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Posted
3 minutes ago, Speedtrucker said:

white collar crimes aren’t really crimes!

Buncha NE Texas rubes giving rich fraudsters a pass because [Cloak Room]. Bet they'll happily put the hammer on some Nigerian Medicare fraudsters.

Astonishing.

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Posted

if I WAS a juror and it involved anyone who spams/ rips people off; the prosecution would have to royally fuck up to not win that verdict.

But I don't believe in unicorns or bigfoot either...

Posted
Buncha NE Texas rubes giving rich fraudsters a pass because [Cloak Room]. Bet they'll happily put the hammer on some Nigerian Medicare fraudsters.
Astonishing.

Honestly this. We have had a few 30-45 min verdicts on PPP loan frauds involving a lot of Nigerians…

But a company ripping off stores, municipalities, cities, and small business owners by hiding percentage point markups?!? Nah that’s just living the American dream of getting rich and what even are contracts?!?
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Posted (edited)
On 7/7/2025 at 8:47 AM, TwiceHorn said:

I don't think it's actually difficult for them, they just have a tough time internalizing that "more likely than not" is adequate proof or evidence for anything serious.

On the other hand, I think a lot of people have trouble internalizing what "beyond a reasonable doubt" coupled with the presumption of innocence means in a criminal matter.

And I've been practicing law for 30 plus years and am not wholly sure what "clear and convincing evidence" is 

Preponderance: 50.1%

Clear & Convincing: Upwards of 75% (nobody really knows)

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt: 98%

Presumption of Innocence: State has to prove every element and D doesn't have to prove anything.

 

Not that you can explain it to a jury without just going from the statute unless you like being yelled at by a judge.

 

It's all ball bearings nowadays.

Edited by dcbc
Posted
On 7/7/2025 at 8:56 AM, Jerry Callo said:

That's what I was alluding to.  Clear and convincing is a pain in the ass to explain to a jury.

 

Can we talk about "clear and specific" while we're at it?  Did we really need another standard for TCPA.

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Posted
On 7/7/2025 at 12:06 PM, TwiceHorn said:

Buncha NE Texas rubes giving rich fraudsters a pass because [Cloak Room]. Bet they'll happily put the hammer on some Nigerian Medicare fraudsters.

Astonishing.

I don't know how many white-collar criminals they acquit, but the NE Texas rubes still convict some too.  We see plenty of them.  The Medicare fraudsters tend to end up in federal court; so I can't help you with that one.

Posted
On 7/4/2025 at 1:09 PM, Speedtrucker said:


Yep…

My jury order of strikes is:
Engineers
Commercial airline pilots(on tax cases)
Elementary teachers
Crim defense Lawyers
College professors


That’s usually the start

No wonder the legal system is turbo fucked. 

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Posted
On 7/8/2025 at 3:22 PM, dcbc said:

I don't know how many white-collar criminals they acquit, but the NE Texas rubes still convict some too.  We see plenty of them.  The Medicare fraudsters tend to end up in federal court; so I can't help you with that one.

Speedtrucker is, I believe, an AUSA, so yeah we were referring to federal prosecutions.

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Posted
On 7/7/2025 at 8:56 AM, Jerry Callo said:

That's what I was alluding to.  Clear and convincing is a pain in the ass to explain to a jury.

I've only struck pilots on cases involving planes, but I assume the reasoning behind striking pilots is similar to engineers.

 

Strike the people that know more about something than anyone else in the room. Great idea. 

Posted
1 minute ago, Fudge Nuggets said:

Strike the people that know more about something than anyone else in the room. Great idea. 

Well, there is the problem of bias.

In the late 70s we (the US) considered creating a specialized patent court.  One of the debates was whether it should be a trial court with technically trained or at least sensitive judges.  The alternative was what we got, an appeals court with technically trained or sensitive judges.  The main difference being that trial courts find facts and appellate courts do not, broadly speaking.  One reason we chose the appeals court rather than the trial court is fear of judicial bias creeping in.  And the purpose of the court was not to implement some vague improvement in the outcome of patent cases, but rather to make the patent law more uniform nationwide and to have it "administered" by those more sensitive to its broader purposes.

As a general proposition, we don't like fact finders that are too familiar with the subject matter.

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Posted

My latest summons was a few months ago for a drug possession case. Based on the potential juror questioning, it became apparent that the defendant was going to pursue an illegal search defense strategy. He (doing his own defense) asked the pool if we knew anything about physics. Sounded like the cops pulled him over for “speeding” even though it was based only on the cop pacing him. My engineer ass got cut real quick.  I was kind of hoping to get picked to see how it all played out especially if it became obvious Deputy Dog fucked up the original stop. 

Posted
4 minutes ago, Fudge Nuggets said:

My latest summons was a few months ago for a drug possession case. Based on the potential juror questioning, it became apparent that the defendant was going to pursue an illegal search defense strategy. He (doing his own defense) asked the pool if we knew anything about physics. Sounded like the cops pulled him over for “speeding” even though it was based only on the cop pacing him. My engineer ass got cut real quick.  I was kind of hoping to get picked to see how it all played out especially if it became obvious Deputy Dog fucked up the original stop. 

Well, illegal searches aren't a jury issue, so no not in front of the jury he wasn't.

Probably something more like flung a bag of dope out the window, which the cops recovered, and he alleged it wasn't his dope and couldn't have been.

Posted
On 7/7/2025 at 12:06 PM, TwiceHorn said:

Buncha NE Texas rubes giving rich fraudsters a pass because [Cloak Room]. Bet they'll happily put the hammer on some Nigerian Medicare fraudsters.

Astonishing.

A couple of doctors here in The Woodlands got arrested for over $90MM in Medicare fraud. They’re free on bail pending trial, even the one with the Mexican last name. I figured they would have kept him locked up or shipped him off to South Sudan. White doctor skating wasn’t a surprise. 

Posted
4 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

Well, illegal searches aren't a jury issue, so no not in front of the jury he wasn't.

Probably something more like flung a bag of dope out the window, which the cops recovered, and he alleged it wasn't his dope and couldn't have been.

I don’t know what he had in mind, but he was asking the jury pool if they knew how to estimate the speed of a vehicle based on the speed of your own vehicle.

Posted
Strike the people that know more about something than anyone else in the room. Great idea. 

So part of the jury selection is that jurors are not allowed to share personal expertise in deliberations and to usually avoid that both sides will offer strike for cause to avoid that… or if it isn’t a cause, they’ll usually be cut by one side.

But engineers… yeah yall can’t help but show your colors.

I’ll post a wild engineer mistake we made up in Chicago about 12 years ago when I was working bank robberies, when I have time to type it all out.
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Posted
6 hours ago, TwiceHorn said:

Well, illegal searches aren't a jury issue, so no not in front of the jury he wasn't.

They can be.  If there's a contested fact issue regarding how the evidence was obtained during the vehicle search, and the judge denies the motion to suppress, then the issue can be presented to the jury with a suppression instruction in the charge.

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Posted
10 hours ago, Speedtrucker said:

I’ll post a wild engineer mistake we made up in Chicago about 12 years ago when I was working bank robberies, when I have time to type it all out.

I would like to hear it.  Hurry up 😀

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Posted

lol sorry wild afternoon and night!

We had a bank robbery where the defendant was charged with robbing a bank and a 924c for a gun that he threatened he had in the note.

The whole event was: he robbed the bank with a note that said he had a gun. He never brandished it. He gets the money and runs out and in the alley between buildings he runs into a rival gang member. They get in a fight and he pulls the gun out and shoot the dude.

Fast forward to trial prep, I pull CCTV footage from the cameras not affiliated with the bank and you can pretty clearly see the pistol bulging in his pants.

We also get fbi and atf forensics to separately verify finger prints from the pistol and the magazine AND 2 bullets still in the magazine from the recovered pistol all matched the defendant.

Fast forward again to trial: an engineer gets left in the jury panel against my protests. We get a guilty on the robbery because it thankfully wasn’t charged as armed robbery but the 924c gets hung and mistrialed.

The jury reason… the engineer was couldn’t agree the concept of circumstantial evidence in practice despite not disagreeing during voir dire. He basically said that without seeing him brandish, hold or own the firearm prior to the alley murder, he couldn’t deduce that the guy did infact have pessessionnif a firearm during the robbery. And that his fingerprints on any ammo and the firearm could have been solely from the murder.

Now on its face it isn’t a bad argument but all 11 other jurors were adamantly in opposition to his work (which he had also done a complete flow chart on the white board in the jury room)

It was wild, the jury was pissed, we were pissed.

I had since added the whole “does anyone watch CSI and expect to have fingerprinting or dna analysis on every piece of evidence?” To our questioning.

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Posted
2 hours ago, Speedtrucker said:

lol sorry wild afternoon and night!
. . . .

I had since added the whole “does anyone watch CSI and expect to have fingerprinting or dna analysis on every piece of evidence?” To our questioning. emoji1787.png

Cops.jpg

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