Keep reading, you'll find the relevant link.
The US Constitution allows that “[N]o
person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous
crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury...”
The Constitution of New York State has
a similar statute.
This is a tool in the arsenal of our
Justice system and I appreciate that ideal that our system was
conceived to have checks and balances to at least try to protect the
rights of those involved in it. It fails occasionally, but it is
generally a relatively fair system.
The Grand Jury meets in secret and I
break no rules in disclosing that soon I will be a part of its
proceedings. I cannot blog about it once it gets going and, to tell
the truth, I am not really looking forward to it.
It is my civic duty and I accept it,
but it also interrupts my job search and I can't postpone it again.
This annoys me more than I can say. It's frustrating, especially
because I saw some progress in terms of good prospects...
Ideally, it would make for great
observations what with the parade of characters that come into my
narrow field of vision. A good writer would internalize all of it and
incorporate them discretely into future works.
Certainly, the surroundings and the
circumstances make for a hyperspecific people-watching experience
and, if I am lucky, a plethora of raw and colorful archetypes to
populate my stories.
I have been amusing myself with the
idea of creating character studies of fictional characters, comic
book types, based on the dregs of society (from lawyers, to crime
victims, to the unethical underbelly of our metropolis).
In my head it ends up being a sort of
Dickensian dark comedy with Shakespearean overtones, but the reality
will probably be more akin to amateur porn on grainy night vision
goggles. Realistic but not as pretty as one would hope—because
courtroom dramas are highly stylized and never even close to what it
is like to be inside a courtroom.
Or, if you prefer, it might be more
like a really bizarre puppet
show as viewed through the eyes of a bad flashback. But that may be
a jaded assessment owing to my frustration. Whatever!
I found this out the hard way when my
cousin had me sit through a day at the bench. It was interesting to
me, but nothing like the stuff people see on TV or film and certainly
nothing like the courtroom of literature.
And yet, it seems to me that the whole
thing lends itself quite well to the exaggerated noir found in
graphic novels. Think on that... you interrupt the artist, even when she is idle, and she plots. Plots!
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