?

Or, if you're a Texas-size con man like Rick Perry, you can just make stuff up, like his claim that a "substantial number of scientists" were found to have been "manipulating their data." The truth is, a half-dozen scientists were accused, based on eight emails hacked and stolen from their computers. There were five separate investigations. All found no evidence of wrongdoing or data manipulation.

You can look it up. But why would any Republican candidate bother to do that? The truth doesn't set you free in the GOP, unless what you want to be free from is any chance of surviving Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

Mitt Romney certainly saw the writing on the wall. After saying back in June when he announced his candidacy that he favored reduction of "greenhouse gases that might be significant contributors" to climate change, Mitt saw Rick Perry take the lead and did one of those deft backflips for which he is so justly famed. He now says he's an agnostic on the matter:

"Do I think the world's getting hotter? Yeah, I don't know that, but I think that it is," he said. "I don't know if it's mostly caused by humans. What I'm not willing to do is spend trillions of dollars on something I don't know the answer to."

Jon Huntsman is a sane, reasonable moderate who believes in science. Which is why he's a dead man walking in the GOP. And that's why President Obama, for all his faults, is going to win a second term.

Local Idiot: Tax The Poor!

In a letter entitled Rhoades At It Again in The Pilot (where my weekly column appears), local idiot Jack Jakucyk once again raises that old discredited argument that it's not the rich, but the poor who aren't paying their fair share. In reference to this column, he starts off with the name-calling right wingers claim to despise, unless they're engaging in it:

Dusty, with his degree from the Karl Marx School of Economics, suggests that the rich not only don’t create jobs, they also don’t pay their “fair share” of taxes.

Then he goes on to parrot one of the more egregiously stupid arguments of the American Right:

At the other end of the spectrum, the bottom half (71 million returns) contributed only 3 percent of total tax revenues. And 51.8 million of the 142 million returns from your fellow Americans had no income tax liabilities due to deductions, tax credits, etc. This may seem counterintuitive, but I wonder if it’s a good thing for our society when half the population pays essentially no taxes. They have no dog in the fight. But Dusty Rhoades is on their side.

They don't pay taxes because they're poor, doofus. It's the old "lucky duckies" argument that was so roundly mocked when the WSJ first floated it. Take, for example, this article by Noble Prize laureate Paul Krugman which points out that:

The Journal considers a hypothetical ducky who earns only $12,000 a year ? some guys have all the luck! ? and therefore, according to the editorial, "pays a little less than 4% of income in taxes." Not surprisingly, that statement is a deliberate misrepresentation; the calculation refers only to income taxes. If you include payroll and sales taxes, a worker earning $12,000 probably pays well over 20 percent of income in taxes. But who's counting?

Or then there's Reuben Bolling, who brilliantly skewered the whole idea with his character "Lucky Ducky":

It's such a persistent fallacy of the Right that I thought it merited being addressed for a wider audience.

Just keep in mind, every time someone raises this claptrap about how "some people at the bottom don't pay any taxes, and that's not fair" that:

(a) it's a deliberate misrepresentation; and
(b) what they're really demanding is more taxes on the poor.

As Jonathan Chait wrote:
One of the things that has fascinated me about The Wall Street Journal editorial page is its occasional capacity to rise above the routine moral callousness of hack conservative punditry and attain a level of exquisite depravity normally reserved for villains in James Bond movies.

So I guess we we can say that Mr. Jakucyk studied at the Blofeld School of Economics.

Oh, and he conveniently fails to address the statistics showing that tax rates don't affect job creation. Wonder why that is? Maybe because he can't...Fox News hasn't  told him how. 

NRO Columnist Takes Issue With the President's Reading Choices, Makes Self Look Like Complete Idiot

National Review Online apparently needed to fill some column space and was running out of things to complain about in regard to Barack Obama. So they applied a scraper to the bottom of the barrel and came up with some dripping clump of ooze by the name of Tevi Troy, who's got his right wing panties in a bunch over--get this-- the books the President brought with him on vacation.

First, five of the six are novels, and the near-absence of nonfiction sends the wrong message for any president, because it sets him up for the charge that he is out of touch with reality.

And:

Beyond the issue of fiction vs. nonfiction, there is also the question of genre. The Bayou Trilogy [by Daniel Woodrell of Winter's Bone fame]  has received excellent reviews, but it is a mystery series. While there is nothing wrong with that per se, not every presidential reading selection is worth revealing to the public....Room is another well-received novel, but it is about a mother and child trapped in an 11-by-11-foot room. This claustrophobic adventure does not strike me as the right choice for someone trying to escape the perception that he is trapped in a White House bubble....

This year’s list suggests that Obama needs to consider the messages sent by his reading more carefully. According to Mickey Kaus, the Obama list is “heavy on the wrenching stories of immigrant experiences, something the President already knows quite a bit about.” For this reason, Kaus feels that the list reveals an intellectually incurious president. Either that, or it is “a bit of politicized PR BS designed to help the President out.” In that case, he notes, “it’s sending the wrong message.” Either way, the annual book list should be a relatively easy way to make the president appear to be on top of things and in control. This year’s list, alas, reveals a president who appears to be neither.

Words fail me.

Oh, wait, no they don't.

Are you KIDDING ME?  Is there literally nothing these people  will not bitch about? JFK read James Bond novels and helped launch Ian Fleming from a writer with  middling sales to an icon. St Ronnie Reagan read The Hunt for Red October and did the same for Tom Clancy. But Barack Obama reads Daniel Woodrell and this somehow shows he's not "on top of things or in control?"

Maybe somebody should remind this  "Tevi Troy" person that the founder of the print version of National Review, William F. Buckley, also wrote genre fiction, namely eleven spy novels. Pretty good ones, too, at least judging from the couple I've read. But then, this so-called "senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a former senior White House aide" probably never actually read Buckley, a true conservative whose shoes the current Klown Kollege at the NRO is not worthy to shine. Buckley's  probably spinning like a dynamo in his grave with the way these morons have defiled the name of conservatism. It used to be a political philosophy;  now it's nothing more than a reflex, an immediate rush to yell "foul" about anything the Democratic President does, no matter how trivial. The people at the NRO specialize in this sort of smallness, silliness and pettiness, and they make the entire movement look even more  ridiculous than Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin combined could do, and brother, that is saying something.

Satire Just Can't Keep Up, Again

Me, August 21st: 

It looks like it’s going to be another election filled with nonstories about whether the candidate’s tie or his lunch or his choice of hobbies makes him think he’s better than you, along with celebrations of some random ignoramus like Joe-Not-Really-the-Plumber.

Wonkette, August 25th:

Joe Wurzelbacher, better known as Joe the Plumber, is considering a run against U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur in 2012, according to Republican Party sources.

Jon Stainbrook, chairman of the Lucas County Republican Party, said there is “high-level interest in the national Republican Party” in a potential Wurzelbacher candidacy.
“We are encouraging Joe to run,” Mr. Stainbrook said. “He hasn’t made any official decision yet.”

 Not only can you not fix stupid, as Ron White said, you can't stay ahead of it.


Of course, God would have to change His mind for Joe to run.

Today's Awesome Advice

From Chuck Wendig, 25 Things Writers Should Know About Social Media, at his great blog Terrible Minds.

"People want to follow other people. People don’t want to follow brands."

"Talk to people, and try not to be a dick."

"Be an escort, not a whore."

Best advice I can give you is, check it out. Wendig speaks truth.