"Kurt Ullman" wrote in message
m...
In article ,
"Robert Green" wrote:

The only real question is how many times they're going to retry Dunn for
murder one. I've never seen the prosecution go more than three times on
any
case, but I have seen them go for a third retrial a number of times,
often
securing a conviction on the third go-round. Each retrial, especially
if
the jurors detail why they were hung, gives the prosecution lots of
pointers
about how they can perfect their case to secure a conviction. Although
OJ's
eventual loss at trial was civil and not criminal, it's clear by the
time
the civil trial occurred that the plaintiffs had learned a lot about how
to
present the case against him from what the criminal jurors had said.

Or that the attorneys were actually competent. OJ was lost when the
idiots actually allowed him to try on glove. They got exactly what they
deserved.

That just proves what I was saying. They didn't do any blood-soaked glove
modeling for the civil jury. By that time, they had learned it was not a
good move. The glove was one of many "screw the pooch" moments. Ah, so
many. I think it was a perfect example of the state, which usually has a
tremendous resource advantage at trial (against most defendants) finding
that $10M+ simply buys mo' better resources for the defense. Look at how
long Phil Spector's $$$$ kept justice at bay and he basically fugging
confessed the night of the murder!!!!!!

Whatever happened to Phil? Let's see what Google says:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...fe-father.html

Nothing good.

A courtroom trial that has been terminated prior to its normal
conclusion. A
mistrial has no legal effect and is considered an invalid or nugatory
trial.
It differs from a "new trial," which recognizes that a trial was
completed
but was set aside so that the issues could be tried again.

There are some rare times where mistrial can attach jeopardy, but
usually requires some rather nasty prosecutorial idiocy.

Agreed. There have been many cases where the prosecutors tried a stunt like
the glove fiasco and actually *realized* they have screwed the pooch and
contaminated the jury. They then do something unrelated to cause a mistrial
hoping their true motives won't be noticed. They hope that they'll get a
"second bite of the apple" and a new jury that hasn't seen their gross
incompetence.

For Clark/Darden, their massive errors was:

a) was not realizing that wet leather gloves stiffen and shrink and
b) forgetting that OJ was a SAG card carrying actor that could do the
reverse "Cinderella and the Glass Slipper" routine in his sleep. It shows,
I think, that many lawyers were not school science project winners. Maybe
it was that Californians don't have the wet leather glove experiences that
most cold climate Americans learn by ruining leather gloves in wet snow.
That was a truly inexplicable event to me.

I was actually sickened by the stupidity of the prosecution in allowing that
"test" to proceed and having to watch OJ "struggle" so hard to try to get
those gloves on. The tragedy is that I don't think they realized how badly
that demo hurt them until after the verdict. Just plain ol' bad lawyering.
No shortage of that in the world.

Appellate courts in general don't tolerate that kind of behavior from either
side (and both sides have done it). If the prosecutor tries it, the risk is
that jeopardy will attach and a retrial will be barred. If the defense
tries it, they defendant gets to pay his lawyers to start all over again
from the beginning. Jeopardy can attach very early in the proceedings:

Jeopardy attaches in jury trial when the jury is empaneled and sworn in,
in a bench trial when the court begins to hear evidence after the first
witness is sworn in, or when a court accepts a defendant's plea
unconditionally.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Jeopardy_Clause

I find it odd that it attaches in a bench trial after the actual hearing of
evidence whereas a jury trial merely requires the swearing in of a jury.

(My advice is that if you have $$$$, NEVER take a plea. So many escape
hatches close when you cop a plea it's only for the poor, the easily
intimidated and the very, VERY guilty.)

Nugatory, for the record, doesn't mean caramel covered or related to Ted
Nugent:


And here I always thought that was CB for "no".

(-: It took me a few seconds to get that reference, good buddy. When I was
still into CB, Lafayette Radio was still in business. Still have a few
giant CB hand-held and battery pack units. Is it still popular now that
everyone has cell phones?

Usually, if a jury is deadlocked by just one or two jurors, a retrial is
almost certain to follow, and perhaps more than one. It's only in cases
where there are a considerable number of jurors voting to acquit that
prosecutors shy away from retrials. Murder one cases are probably an
exception to that rule, at least for a second a trial. The state of
Florida will almost certainly retry Dunn because he may be successful in
overturning the first convictions on attempted murder and they clearly
don't
want him walking away without any consequences.

Lost interest before the jury started talking. What was the vote if
known.

The ratio usually determines if they'll go for retrial, especially multiple
retrials. Think of AHR. Try to name 12 members who would agree on
everything presented to them. The question is "was the verdict the result
of reasonable doubt or just a single, cranky holdout torturing the group for
giggles?"

Somewhere in my reading the balance point on retrials with hung juries is
between having a quarter to a third voting to acquit - in other words a
clear majority for a guilty verdict. Sometimes, out of what is loosely
termed "public necessity" they will retry a defendant even though more than
1/3 voted to acquit if the jurors thought he was innocent. Those cases are
trials with a lot of public attention focused on them, like Dunn's. In fact,
even after several retrials, if there's a strong sense of a need to hold
someone accountable, and juries have repeatedly hung, in come the Feds with
a host of different charges, just different enough not to trigger double
jeopardy.

Prosecutors almost always believe they can do better the second time around,
and mostly, they're right. That's because invariably someone like you tells
them "drop the idiotic glove bit on round two" and they do. The prosecutors
in Fla. will be analyzing every word the jurors say to anyone for clues that
would help them avoid a second mistrial on murder one.

Sometimes it's very easy - a juror will say "I didn't like the way the
prosecutor badgered him on the stand" or something similar. Sometimes the
jurors themselves don't know why they voted the way they did. On at least
one occasion a juror voted to convict because he wanted to get home to watch
a football game.

The worst thing that could have happened to OJ after the glove demo was for
the defense to cause a mistrial because I doubt Clark would have been
allowed by Garcetti to repeat that glove stupidity (or been allowed to
change her hairstyle mid-trial, which seemed to vastly upset scores of trial
watchers at least as much as the glove). Gotta love American Justice. (-:

--
Bobby G.