catelin

Ha!!! A portion of the transcript from closing arguments in the case I just finished a couple of weeks ago. This really cracks me up! I must have been delirious!

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JUDGE: Counsel, you have ten minutes left for rebuttal.

MS. COMPTON: Thank you, Your Honor. May it please the Court, Counsel. Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, in order to acquit this defendant you are going to have to believe one of two things. You are going to have to believe that every single one of these boys that testified is a liar, or you are going to have to believe that the man sitting at that table is the unluckiest person in the world. Really. I mean, have you ever heard of anyone with worse luck than this man? No matter where he goes, no matter what he does, no matter who he's with, he somehow always manages to wind up with a young boy's penis in his hand! And on a bad day, on a really bad day, in his mouth!. . . .

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That should lift a few eyebrows at the Court of Appeals.

The key concept to suicide is that you fucking kill YOURSELF. Why is it, then, that someone decides to take some other poor sap along for the ride? I personally have never understood the idea of wanting to make oneself dead. I've got too much of a survivor instinct. You're in a plane crash in the Andes with me, I will be using my pocket knife to make ass steaks. No doubt. But even assuming that there's a bona fide reason for shortening your stay on the planet, why include someone else in that? As usual, my question relates to a case I'm working on. Aside from being the vivacious bon vivant my friends all know and love, I'm an ATF-trained arson prosecutor. You'd never know by looking, eh? Oh, and I mean the training on how to investigate and prosecute arsons, not how to commit them. Just figured I'd make that clear, in light of that pesky ATF/Waco dealio. So I've got this case comes across my desk where one guy decides he's going to blow himself to bits. Efficient. I have no problem with that, as long as it's away from others. However, he decides to do it in his place of employment. Pulls out the gas stove from the wall, turns the radio on, and sits down for the long sleep. A neighbor boy, about 20, smells gas. He sees the guy and runs in to pull him out of the small building. Well, suicide king gets pissed and ends up igniting the gas...building goes boom. Boy of twenty now has burns over fifty percent of his body and may not live. Suicide king has burns, but of course, not nearly as serious as the poor kid who went in to save his sorry ass. The rub in all this is that 20-year-old good Samaritan's mother got to stand by the sidelines and watch her son's clothes burn onto his body. Right in front of her eyes. Man. No good deed goes unpunished. Sometimes it sure seems that way.

Sometimes I really hate Sundays. Maybe it's facing another week of court, trials, briefs, defense attorneys, judges, etc. when I'd much rather be staying home hanging out with my kids. They grow so fast that I'm afraid all I'm going to remember are blurs...like the pictures you get when the shutter speed on the camera is too slow. Maybe it's that my boss chewed me out last week because I gave a guy a softer deal than most because he was going to be deported if I didn't. I started crying in the middle of all this from sheer bewilderment that he didn't see that I was trying to do justice, not thwart it. (I'm one of those poor souls for whom crying is like sweating--the harder I try not to, the more I cry.) I still think I did the right thing. He still thinks I fucked up. Whatever. Maybe it's that, as much as I like working hard, I still get a little jealous of my friends who "married well" and don't work at all. I think it's really just that I'm still lazy and sluggish after the holidays. Ah, well. Tomorrow will come and I'll be back in the groove--fightin' the bad guys--trying to figure out who the bad guys really are.