Productive Day
Today I spent 4 hours in a courtroom. The first 3.5 hours were spent sitting there listening as other people’s hearings happened. Then I got to sit in a little side room for 20 minutes as they started the proceedings for the case of the stolen scooter. Then I got to come in, and I got sworn in, and sat on the stand and told them about how I didn’t give anyone permission to jack my scooter, and how it had $1400 worth of damage done to it, and how I called the police immediately after discovering the theft, and all that stuff. The defense attorney grilled me a bit, hoping to find some angle with which to insert a lever to free the defendant. However, I was tight as a nun, and my testimony was unpenetrable. The scooter wasn’t at all damaged before it came up missing, there is no proper way to start it without the key, I had never met the defendant before, and I had even brought an official itemized damage estimate courtesy of the dealership. For a brief moment, the defense attorney seemed dissappointed that he couldn’t find any holes in the case, but then he realized that he had 100 more orange-jumpsuit-wearing people to defend that day, and that there would be plenty of other opprotunities to tear apart unsuspecting witnesses and make frequent objections.
After the courtroom business, I filled up Madalene’s car with gas, took it to a car wash to scrub all the filthy road salt off of it so it doesn’t rust up, and then replaced all three of her wiper blades. They had gotten to the point where the running the wipers actually made things worse as the rotten rubber simply smeared the filth about rather than pushing it off the windshield. The new blades cut through moisture like a hot knife through vegetable oil based butter-like vegan spread. Huzzah!
I also bought some Cherry Coke.
Monday 27 Jan 2003 | Sam | Personal
Soooo….what was the outcome of the court hearing? It must have been good if you bought cherry coke.
“I was tight as a nun”
LOL, that’s exactly what I needed to read first thing in the morning. Another gripping courtroom drama. I’m quite sure we’ll see the dramatization on Law And Order soon…
Oh, the outcome! Well, because it was just the preliminary hearing, the outcome was rather boring and predictable. It was simply that “There is probable cause to believe that the defendant may be guilty of the charges against him.” Which, seeing as how they caught him riding the scooter, was basically the expected outcome of the hearing. The preliminary hearing is just a place for them to weed out bogus cases (like, if I knew the guy, and had given him my keys and told him he could borrow the scooter, and then I learned he was hitting on my girlfriend so I tried to get back at him by telling the police he stole it, that would get thrown out of court as a bogus case). Its also a place for cases to get thrown out because the police gathered evidence in an unconstitutional way, or if there is no evidence and the person is just in on hearsay or something like that.
But in our case, it was just a routine proceeding before the real trial.