My God. THESE are LAWYERS????
Today was the most hilarious moment I've had in all my visits to the court.
I saw a defence lawyer give the most funny opening statement in my life. Well okay...it was the first ever proper opening statement I'd ever seen. Previously I usually saw a case about 1/2 way through. But anyway, my point still stands. This defence counsel was moving about like a monkey. And he kept clearing his throat because he kept laughing. Not loud laughing but you know...like when you speak you kind of give that 1/2 laugh where you let air out? Anyway...it was so IRRITATING and he was moving left and right and using too much hand movements. I mean...what the.....didn't he ever learn you shouldn't move too much when you speak? But really the most irritating thing was that laughing and throat clearing. I was pretty taken aback I have to say. I mean....how did he manage to carve a career as a barrister with that kind of public speaking? Okay I do concede he actually brought up very good points but it was completely undermined by his delivery. And I'm speaking from a law student's point of view, a mind trained after almost 4 years to pick up the evidence itself and apply my common sense to the facts, not the way they are presented (although we all know that's not completely possible). So all I could think of was, WHAT are the jury's impressions of this monkey? Has he completely killed his client's case?
At least the good thing was he really woke me up. HAHA. But earlier when the prosecutor I was following around was talking to this fella I thought that he seemed to be very confident and really knew the gist of the issues and why he thought there was no case for the prosecutor. But once he started on his theatrics (and really I hope for his sake it's theatrics gone bad and not just his natural presentation style) I realised he's just one of those people who think they know so damn much but really...well they're monkeys!
Anyway...moving on from that, I saw my first jury selection today. The judge let all those who gave excuses go except for one guy who obviously wouldn't have been too happy about that. He probably thought: "damn, just because I was the last to give my excuse the judge decided he wasn't going to be so lenient any more ('cos his excuse had been used by quite a no. of the earlier jurors who were excused)"
But if I were the defence I would have objected to him being called as a juror if his name had ultimately been picked out of the ballot (it wasn't so that issue didn't come up) because I would imagine he would be sore at being the only one not allowed to be excused despite having the same reason as most of the other excused jurors just because he came last. There would be a risk he would be prejudiced against me just because he was stuck there because of me. Which only goes to show you, just the process of jury selection itself, despite the judge trying to make things impartial and fair, can already make the juror biased against the accused.
Anyway it was quite interesting because the foreperson they chose for the jury was a young asian female student. Of course I had picked her out from the start even before the jury had been chosen because of her age and race. Also she was quite pretty and well dressed. HAHA.
Anyway, may I conclude that if I'm ever a lawyer (which I doubt) I don't think I'll do litigation. The waiting and numerous adjournments just to get one trial started are SO IRRITATING. We were supposed to have a possible trial yesterday. No...adjourned till today. Supposed to have witnesses give evidence today...NO...adjourned till tomorrow. So hopefully they go really slow tomorrow because I can't go for that trial tomorrow although it is getting interesting w/ monkey lawyer, and I wanted to watch one witness in particular give his evidence. So hopefully if there's nothing the barrister in charge of me has planned for me for friday, I can go back and watch the rest of the trial. Meanwhile tomorrow I'm going for a mediation tomorrow! Cool!
Also in between the defence suddenly brought out some new evidence and the prosecutor had to go back to the Office of prosecutions to go get some advice on whether the Crown should proceed w/ the prosecution case. And so I got to see the Director of Public Prosecutions who is a fiery man. Very interesting fella. He was like...I don't care, run the case! And pretty much was raging and kind of scolding the prosecutor. HAHA. He didn't look physically impressive but once he opened his mouth you could tell he knew what power he had and he wasn't going to be put down so easily by the defence's extra evidence. Not to mention he was angry it hadn't been brought up when it should have - 12 months ago!
Okay...got to change to go out for dinner.
I saw a defence lawyer give the most funny opening statement in my life. Well okay...it was the first ever proper opening statement I'd ever seen. Previously I usually saw a case about 1/2 way through. But anyway, my point still stands. This defence counsel was moving about like a monkey. And he kept clearing his throat because he kept laughing. Not loud laughing but you know...like when you speak you kind of give that 1/2 laugh where you let air out? Anyway...it was so IRRITATING and he was moving left and right and using too much hand movements. I mean...what the.....didn't he ever learn you shouldn't move too much when you speak? But really the most irritating thing was that laughing and throat clearing. I was pretty taken aback I have to say. I mean....how did he manage to carve a career as a barrister with that kind of public speaking? Okay I do concede he actually brought up very good points but it was completely undermined by his delivery. And I'm speaking from a law student's point of view, a mind trained after almost 4 years to pick up the evidence itself and apply my common sense to the facts, not the way they are presented (although we all know that's not completely possible). So all I could think of was, WHAT are the jury's impressions of this monkey? Has he completely killed his client's case?
At least the good thing was he really woke me up. HAHA. But earlier when the prosecutor I was following around was talking to this fella I thought that he seemed to be very confident and really knew the gist of the issues and why he thought there was no case for the prosecutor. But once he started on his theatrics (and really I hope for his sake it's theatrics gone bad and not just his natural presentation style) I realised he's just one of those people who think they know so damn much but really...well they're monkeys!
Anyway...moving on from that, I saw my first jury selection today. The judge let all those who gave excuses go except for one guy who obviously wouldn't have been too happy about that. He probably thought: "damn, just because I was the last to give my excuse the judge decided he wasn't going to be so lenient any more ('cos his excuse had been used by quite a no. of the earlier jurors who were excused)"
But if I were the defence I would have objected to him being called as a juror if his name had ultimately been picked out of the ballot (it wasn't so that issue didn't come up) because I would imagine he would be sore at being the only one not allowed to be excused despite having the same reason as most of the other excused jurors just because he came last. There would be a risk he would be prejudiced against me just because he was stuck there because of me. Which only goes to show you, just the process of jury selection itself, despite the judge trying to make things impartial and fair, can already make the juror biased against the accused.
Anyway it was quite interesting because the foreperson they chose for the jury was a young asian female student. Of course I had picked her out from the start even before the jury had been chosen because of her age and race. Also she was quite pretty and well dressed. HAHA.
Anyway, may I conclude that if I'm ever a lawyer (which I doubt) I don't think I'll do litigation. The waiting and numerous adjournments just to get one trial started are SO IRRITATING. We were supposed to have a possible trial yesterday. No...adjourned till today. Supposed to have witnesses give evidence today...NO...adjourned till tomorrow. So hopefully they go really slow tomorrow because I can't go for that trial tomorrow although it is getting interesting w/ monkey lawyer, and I wanted to watch one witness in particular give his evidence. So hopefully if there's nothing the barrister in charge of me has planned for me for friday, I can go back and watch the rest of the trial. Meanwhile tomorrow I'm going for a mediation tomorrow! Cool!
Also in between the defence suddenly brought out some new evidence and the prosecutor had to go back to the Office of prosecutions to go get some advice on whether the Crown should proceed w/ the prosecution case. And so I got to see the Director of Public Prosecutions who is a fiery man. Very interesting fella. He was like...I don't care, run the case! And pretty much was raging and kind of scolding the prosecutor. HAHA. He didn't look physically impressive but once he opened his mouth you could tell he knew what power he had and he wasn't going to be put down so easily by the defence's extra evidence. Not to mention he was angry it hadn't been brought up when it should have - 12 months ago!
Okay...got to change to go out for dinner.
posted by A.Yu at 4:36 PM
1 Comments:
ooh.. that burger looks so very tasty! - sq14
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