Like the Case about Tomatos
Tomatos are a vegatable and water is not a beverage.
http://www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051027/NEWS03/510270399/1001
Please Leave Your Flair At Home
Today, Division II of the Court of Appeals published an opinion in State of Washington, Respondent v. Brian Keith Lord, Appellant. Lord was appealing his conviction on many grounds of process and error, but the most interesting – and the part they published a response to – was the allegation of jury bias created by spectators wearing buttons with a photo of the victim. The court found that while “[w]e agree that the better practice would have been for the trial court to have prohibited the buttons when Lord first requested, rather than on the fourth day of trial” no damage to the presumption of his innocence resulted. The final length of the trial (31 days) and the difficulty in clearly making out the face on the buttons, which were otherwise without a message, were both cited as factors in the court’s decision.
This is one of those cases that surprised me because I simply would never have thought up the underlying situation. Indeed, the court found no precedent in Washington law. However, it did manage to find not one, but three previous cases wear spectators arrived with photo-buttons of the victim. None of those cases were found to have created bias, but two other cases involving button text (reading ‘Women Against Rape’ and ‘MADD’) led to retrials.
Personally, I can’t decide which type of button is worse. The text buttons emphasize the seriousness of the crime to society, but the pictures emphasize the seriousness of the crime to the people a juror sees every day. I expect both could lead to reduced leniency for the defendant. Luckily, the issue is relatively unimportant. The reason the text buttons were treated differently had more to do with the actions of their bearers than the buttons themselves – the ‘Women Against Rape’ mingled in common areas with jurors and ran a hospitality stand for the state’s witnesses; ‘MADD’ passed buttons directly on to a potential juror member.