After a monthlong trial full of high-tech gadgetry and multimedia presentations, jurors in the CIA leak trial apparently are handcrafting their own visual aids to help sort out the complicated case.
Jurors asked for a large flip chart, masking tape, Post-it notes and pictures of the witnesses almost immediately after beginning deliberations last week. Late Wednesday afternoon, they emerged to ask the judge for large, easel-sized pages that can be stuck on walls.
“We would like another big Post-it pad,” the jury foreman wrote. “The large one for the easel.”
The trial focused heavily on one week in June 2003 and attorneys for both sides used computerized timelines to highlight key events. Jurors may be trying to reconstruct their own timeline from witness testimony that sometimes was conflicting.
Can’t someone give them a laptop and projector? Help them build their own PowerPoint presentation?
Knowing the kind of people who typically end up on juries, I am surprised they did not ask for crayons, finger paints and paste (the good tasting kind)!
I was involved with a case where the jury re-organized the furniture in the deliberation room to approximate the appearance of the crime scene. Juries do weird stuff all the time. The stuff they asked for was rather trivial considering the complexity of the case.
Just declare him guilty of perjury and get it over with. Talk about your no-brainers. The entire defense consists of ‘he was busy and forgot’. What do you need a timeline for? Either he’s lying about that, and lied to the grand jury, or he didn’t. (But he did.)
Most of the time technology will slow you down where you just want the facts, not make it look pretty. Quick and crude is better than slow and elegant. (And I think Visio is the MS program for building flow charts, not PowerPoint)
#3…Noam Sane…..while I think(actually *know*) that a lot of people in Washington are guilty of many serious things, and will NEVER been tried for them….I think this was a very expensive nothing. When the Justice Department can’t prove a case, then ask questions that could be answered in several ways, just to trip up a person so they can charge them with obstruction or lying to investigators, then they are no longer doing their job, they are creating crime.
Far more important in the scheme of things, would be the arrest and trial of the person who actually **outed** Plame. Since everyone in the country now knows who that was, and he has admitted it, it should be a slam dunk. That was the REAL crime in this whole episode. Outing an undercover operative is a felony with a very long sentence attached.
Why isn’t Mr. Armitage in custody??
Actually, Joshua, it is even worse than that. During the trial, the jurors submitted written questions to the judge asking for clarification of certain points of the case. The one question the judge refused to answer was if Plame was an undercover operative at the time of the outing. The judge said that her CIA status at the time wasn’t material to the case. In fact, the judge admitted that even he didn’t know her status. Apparently, determining if Plame’s outing was actually a crime was never a concern of Special Counsel Fitzgerald.
Well, if they ask for KY jelly and a proctoscope, we’ll at least know they’re looking in the right direction.
Actually, Smith — you must be more ignorant of the case than the judge. Since, Libby was charged with perjury — and that’s all the jury should be considering.
Oh, I’m sorry — I forgot you accept an ideology that must consider politics, race, gender and economic status as part of the legal process.
#8
“Since, Libby was charged with perjury — and that’s all the jury should be considering.”
I keep forgetting that suppressing facts that are obviously related to the behavior of the individual is a common practice in the U.S. legal system.
So much for “The truth, the whole true, and nothing but the truth”.
moss, I’m guessing that you also believe that the jury in the Watada case should determine whether Bush lied, when the order that Watada disobeyed because he said it was illegal was an order to report to a duty station, not an order to raze a village.