Mod parent up...

I just read some of these. I don't know about the rest, but the Roger Hedgecock article states that the bailiff gave the jury alcohol and pushed for a conviction. After much wrangling and seeming judicial misconduct (judge stating he thought Hedgecock was guilty, and therefore would not release interview transcripts to the defense) the State Supreme Court ruled in Hedgecock's favor. He then plead to a misdemeanor, with *no* retrial.

Thanks for the links, though. Interesting reading.

Well, I certainly don't. As far as I am concerned, it is the same attitude you hear when people say "But we have to do something!!!". It doesn't work. Don't bother. Use a more secure browser. Use an ad-blocker. Have a decent firewall installed. These will help. Perhaps you can enlighten us on which Antivirus program you use on the networks you manage. Then tell us which infections it stopped. I have customers who own solutions from Symantec, VIPRE, Kaspersky, McAfee, AVG, Avira, and Trend (among others I won't take the time to recall). Invariably, those who insist on using IE get infected the most. I have encountered some who get compromised or scammed while using Firefox or Chrome (99% of the time with no ad blocker installed). Not only do the AV packages not stop the infection, but looking in their "quarantine" I never find anything more than tracking cookies. The first rootkit, virus, or whatever that the package encountered was not only not stopped, but crippled the AV.

Often, the AV package is still intact enough to interfere with the proper progress of a legitimate mitigation tool like ComboFix, though.

The customers I have who never get infected? Yeah, they're using Macintoshes, running OS versions between 10.5 and 10.8. Occasionally I see a Mac user who has been tricked into installed MacKeeper (bogus maintenance software) when they don't have an ad-blocker installed. Simple to remove without extra software.

Fantastic points, highly insightful. It's funny how the dogma they feed you in the school systems talks about McCarthy's witch hunts, and then ignore the fact that much of what he claimed was actually correct (see Venona Project - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venona_project).

Maybe the old style Syquests were that much, but the EZ135 debuted at $25. A screaming deal at the time.

It always struck me that Zip drives became so ubiquitous. I looked at them briefly for my own use, and chose the Syquest EZ135 instead. The Syquest had a transfer rate 4 times the speed of the Zip drive, and the access time was half that of Zip. About the same cost for drive and cartridges, but 35MB more data per cartridge. Considering my internal drive was a 40MB SCSI drive, that was something. I swear that sometimes the Syquest felt faster than my internal SCSI drive, though I never benchmarked it.

They always mounted, unlike Zips which sometimes had seating difficulties. Later, when Jaz came out, for the same price you could get the Syjet. A faster drive and 50% more storage. Not as reliable as EZ135, but then again, JAZ was a reliability disaster. Oh, well.

Why would Augustine have been burned at the stake? He was raised as a pagan, and in fact lived in a society where Christianity had no domination over the fate of men. I may be mistaken, but it appears from your comments that you have a very emotional response to this very sedate and relaxed message from Dr. Bakker. His primary point was to give credit where credit is due. Many of these people learned a great deal about a great many things without all the advantages we have today.

At the same time, they did not have the disadvantage of learning these things as if they were some obvious fact that was spoon fed to them by a professor. They didn't run around parroting scientific notions that they had no direct knowledge of on the strength of perceived authority. Certainly they had other ridiculous notions, some of which may have been inherited. But on the whole, they were deep thinkers who explored their universe. Most people then and today do not spend 10% of the time these guys did thinking and discovering.

Yes, I am very familiar with Jury Nullification. I absolutely believe it is a Juror's moral responsibility to know it and apply it. But as a matter of pure fact, they typically will not. They will not be read, learned, or educated. The fact that the defendant is the defendant will cause most to assume guilt. In practice, the defendant's attorney will have to work hard to prove his client's innocence. If the client is not good looking, this can be very difficult.

I don't say this in ignorance. I have been called upon as an expert witness. The funny thing is, what I have witnessed most is prosecutors' willingness to try to twist the truth, leave out pertinent information or prevent it from being disclosed, and in fact try to take advantage of the ignorance of juries (and I mean ignorance of the particulars of an industry, for example, not that they are ignorant) to try to win a conviction when there is not only reasonable doubt of guilt, but reasonable probability of innocence.

Just like anyone else, they want to *win*. But they often seem to lose sight that *winning* is convicting the right person of the crime, if indeed a crime has been committed.

It cannot be left to Jury Nullification, which is a little known avenue for justice, and only one that is effective with an informed Jury (rare) who are given the right circumstances to detect a problem with the law itself, or how it is being applied, or with the punishments attached to conviction. Also, in many states, mere mention of it can get you into trouble with the court.

I think you are confusing the prosecution with the defense. It is not the prosecution's job to "throw what he can get away with at the defendant". The prosecution's interest should be to prosecute someone who they believe has committed a crime worthy of prosecution. It is certainly not the job of the jury to determine overreach. The judge is the arbiter of the law, and the jury is merely the arbiter of the fact.

The responsibility of defense is closer to your notion, as famously stated by Justice Byron White. But he spells out the responsibility of the prosecution, as well as other law enforcement, to get it right, even during the trial itself:

"“Law enforcement officers have the obligation to convict the guilty and to make sure they do not convict the innocent. They must be dedicated to making the criminal trial a procedure for the ascertainment of the true facts surrounding the commission of the crime. To this extent, our so-called adversary system is not adversary at all; nor should it be. But defense counsel has no comparable obligation to ascertain or present the truth. Our system assigns him a different mission. He must be and is interested in preventing the conviction of the innocent, but, absent a voluntary plea of guilty, we also insist that he defend his client whether he is innocent or guilty.

The State has the obligation to present the evidence. Defense counsel need present nothing, even if he knows what the truth is. He need not furnish any witnesses to the police, or reveal any confidences of his client, or furnish any other information to help the prosecution’s case. If he can confuse a witness, even a truthful one, or make him appear at a disadvantage, unsure or indecisive, that will be his normal course. Our interest in not convicting the innocent permits counsel to put the State to its proof, to put the State’s case in the worst possible light, regardless of what he thinks or knows to be the truth.

Undoubtedly there are some limits which defense counsel must observe but more often than not, defense counsel will cross-examine a prosecution witness, and impeach him if he can, even if he thinks the witness is telling the truth, just as he will attempt to destroy a witness who he thinks is lying. In this respect, as part of our modified adversary system and as part of the duty imposed on the most honorable defense counsel, we countenance or require conduct which in many instances has little, if any, relation to the search for truth.”