Thursday, January 11, 2007

 

Today was a day of mail. I received a large, framed painting from my parents, a signed Lisa Jarnot broadside from Hot Whiskey Press (yay and thanks!), and 144 pint glasses imprinted with me and Mark's mysterious wedding logo:

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Wednesday, January 10, 2007

 

Cleaning my apartment today, I actually found a way to generate more bookshelf space by turning various compartments in my closet, which I think were originally meant for shoes, into shelves. While transferring the many books I had stashed in corners, under pieces of furniture, and stacked into artful pagodas about the house into their new shelves, I got the book equivalent of finding 20 bucks in a pair of pants. I discovered that I own books I have no recollection of ever buying or receiving. Like Walt Whitman's civil war diary and a retrospective of the work of Mies van der Rohe. Who knew?

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All Censory Impulse orders through yesterday are out in the mail, winging their way to you.

I'm researching Scotland.

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Monday, January 08, 2007

 

Jury duty was no fun. It's never fun to cry in front of a federal judge, although everyone looks at you with sympathy. Anyway, it wasn't until this morning, before I went to court, that it struck me: you know, this might be a criminal trial. In fact, given that this is federal court, it's pretty much guaranteed that any jury they need will be for a criminal trial. I don't think DC is exactly a hotbed of diversity jurisdiction tort and contract suits with jury requests.

Well, I thought. A criminal trial. Do I honestly think I could vote guilty if it meant sending somebody to jail? Probably not.

So that's what I told them at the voir dire. I felt really bad about it, like I couldn't do my job, but I just don't think I could do it. Maybe if it was triple infanticide and it was 100% clear the guy did it, so you need to lock him up not to teach him a lesson, but because he is simply too dangerous to the rest of humanity to have running around.

But most crimes are not like that. They are stupid. Stupid people doing something stupid. And what they're being punished for is being idiots. I don't want to help someone stupid ruin their life by sending them jail for just being stupid. This was that kind of crime: the kind where when you hear what the guy is supposed to have done, you aren't shocked, or appalled, or even mildly indignant. You just think, "well, what did you have to go and do that for?"

When I clerked, my judge sat by designation in the courts of appeal, and we had a few criminal cases out of the Ninth Circuit. Of course, we didn't decide guilt or innocence: that was up to the jury and judge below. We just reviewed the decision to see if it was wrong on the law, or there was something prejudicial about the procedure. And I felt like crap even doing that, because I thought the people judged guilty were getting a raw deal.

So I told them all that and got kicked off that jury faster than you could blink. I'm still on call for the next week or so, though I hope I don't have to go back. Maybe if I do, I can just wear a sign around my neck that says "Won't Vote Guilty" and get myself sent home without crying.

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Sunday, January 07, 2007

 

Our mild winter has all the flowers confused. Today I saw forsythia, snowdrops, Bells-of-Ireland, and a bearded iris. Last week in Charlottesville, the daffodils were out.

Jury duty tomorrow. Will my position as an attorney get me knocked out of the pool? At least I hope that the attorneys picking the juries will understand that I am annoyed because I can't bill if I'm in jury duty. Billables uber alles!

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erica kaufman's Censory Impulse, now available at Big Game Books.

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