Pretty sweet setup TBH. I need a new chair and that one looks uber good. Mind if i ask where you obtained it??

I got mine on Amazon.

It's a Herman Miller Aeron and is awesome

That's sick brky

I like it tons. I feel so much freer than with the desk.

went and got baller status on us

He went and got a yob or something

+1

I want a Herman Miller in the worst way.

Looks like you can fit an iPad next to that air imo.

I have a Herman Miller Reaction, and it is ****ing fantastic.

Sumpin like dat.

Pic taken with my Motorola Zoom.

Ipod is sitting on my tower collecting dust as usual.

Wow, that sick. Nh brky, nh.

I'll have to read up on that. The judges at the highest instances (Bundesverfassungsgericht - constitutional court, comparable to the Supreme Court) are appointed for limited terms (something like 10 years) by parliament, usually by a consensual decision.

first thing that came to my mind

Today I gained a new title, VP of E-Marketing Continuity...meaning I'm in charge of making sure all of our employees have their LinkedIn profiles aligned (similar titles, descriptions, industries, etc...)

Aw yea, my first busy work project!

Canga, I love the really really long words that come out of German

You mean, like Bundesnichtraucherschutzgesetzesnovelle? (I think I just made that one up, but with our government - and our language - you can never be sure.)

Yeah, I wish I could make words of unlimited length

Well, on the other hand you can write headlines with unlimited possible interpretations.

So much 'real' job talk... yawn. Just waking up and ready to face Friday

We're talking about chairs being balla, then El Nino shows up to make us all feel like dorks.

haha, yeah my life is a complete 360 since last year

moved and got a big boy job (yob!?!?!) and only play poker 5-10 hours a week instead of 30 hours a year ago

As a lawyer, I worked both sides of the street--I was a prosecutor for a while and a defense attorney for a while. Putting on my prosecutor hat, the idea of a "Not Proven" verdict appalls me. But putting on my defense hat, it makes me happy.

From a procedural point of view, having a "not proven" option strikes me as superior to guilty/not guilty. For one thing, precision is always preferable to less precise. "Not proven" allows a jury to say more precisely what it means when it is relying on the state's failure to meet its burden of proof to acquit. Three permissible outcomes of a jury's deliberation--That the jury is convinced of innocence, convinced of guilt, or not convinced of anything. Not having a "Not Proven" verdict option is a subtle method of hiding from the jury the permissibility of option 3.

A jury's job is not to sort through the opposing sides' evidence and figure out what happened. It is simply to hold the prosecutor's evidence in a scale, adding weight to he scale when the prosecutor makes a point, and removing weight from the scale when the defense makes a point or rebuts the prosecutor's point, and, at the end of the case, looking at the scale to see whether the uncontradicted prosecution evidence weighs enough to persuade beyond a reasonable doubt.

Lastly is the issue of fundamental fairness. The state has a team of prosecutors, investigators, police, forensic scientists and an essentially unlimited budget all dedicated to putting the defendant in jail. On the other side is a defendant whose IQ is usually around 90, and an overworked and underpaid court appointed lawyer with no investigative ability other than his own shoe leather. Under these circumstances, it ought to be child's play for the state to be able to prove its case. The only way to even partly offset this ridiculously giant disparity in resources is to give the defendant the benefit of the doubt at trial, and the "not proven" verdict helps to do this.

I urge you to support the not proven verdict. Having it is much superior to not having it.

I can live with the guilty, not guilty, not proven or even the simple "We just freakin' aren't sure..." jury returns. But shed some light on this if you would mpethy, why is it always a repeat pedophile which hits the news as another child's body is found abused and buried or tossed somewhere? Then I can recall some ACLU buffoon representing one of these pedophiles and arguing it was unconstitutional to tell the kiddie-raper he couldn't live close to a school, etc?

I'm not sure what you expect me to shed light on? Pedophiles have one of, if not the highest, rate of repeat offending. It's actually one of the reasons a lot of people in the social sciences think there is a strong genetic component to pedophilia; the one trait that almost all criminals share is an impulse control problem, and pedophiles stand out as exceptionally unable to control their impulses even among criminals.

But the best thing about our system of government is that even pedophiles have rights. I mean, in the absence of due process, who decides whether the community should be able to run a guy out of town? Maybe we can agree that pedophiles shouldn't live near schools. (First of all, what is "near," and find me a residence that isn't "near" a school). But what about arsonists living near other buildings? Rapists living near women? Bank robbers near banks? Who gets to decide who is an undesireable neighbor? See the problem? Where does it end and who gets to decide who lives where? If it is the majority, what are the limits on the majority's decision?

In the particular case of a pedophile living near a school, this is an actual tricky legal issue. the constitution does give you a general right to freely associate with whomever you like, go where you like and live where you like. When a law infringes that right, as the pedophiles near school law most certainly does, only a court in our system can decide whether that infringement is reasonable, and that means a lawyer doing the dirty work of making sure your rights don't get violated by defending the rights of a pedophile. That that lawyer is usually employed by the ACLU simply reflects the realities that most lawyers are not lining up to defend either your rights or those of a pedophile (being more interested in defending their billable hours), and that most pedophiles are not rolling in sufficient dough to pay their own lawyer.

Lawyers at the ACLU are not fans of pedophiles. They are protecting your rights, using the pedophile as a test case. Limiting where a pedophile lives is an easy first step for the majority to take on the road that ends with limiting where blacks, whites, christians or muslims can live. The ACLU, as a matter of security, sets up its guard post at the entrance of the road.

So say I'm on trial and the verdict is "not proven." Can I be tried for the same crime again - presumably when the prosecutor finds new evidence? In the U.S., I mean.

The US doesn't have the not proven verdict. (I'm pretty sure that Husker, the original poster on the subject, must be in Scotland, afaik the only place that has the not proven verdict). But if found not guilty in a fair trial, you can't be retried, new evidence or not. The circumstances under which you can be retried after a jury finds you not guilty are so rare that I don't know what they are off the top of my head, like I can usually spout most other black letter law. But they would involve an error in the fairness of the trial, such as that the defendant bribed the jurors or something.