Sunday, July 4, 2010

Trial over . . . well and truly.

The easiest thing to do would be to accidentally forget to update the jury trial information from last week, to have it slip my mind completely to post the verdicts. And that would be understandable given that I was in trial. Awfully tiring, you know.

But that would be churlish and unprofessional, and I'm never both at the same time. So here it is:

167th JUDICIAL DISTRICT/ JUDGE LYNCH
Defendant: Alex Stinnett
Offense: Aggravated assault with deadly weapon
Prosecutors: Efrain De La Fuente and Mark Pryor
Defense attorney: Ryan Deck
DISPOSITION: Jury found defendant not guilty.

And my hearty congrats to Ryan Deck and his co-counsel, Rick Oliver. They were excellent. Ryan is, I believe, a Round Rock lawyer but I'd definitely add him to my list of lawyers I'd recommend for anyone in need in Travis County. Rick operates in Houston, and same goes for him.

So what's next for me? I did have a jury trial set for July 12, but the defense counsel asked for a reset so that's now going to be in September. I have a couple of other cases swirling around the jury docket but no hard-and-fast settings as yet.

But this past week reminded me of the vagaries of trial. Witnesses don't always say what they said before, they don't follow instructions as they might, and it's always impossible to tell which items of physical evidence a jury will focus in on. It's always eye-opening, ever-fascinating, and inevitably educational.

Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to talk to the jurors as I usually try to do because the timing was all wrong -- I had to decide between that and racing home to see my kids before they went to sleep. And the more I do this job, the more time I want to spend with my kids. As I sped along MoPac (at 1 MPH below posted speed, natch) I did worry the jurors might think we'd taken off in a huff! Not so, as ever we were both very grateful for their attentive and diligent service.

One of these days I need to get a juror to guest post. Any volunteers?

2 comments:

  1. sorry to see you lost, DAC, but good that you're being classy about it.

    after losing a trial, do you do any sort of retrospective look at things to see what went wrong? do you wonder if you had negotiated a little better at the pleading stage, maybe you could have gotten him behind bars for a couple years? Just curious.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Great question, I think I'm going to blow up my answer into a full post. It'll have to be next week, but I will do it, promise!

    ReplyDelete

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