Newscoma

Now for some rural media stuff that you probably don’t care about but I’m going to write about anyway.

I spent the day with Scout at a trial in our home courthouse. The trial was your average Meth Gone Amock sort of thing. I had received prior permission from the judge to take a couple of pics and we’d been following the case because a man not on trial but this guy’s buddy is being heavily investigated on federal charges. You watch those things.

Anyway, your average drug trial.

So I get there and the courtroom is filled with potential jurors, many I know. See, that’s the weird thing. It’s like social time before you hit the courtroom in rural America but then the judge hits the room and everyone gets all respectful because that’s what you do in court. As a member of the press, I have always been reverant of the judicial process.

The guy on trial, name unimportant, was one of those guys that you just look at and go, here we go. The thing is, I thought his defense attorney had a very good point about his client’s actions, but his client did him no favors. And being his attorney is someone I really dig, I wanted to throw my reporter’s notebook at his client, because the case had a lot of circumstantial evidence that could have gone either way although I must say that there was a lot of evidence that a juror had to weigh because both sides had a case.

It wasn’t easy, but then again it was. I was pretty objective walking in there, I knew the case but didn’t inundate myself with it because I didn’t want to have an opinion walking in the trial.  I needed the information from his affidavit of complaint, nothing more. I needed to experience it with the jury, if that makes any sense.

Apparently the defendant didn’t take it very seriously. He should have. His attorney did but in the end, he was convicted and is looking at 12 years. But he was too busy playing rock star outlaw boy and pretty much mocked the court process in small, significant ways that made the difference.

And it does make a difference.

He kept turning toward his current amore in the courtroom, throwing discreet little kisses, rolling his eyes at his former girlfriend who testified IN HIS BEHALF, and then threw a  shit out in his testimony and verbally assaulted the judge. (Did I mention the judge wears an amazing hat when he’s outside the courtroom? If I didn’t, I should have.) Anyway, the jury, in which I was sitting catty-cornered to, saw everything I was privy to. This guy had not considered that jumping your bond (which he did), getting arrested in the past (more times than I can count)and boasting about eluding police making them “work for their money” wasn’t doing himself any favors with the jury.

Do I think he committed the crime he was accused of, well, I’m still not sure and that’s a reasonable doubt but I didn’t serve on the jury either. They thought he did and that’s what they were there to do. I’m working on one hell of a cold and I was trying not to drip snot on the baliff sitting next to me and remember, I’m there to cover the trial, not to convict or advocate for this guy. My job is to report what happened. I will also say that listening to the chemical components that are attributed to methamphetamine production and then hearing a chemist break it down from the DEA was interesting to me.

I know, I’m a weird person.

So, he’s convicted of a felony, acted like a turd and testified in his own behalf (and cleared the courtroom twice). Did he commit this one? Probably (but I’m always like this after a trial. I try to weigh it out but the evidence was pretty stacked against him) but I do know that Squid Billy’s actions were not what you do in a courtroom with parents of kids (the jury was pretty much balanced with more women, people of color and of age) who are wondering if the War and Peace sized folder was an indication of past and future history. And apparently with their conviction they felt like he did the crime he was accused of.
So it was interesting. There may be some lawyers out there who would kick my ass on this assessment, but I’ve sat through hundreds of trials. And the bottom line is the evidence convicted him, but so did the fact that he was disrespectful of the very process set in place to give him a fair shot.

Rolling his eyes at his very own witness. Stoopid.