Ringus Ex Machina

Filed under:Cool — posted by Anwyn on March 20, 2007 @ 9:48 pm

As soon as I saw the title of Dave’s post, “How Lord of the Rings Should Have Ended,” I knew what the projected ending would be. We used to get this question an average of once a month back at TORn: “Why didn’t the Eagles just drop the Ring into Mount Doom?”

Well, whether you buy my answer from back then or not, the movie’s cute.

Morons on an Oregon Jury

Filed under:Jerks,Sad,Wacky Oregon — posted by Anwyn @ 9:34 pm

Moron jurors agitate to reopen a case to the point where the DA gives the guilty perp–a father who killed his 33-day-old daughter when he threw her into the air as high as he could and then “threw her down onto the couch with great force,” according to his confession–a new plea-bargain in order to avoid having the case reopened.

[Baby killer] Haley had been charged with felony murder for shaking Gabrielle to death. When he went on trial, [defense attorney] Connall brought in an expert witness who testified that shaken-baby syndrome is old medicine. But before the evidence was all in, Haley decided to plead no contest to second-degree manslaughter and received six years in prison.

When [Judge] Johnson informed the jurors, they objected and said they believed the expert witness had created reasonable doubt. [Moron juror] Hanau contacted Connall, who swiftly went to court to change Haley’s plea. The jurors appealed to District Attorney Michael Schrunk, who reminded them that they had not heard all the evidence. Still, the jurors pursued the case.

Schrunk tried to block the case from being reopened, but he lost in the state Supreme Court. The case was headed for a new trial last fall when Connall appealed to Schrunk to help forge a new plea agreement. After several rounds of talks, he agreed to accept Connall’s proposal, which Haley completed Monday.

He was serving six years, then got a second plea-bargain through the efforts of these moron jurors. The new deal includes four years of prison, three already served, plus probation and a prohibition against caring for children under 18. Oh, and parenting classes. He was high as a kite on weed and had thrown her around much more than once–all according to his confession, which was the return the DA got for this laughably lenient sentence agreement.

Note that the “reasonable doubt” the moron jurors cited was created by an “expert” witness testifying that the shaking need not have caused her death–it’s not reported whether the jurors doubted that she was shaken. You have to be a real moron not to believe that whipping a baby’s unsupported neck around violently will eventually kill her and a real asshole to testify to a “medical” opinion that it won’t.

And the moron jurors were stunned when the confession was read.

[Moron juror] Jean Maynard smiled ruefully. “We don’t think we were stupid jurors.”

Lady, as in everything else connected with this case, you and your fellow morons were dead wrong.



image: detail of installation by Bronwyn Lace