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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jlallen who wrote (932556)	4/29/2016 11:38:25 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 1577202

[–] Master-Thief 8 points 3 years ago* Have you ever made a judge laugh (or made a judge angry)? What happened? [–] KenPopehat[ S] 16 points 3 years ago I've made many judges laugh because I am a snarky asshole. The most recent time was during an appellate argument when I blew a second-grade math problem (converting my client's sentence from months to years) and snapped "that's why I had to go to law school." Mad? Yes. Many times. One now departed judge yelled at me for ten minutes when I was a prosecutor. He was sentencing a defendant, we were about to charge the guy with doing the same thing again, he wanted us to charge NOW so we could combine the sentences (note the assumption the guy would be convicted on a new charge.). I told him, not explicitly but not particularly diplomatically, that we were the executive branch and we would charge when we damn well got around to it. Oh, that's a paddlin'. More recently, when a judge yelled at me about why I hadn't stated something I'm a brief, I replied, "well, your honor, I thought it was self-evident." Which I do not recommend saying to a federal judge until you have been a lawyer long enough to not mind getting screamed at. It's bracing. [–] Master-Thief 11 points 3 years ago* takes notes Also, if you ever want to hear the story of the time I saw a judge make an AUSA cry, just let me know. EDIT: Well, then... Summer before my last year of law school, I was interning for a government agency and my supervisor would often give me and the other interns time off to go watch cases at the U.S. District Court in D.C. True enough, one of the cases was an obscenity trial (yes, they still do those). The defendant and his production company were charged with sending two DVDs of some really nasty porn to an undercover mailbox in D.C. There were several problems with the case, though. Chief among them was that the supervising FBI agent had testified on the stand that he had re-watched the DVDs at the court's (i.e. the Judges') request. Needless to say, the Judge had never said this, at all. Judges don't tell LEO's or AUSA's how to prepare for a case. Like, ever. So the judge ordered the AUSA prosecuting the case to make a sworn affadavit that the Judge had not ordered the agent or the AUSA to re-watch the videos. Except the next day, the AUSA hadn't written one. Instead, she tried to argue that signing the affidavit would make it look like the agent had lied when he had simply misspoke. This was a bad idea. The Judge was not buying this at all. The judge gave her the choice of either doing the affidavit or being called to the stand as a witness, which meant that she'd have to recuse herself from the case. The AUSA, probably realizing the minefield she had just blundered into, then said that she'd wanted to do the affidavit, but her supervisor at the US Attorney's Office had refused. The Judge asked for the supervisor's name, and the AUSA gave it. The judge then said that if the supervisor was not in the courtroom in the next 45 minutes to explain why he told the AUSA to defy a judges' order, his AUSA would be held in contempt of court and jailed until the supervisor showed up. Oh snap. The judge then called a recess and I went to the bathroom. As I walked, I saw the AUSA in the hall by the judges' chambers on her cell phone, in tears, screaming "I don't care if he's in a meeting! You get him on the phone right now!" I actually felt really bad for her, and then I remembered that she had brought this upon herself by trying to blow off the judge to cover up a screw-up. Eventually, things were resolved, and the Judge got the affidavit he wanted. The supervisor didn't actually show. And an hour later, the judge dismissed all the charges against the defendant for insufficient evidence ( a "Rule 29" , which can be granted even before the defense presents its case). My boss back at the office said that this was very, very rare - she'd been an AUSA herself, and only participated in one trial that ended in an R29 in seven years of criminal prosecution. ... reddit.com