Nice people thread part 3- Nice as pie

GDB2222

chewmylegoff wrote: »

amusingly, steen was running another fraud during the trial, and subsequently was found guilty of that, getting another 3 years on top.

http://www.sfo.gov.uk/press-room/latest-press-releases/press-releases-2007/george-steen-serving-six-years-gets-three-more-on-second-conviction.aspx

There's a picture of him in this news article http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/1837707.youll_stay_behind_bars_conman_told/

I must say that he looks like a pillar of the community. I guess that's why folks just handed loads of cash over to him. Poor choice to run off to the Philippines as they had an extradition treaty. Wouldn't he have been better off going to Cyprus?

GDB2222

tomterm8 wrote: »

You know, the scary thing about trial by jury is you are getting tried by the people who are too stupid to work out a way of getting out of it.

The only time I got called, I gave a perfectly valid excuse that they accepted. The funny thing is, though, that I haven't been asked again since.

chewmylegoff

Yeah, a poor choice, should have gone to cyprus and waited 10 years then come back!

I think he had some kind of link to Philippines, perhaps a rentabride not sure.

neverdespairgirl

vivatifosi wrote: »

NDG you'll know better than me, but is such behaviour and lack of respect for the duty commonplace?

I've not done jury service, and our contact with jurors is very, very limited.

LydiaJ

I did JS a couple of years ago. At the end of it, I had a very helpful chat with one of the court officials about what I would be able to discuss afterwards and what not. I needed to know (a) because I'm the sort of person who talks about most things that happen to me unless I know it's confidential, in which case I don't. At all. And also (b) because the politics dept at school had asked me to give a talk about it to the AL politics class, and I needed to know what I could tell them.

I was told I could talk as much as I liked about anything that had been done or said in open court, but nothing that was said in the jury room. So I could say "we were out for a few hours and we convicted him by 11 votes to 1" or "the judge looked really surprised that we came back so quickly, and we acquitted him unanimously" but not "I thought xyz but the girl next to me thought abc and said pqr about it."

I was on 3 cases during my 2 week stint - a fair amount of overlap between the jurors but not all the same by any means. We were a very varied bunch of people, but everyone took it seriously and we all tried our best to reach the right decision according to the evidence. In contrast, I wasn't impressed by the attitude of my divorce solicitor. I was seeing him about my divorce a few weeks later, and mentioned the JS, and he was really interested to hear about it and wanted to hear what cases we'd heard, so I told him about them. He had quite a cynical point of view and regarded our third defendent as obviously guilty, whereas we jurors, having been sternly told by the judge only to convict if we were sure beyond reasonable doubt on the basis of the evidence, unanimously acquitted him. (The question essentially boiled down to whether he did actually know that what was in his friend's parcel was drugs, or if possibly he could have been stupid enough not to have realised that his friends were setting him up to take the blame if everything went wrong.)

Before I did it, I had a vague belief that jury trial was a "good thing" in an uninformed sort of way. Since doing it, I believe in it quite a lot more, and I felt our defendants got fairer trials from us, who came to it fresh, than they would have got from a bunch of legal professionals who are seeing such things all the time and get used to them.

It's also given me much more insight into why the conviction rate for rape is so low. I find that if people hear I've been on a jury that acquitted a rape defendant, they usually respond initially with disapproval. However, when I say "Well, the evidence was ........ and ...... and ....... We were asked if that evidence was sufficient for us to be sure that she hadn't consented - would YOU convict on that?" every single person I've told about it says "Oh well, in that case, no, of course you couldn't convict on that evidence."

I don't want to give the impression we were a bunch of wishy-washy bleeding hearts who'd believe any defendant's sob story - we convicted our assault defendant, and he went down for it.

1984ReturnsForReal_2

The woman got what she deserved.

neverdespairgirl

Rape is a nightmare crime to prosecute.

If you're trying a GBH case, or a theft case, there's a good chance you're sure that something was nicked, or someone hurt. It's a question of who did it.

On an objective level, it's often difficult to tell whether sex was consensual or not. Of course, you do get cases where there are nasty and obvious physical injuries, but quite often, from a forensic science point of view, you can't tell the difference.

It's tricky to convict anyone of anything on the basis of one person against the other. And the most difficult cases are ones where the parties do know each other.

neverdespairgirl

Why on earth was what I wrote foul?

neverdespairgirl

He might well have been talking about the Facebook juror, though?

Davesnave

lemonjelly wrote: »

Rant alert - B&Q are rubbish!!!!!!

Shed delivered yesterday. Get home to find it is the wrong !!!!ing shed!

We did extensive research before deciding on a shed to adapt to a chicken house. Eventually we settled for a local manufacturer whose display models were 'proper jobs.' He was maybe £50-£100 dearer than some apparently equivalent deals on the Net

The shed took about two weeks to be made, included a pop hole door for free and went together like a dream; even the instructions made perfect sense.

Chatting with the shed guy, he told me that on many occasions people turn up at his workshops asking for help with mail order sheds which won't go together, or which need repair before they've been erected. He said it was not unusual to see grown men in tears over choosing the wrong shed.

Yes, it's a tough life out there in shed land!