Before the two-faced Janus backs out of his door for this year, I should explain what happened to disrupt my newfound blogging interest. My court reporting Nemesis again. I quite agree with my sisters that I should be let alone in my retirement, but the Douglas County Attorney's office lost eight volumes of transcript, 2500 pages worth, and six of eight volumes of bound exhibits, plus most of the separate exhibits like seven of the eight rape kits and all the fingerprint comparison charts and such out of 166 exhibits, including DNA autoradiograms. Even though the case has gone up to the Nebraska Supreme Court twice, on both trials, and been affirmed, the defendant has nothing better to do with his life sentences than prove an unwarranted and expensive nuisance. He is charging his public defender counsel with negligence at this stage for trials and proceedings in 1994-1995 and, because the two bills of exceptions--as the appeal documents with all their exhibits are legally named--are missing, is demanding a new trial. So my former judge has correctly ordered that I re-create the missing transcript from my Stenograph notes, which I am now laboriously doing.
I skipped over some of the famous stages of grief, my first reaction being rage that all my meticulous labors had been thoughtlessly, irresponsibly lost, with no explanation how that many big fat volumes can disappear; that no one would be reprimanded, much less punished, much less forced to pay for the costly replacement. Having become reclusive out of my courtroom experience, I'm like any other animal prodded out of his hole unwillingly, snarling and snapping.
Then, after the court-appointed attorney told me what was left, one photo-lineup scrapbook exhibit, one rape kit exhibit, and Volumes VI and XVII of bound exhibits, in disbelief I had to check for myself and went into a deep depression finding these meager remains and the index card with the name of the deputy county attorney who had last checked out the whole several years back.
But my judge has given me what time I need for my arthritic hands to type it all out again, aided occasonally by my thoughtfully compassionate sister, who is a computerized court reporter, a merit writer (the highest level of the profession) who can do real time, the process of providing instant readback to court and counsel (and others) by screens displaying immediate shorthand transcriptions. She has helped with 250 pages or so, my dictating to her and then her making some proofreading and format corrections to match my style (I do the proofreading; she makes the corrections I wish). But she is also a partner in a very busy firm and a very popular court reporter in high demand for her skills, nor do I want to bother her.
Anyway, while I am boring myself through the second voir dire of the second, two-week trial with 41 witnesses, I'm making this explanatory entry, deciding I need to do at least some occasional blogging to keep my hand in--or, rather, my head. Voir dire, by the way, is what attorneys and judges translate loosely as "to speak the truth" and refers to the jury selection at the beginning of a trial. From my college French, I know that the two words are infinitives, the basic verb forms, for "to see" and "to speak, to say, to tell." Out of a much larger number, names are picked out of a tumbler--just like Bingo--and these prospective jurors are subjected to various questions and lecturing by the judge and the two counsel, beginning with the simple questions that drive court reporters crazy with a plethora of proper names, the jurors' names and the places they and their spouses work. That's important, because, as happened in the second trial, two of those called were a policeman and a crime lab technician, both very familiar with the case and so immediately excused.
Since this series of cases involved a notorious serial rapist nicknamed the "Dundee rapist" for one of the areas where he committed a number of rapes and one attempted rape, one of Omaha's oldest and best-known, we began the process of questioning with individual voir dire based upon whether anyone had been raped or had a family member or friend sexually assaulted or been involved otherwise in felonies or having crimes committed against them, some immediate issues that have to be dealt with privately one by one in the jury room rather than out in the courtroom before 150 or so people. For instance, by such private questioning for the first trial on two attempted rapes, we discovered three women had been raped or sexually assaulted (one in Mexico) and two men had rape connections, one a landlord with a tenant who claimed rape, another with an ex-brother-in-law convicted of rape. In the second trial we had a couple of women who had friends raped, including one of the alleged victims of the defendant, an ex-Air Force man passionately affected by an experience of two blacks raping a woman he knew (the defendant had interracial parentage but was perceived as black), and another man whose sister had been badly abused and refused to even try to be fair against any man accused of abusing a woman. Interesting commentary on our culture, I suppose, or on human failings?
After the individual voir dire, we went back out into the courtroom where the attorneys hammered away at key concepts and phrases such as "burden of proof" and "beyond a reasonable doubt" and "presumption of innocence," all crucial to our judicial system. Based upon roots in the Magna Carta and later English law, we demand proof of guilt by the governmental prosecution rather than proof of innocence on the defendant's part, his automatic "presumption of innocence" considered inviolable evidence until proven otherwise by convincing, credible evidence "beyond a reasonable doubt." That latter is opposed to the civil lawsuit standard of "preponderance of the evidence" or the like, as one attorney called it, 51% for the winner, 49% for the loser. The criminal standard is higher, naturally, because the stakes are higher, often long prison terms, life, even the death penalty. It does not mean absolute, mathematical certainty, because circumstantial evidence is sometimes all that can be proven.
Anyway, while the attorneys are hectoring about these terms, they also ask, for example, where jurors were born (more proper names), where they went to school, whether they had children and, if so, how many and what ages, where they get their news. (It should be no surprise that most get their news from the worst possible source, television. Marilyn vos Savant, whose column runs weekly in Parade magazine and who has the highest IQ ever tested, is my best support for what I learned when I taught Mass Media: she won't even watch TV news, the worst; anything written is far preferable.) With a great deal of publicity in the serial rape cases, the news questions were highly important, naturally, especially for the defense counsel, who would make motions to excuse anyone who knew too much about the case or the defendant from the news coverage, presumably biased by that knowledge. For that matter, we actually had a juror who was fairly well acquainted with the defendant's girlfriend and had met him.
This process lasts ludicrous weeks and months in California, but my judge at the time was firmly in control, and Nebraska does not suffer the kind of expensive shenenigans of the Coasts. For the court reporter it is always way too long, however, especially because the conditions are bad for hearing, with people scattered about the courtroom and dropping their voices to speak conversationally with the attorneys, who usually are standing near or in front of them. Add in all the proper nouns and American abuse of "Uhm-hmm" for "Yes" and very familiar term territory, and this is the part that is the trial for the court reporter. And I have to re-create it twice over.
Now I must return to actually doing it, saving the next entry for explaining more about the case.
