The Binary Circumstance

It was reported today that Martha Stewart’s lawyers have asked for a new trial, based on the fact that one of the jurors lied his way onto the jury.

Martha Stewart requested a new trial Wednesday, saying one of the jurors who convicted her failed to disclose a checkered past that includes an arrest on assault charges.

Stewart’s lawyers said juror Chappell Hartridge has been sued three times and has been accused of stealing money from a Little League group — but improperly left the accusations off his jury questionnaire.

The lawyers said Hartridge, who called Stewart’s guilty verdict a victory for “the little guy,??? showed a clear bias against Stewart that damaged her right to a fair trial.

Among many other questions, potential jurors for the Stewart trial were asked whether they had been in court before, been sued or been accused of any crime.

How ironic that Martha Stewart was convicted of lying to the government and potentiall put in prison by a man who lied to the government, allegedly stole as much as $50,000 from a Little League baseball team, and was arrested for beating his girlfriend, a gender-based crime.

Included in the Stewart court filing was an affidavit from the [the ex-girlfriend], who said Hartridge was “occasionally physically abusive??? to her during the four months they lived together.

Hartridge “dishonestly suppressed information concerning a gender-related incident in order to be able to sit in judgment of a well-known and highly successful woman in a case alleging false statements,??? Morvillo wrote.

The juror also failed to disclose on his jury questionnaire that he had been sued three times, the Stewart filing said. The papers said civil judgments had been entered against him in each case.

The Stewart team sought a new trial under a 1984 Supreme Court case that said convicts can seek new trials if they show that a juror lied in jury selection and that the truth would have provided a basis to remove that juror.

I think Martha gets a new trial.
See also: Martha and Peter Running Red Lights

UPDATE: What I Learned Today linked to this post and added a link to an opinion by Professor Bainbridge that Martha Stewart’s attorneys are grabbing at straws with this motion.

If people can have their lives destroyed and be sent to jail for lying to the government by a juror who also lied to the government to get on the jury, it’s only more evidence that our courts have no rational basis whatsoever. But I already knew that. I hope Professor Bainbridge is proven wrong.

Since the government is so hot to convict people simply for lying to them, they will certainly bring charges against the juror who allegedly lied to them, Chappell Hartridge. He will be tried and convicted and sent to jail, hopefully by jurors who lied about their past to get on the jury. They can then go on TV and claim it as a victory for the big guys. This is what will happen if the scales of justice are balanced, if everyone, the big guys and the little guys, is treated the same.

If Chappell lied, the cost of his lies is potentially many times greater than the cost of Stewart’s lies when you consider the damage to the lives of Stewart and Bacanovic and the possibility that taxpayers will have to pay for a new trial.

This article explains why women are having such difficulty finding men to marry them. HINT: You made your bed, ladies, now you have to sleep in it. Alone.

In 1973, the Supreme Court granted women the sole legal right to abort an unborn child. In 1990 President Clinton signed the Violence Against Women Act which allowed women to evict their partners solely on account of being “fearful” of an attack. And in 1996 draconian child support enforcement measures were enacted.

Men generally don’t like to complain. A man will endure ridicule and abuse, and then move on with his life. But abuse him once too often, and he will vote with his feet.

And one day, men woke up to the fact that marriage was a losing proposition. The math was hard to refute: Half of all marriages wind up in divorce. In 85% of cases, mothers gained custody of the children. And sometimes, bitter ex-wives would try to turn the children against their father, what psychologists call Parental Alienation Syndrome.

In the face of such dismal odds, men decided to go on a Marriage Strike. By the millions, men opted to remain single. In 1990 the U.S. marriage rate was 9.8 [per 1000]. By 1998 it had plummeted to 7.4. That’s a huge drop in eight short years. And women became desperate.

I could say a lot about this article but for now I’ll just let my readers judge it on its own.

This is an interesting article about the “left behind” series of books. This passage in particular:

Misinterpretation, however, is not a new phenomena. The Church Fathers faced it too. In his book, Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View, Professor Georges Florovsky recalls the image by the second century Bishop Irenaeus which bear an uncanny resemblence to our current “battle for the Bible.”

St. Irenaeus described an artist who made a beautiful jeweled mosaic of a king. Another came along and took apart the pieces of this beautiful mosaic, rearranging the tiles to create an image of a fox. This second person then claimed that the image of the fox was the true one, as the mosaic pieces were all “authentic”.

This is what heretics do to Scripture, St. Irenaeus maintained. They claim that because they use the words of Scripture, the doctrines they teach are true. But heretics ignore the design, the rule of faith—the Tradition—which the Church has always used to test interpretations of the Bible.

I think the same can be said about the totality of existence. People fail to see how all the different components work together as a dialectical, integrated whole. They take all the components apart and put them together in a way that fits, but in the process they lose the power of the whole. The total picture, as it is, holds itself together; the rearranged picture requires the use of force.

It’s as if you took a great impressionist painting and chopped it up into little pieces and put it back together as an abstract work of art. Impressionism relies heavily on breaking the component parts of light up into discreet units and putting them together in a way that fools the eye. But if you stand back from it, the abstraction disappears in the overall context of the picture which is realism. That is the great power of impressionism. Impressionism tells a truth about how components fit into a great, spectacular whole. It is its ability to portray that truth that makes it one of the most difficult periods in art to top.

If you chop that painting up and then put those pieces together in an abstract pattern, you could still get a visually interesting work of art but you would have lost the artist’s relationship to his original subject, his vision, his story, the unified whole that he had created. You would simply have taken those abstract components and organized them into another level of abstraction which has meaning primarily to the artist, without ever connecting with any objective truth about the organization of existence.

Professor Florovsky states, “…the point which St. Irenaeus endeavored to make is obvious. Scripture had its own pattern or design, its internal structure and harmony. The heretics ignored this pattern, or rather substitute their own instead. In other words, they re-arrange the Scriptural evidence on a pattern which is quite alien to the Scripture itself.”(p. 78). Isn’t this precisely what premillennial dispensationalism, with its pseudo-biblicism, is doing in our day?

To rejoice in the sufferings of our age is to take Christ’s name in vain. Christians are to see the face of Christ in the faces of all the suffering people in this world. We don’t rejoice in suffering but are called to feed, visit, clothe, them and to seek peace.

I am so glad that the White House read my recent post about Condoleezza Rice and decided that she should testify in public and under oath before the 9/11 Commission.

The White House wrote a letter to the commission and the commission wrote back and presto-chango it was all decided.

All that very important posturing about principles and precedents wasn’t playing too well with the public so I guess they finally realized if something didn’t change we were all going to turn off the TVs and find something more constructive to do with out lives.

And things haven’t just changed at the White House and the 9/11 Commission; they have changed here, too.

In keeping with the new atmosphere of cooperation, the White House sent me nice note, handwritten no less, thanking me for my assistance in clarifying the issues. It had some words that were crossed out, but the President is very busy, so I wasn’t offended that they sent the draft copy. I’d like to share it with you.

From THE WHITE HOUSE:

Dear Mr. Gibbons:

When you recently suggested on your blog that Dr. Condoleezza Rice might be viewed as a “megadeath intellectual” it made us think.

We have spent so much time of late praying that our executive privileges would be preserved and protected from the long arm of Satan any questioning by the Congress, committees, voters, taxpayers, the families of 9/11 victims, or anybody who wrongly believes thinks they have a right to know what their government is up to.

Our devotion to this course left little time for us to read the crap that idiots like you publish on the Internet check the pulse of blog opinions. Had we seen your post earlier, John Ashcroft would have used the Patriot Act to shut your site down and throw your stupid faggot ass in jail along with Richard Clarke we would have seen the error of our ways and sent Dr. Rice before the committee to testify under oath ASAP.

We wanted to take this opportunity to inform you that when the Rapture comes we have it on good authority that you will be left behind to experience the Hell we are working so hard to create thank you for your great contribution to our country.

Sincerely,

THE WHITE HOUSE