If you’re not already following it, I have to recommend tamaratattles.com if you’re at all interested in the Jodi Arias trial. Not only are her posts great, but some of the funniest, smartest, and all-round entertaining comments can be found there!
(She has tons of other topics she posts about, too…probably something for everyone there.)
I love it when I come across things like this…these folks make me enjoy humanity for a while. And that’s not an easy thing to do.
Below is a conversation I’ve been having on twitter…I avoided explaining that the evil lifeblood of twitter is that (other than celebs & others who use it to promote themselves & make money) many people use it as a tool to “explore”, shall we say, their pent up aggressions and frustrations in a fairly anonymous manner, without having to face real consequences. Why did I avoid it? Because this woman seems like a nice person and there’s no point in making her feel even more animosity towards tweeps.
For example, I used to tweet almost solely about politics through a different account, and politics-on-twitter is the epitome of social media hate, vitriol, viciousness, take-my-side-or-I’ll-tell-my-3000-followers-to-block/attack-you-mercilessly, boundless bullying, death threats, stalking, and general out of control scumbaggery. It’s the nature of the beast – don’t enter that den unless you can take being ripped to shreds – or perhaps worse, watching others being ripped to shreds, sometimes for months, as they’re ganged up on by dozens of people who were supposedly their “friends” just last week, or the previous day, or the previous hour. And it never ends because politics never ends. It’s not like a trial that ends, or celebrity scandals that blow over, etc. It is INSANITY.
So I guess I’ve seen (and occasionally been somewhat involved in) some of the worst that twitter has to offer. From taking a brief look at this woman’s twitter stream, she just discovered twitter last year…she’s still discussing things thoughtfully and rationally. Yay! I’m happy to have a dialogue with someone like that on a topic we may be in disagreement on. It’s refreshing and – omigawd, as I was typing, some words came outta my fingers that actually made some sense. So I’m sharing here….
The point I made at the end is what this post is about. Not only is an expert witness fair game, but especially when that expert witness is being paid by the state’s tax payers. Even though my tax dollars aren’t paying for the witnesses in the Jodi Arias case, or the defense team of #Jirk, I was born in Arizona and lived there for more than half my life so although I’d have the same opinion in regard to any state, Arizona’s a little closer to my heart.
Rather than scaring all potential defense attorneys and expert witnesses away, as @NCasserly believes (I don’t think this country will ever run out of attorneys and experts who will sell their moth-eaten souls for money), but I think this kind of online uproar over these expert witnesses will have a positive effect. Eventually potential experts will realize they had better be extremely well prepared, and have done their jobs properly and impartially, before coming into the courtroom and testifying. And the defense attorneys will hopefully prepare them better – #Jirk did pretty poorly in that sense, and didn’t seem to have even explained to LaViolence what kinds of Q’s and A’s would be involved in cross.
I testified in court once, just briefly, and was only told what the subject matter was, not a peep about cross examination, which by now, most of us know is a very, very different animal than direct. I was shocked when the attorney for the other side posed a question as a statement of fact, and he did it quickly and very smoothly right after asking several “easy” questions. Fortunately, there was only one question like that and it was completely contrary to the truth so my answer came out very naturally and enthusiastically as to the truth. I can’t even imagine what it’d be like in a criminal trial – the attorneys must prepare witnesses for exactly what cross examination consists of, and the witnesses must be very well prepared to face it, confidently.
The Liz Lemon 