Word: kamisar
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...courts. Now many legal observers worry about what changes, intended and unintended, the Simpson spectacle may engender. "Reforms will come speedily and without great caution or thought,'' predicts Brandeis professor Jeffrey Abramson, who wrote We, The Jury: The Jury System and the Ideal of Democracy. Says Yale Kamisar, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School: "If I were teaching criminal law tomorrow, I couldn't look my students in the eye. What I'm teaching them seems unrelated to what's going on in the real world...
...This sort of jury nullification, wrote syndicated columnist George Will, in which the panel is motivated by something other than the particulars of the case, amounts to "approximately what Groucho Marx said in the movie Duck Soup: 'Who are you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?'" Legal scholar Kamisar notes that juries now and then will use latitude to ignore law and free a defendant on principle, "but as a general proposition, you can't tell them when they can exercise it." Prosecution consultant Martel agrees that Cochran went "somewhat over the top in terms of a lawyer...
...that neither their time nor they were important." Motions should be heard "before court starts, and after court, and on Saturdays," says Babcock, who believes that in the Simpson case "the jurors became a little band with their own agenda, in opposition to the court and the system." Kamisar agrees that Ito "simply didn't take charge. There's no way you should let a witness stay on the stand for eight days...
...JURY. The nearly instant decision after nine months of trial and what prosecutor Clark described as a "mountain of evidence" was the ultimate "embarrassment," in Kamisar's view. "The 12 smartest people who ever lived couldn't have sorted through the evidence and evaluated it in four hours," he declares. "I have to accept the verdict, but I don't have to respect the jury that rendered it because of their unseemly haste. They could at least have stayed in deliberations for nine hours--one hour for each of the million dollars it cost to prosecute the case...
...says Simpson prosecutor Brian Kelberg. "How are we going to get a surgeon or a bank president?" The potential jurors for big, sequestered cases tend to be unrepresentative: older, less educated and largely female. Moreover, sequestration is "a far cry from the foolproof system we think it is,'' says Kamisar. "Things slip through the seal"--conjugal visits, for instance...