Wow just Wow

It is nearly impossible to describe just how corrupt and vile this kind of conduct is. It is something that would be laughed off the pages of a mystery/trial novel. Such a thing could not happen in an even partially open society, I would have thought.

For a juror to contact the prosecution during a trial is simply something beyond anything I have ever heard of happening. It brings to mind racially tinged trials from before the 60s in places like Alabama, and only in towns so small that we've never heard of them. Hell it didn't happen to Clarence Darrow when he defended those union guys.

That the jury could permit one of their members to do this is appalling enough, but that the prosecution would not report it raises it to another level of horror. Then that the marshalls would participate in this just moves it beyond anything that I could ever imagine happening this side of some dystopian fantasy novel. And then I wouldn't (before today) have considered that novel particularly interesting, because it was just so fantastic -- maybe 1984 or Brave New World or something like that.

As a trial attorney for more than twenty years if that happened in a trial I was involved in, in small rural Ohio counties, then I would have expected everybody involved to end up in jail and the professionals would have been suspended from the practice of law for the rest of their lives.

But -------------- under Bush. My how far we have fallen. My guess is that nothing or very little is done to punish those involved. We must move on you know.

UPDATE: Oh yeah, I forgot about The Trial by Kafka. Of course that is the entire point of that book, isn't it? I guess short of a totalitarian state, where could this happen? It is kind of like Lewis Caroll and Kafka combined. Who'd-a-thought that we'd be living in the pages of a sort of retarded combination of both?

One does get kind of tired of comparing one's country to Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass but there you are.