That was quick

My jury service ended very quickly. We were asked to report to the jury room at 8:15 am. The room was full with about 70 people, with others seated on long benches in the hallway outside. We were given forms that we had to fill in saying that if we had been fully vaccinated, then masks were optional but if we were not or did not wish to disclose our vaccination status, we had to wear masks. But no one asked to see our vaccination cards. Almost all the people were masked. I could see only five people without one.

Compared to the jury waiting room in Cleveland, this was less well-appointed, perhaps because Salinas is a smaller city. The Cleveland room was very large, with comfortable chairs, tables, and racks of magazines and even jigsaw puzzles for people to pass the time while waiting. The best part of it was that inside that room there was a smaller room that was called the Quiet Room with no talking. I would usually sit in there. The building also had a cafeteria.

The room in Salinas was smaller with straight-backed chairs spaced apart, all facing forward.. They said that it used to have 200 such chairs close together but that covid precautions had reduced it to just one third the number.

At 8:30 am, the presiding judge came and gave us a little talk for about 10 minutes about how important we were to the legal system because everyone is entitled to have their case heard by a jury of their peers.

At 9:15 am, the administrator told us that the parties had settled their case and that therefor we were dismissed and our service completed. I was surprised that there was only one jury trial scheduled since there are many courtrooms in the building but perhaps most people prefer a bench trial to a jury.

I was home before 10:00 am.

Called for jury duty

It looks like I been truly accepted as a Californian. I have been called for jury duty for a week starting tomorrow. The system is a one-day or one trial one which means that I report on Monday and if I am not empaneled on a jury that same day, then I am done. If I am placed on a jury, then I am required for the whole trial which they tell me usually lasts for three or four days. However, if it turns out to be a rare complicated case, then I could be on a panel for weeks.

So basically, I am saying that blogging will be light starting tomorrow until my jury service is done. If there is good wifi in the courthouse building and I am just sitting around waiting to be called, I may be able to blog.

The Texas abortion legal circus gets under way

As expected, civil lawsuits have been filed against the Texas doctor Dr. Alan Braid who publicly announced that he had violated the new state law that placed such restrictions on abortions that it effectively banned the practice entirely. The law had apparently not specified that one had to be a resident of Texas to file the case and the two lawsuits (so far) have been brought by one person in Arkansas and one person in Illinois. The latter says he is actually pro-choice and his lawsuit was being pursued with the intention of showing that the law is unconstitutional.
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Abortion bounty hunters and legal standing

In an earlier post, I wrote about how the Texas anti-abortion law, by authorizing anyone at all to bring a lawsuit against anyone who aids someone in getting an abortion, has greatly expanded the legal notion of ‘standing’, that only those who have suffered a direct injury can seek redress from the courts. This is a reasonable requirement since otherwise the courts could be clogged with people bringing lawsuits on any and all matters whether or not they are at all affected by it.

The need for standing is not explicitly mentioned in the US constitution but over the past century, the US Supreme Court has read that requirement into Article III.
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Texas doctor throws down the gauntlet to new abortion law

Texas has passed an extremely restrictive law, effectively eliminating a woman’s right to have an abortion by authorizing any person to sue and collect damages from anyone who provides any kind of assistance to women seeking abortions, and completely stacking the legal deck in favor of the people seeking the bounties.

A doctor in Texas who performs abortions and recalls what it was like in the days before 1972 when abortions were illegal in that state, has decided to challenge the law by performing an abortion and then publicly announcing it.
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How could big investors have been this gullible?

I have been fascinated by the case of the company Theranos, whose founder Elizabeth Homes is going on trial for fraud.

The trial, delayed earlier this year by Holmes’s pregnancy, is scheduled to begin on Tuesday and last several months.

Jurors will hear allegations that Holmes raised more than $700m from investors on claims Theranos invented a revolutionary machine that could conduct hundreds of laboratory tests from a single finger-prick of blood, but was actually using other companies’ technology for the tests. The company folded in 2018.
…

Holmes dropped out of Stanford University at 19 and became a star in a startup space dominated by men. She founded Theranos in 2003, with the goal of revolutionizing blood testing. The company’s rise and fall became a cautionary tale about the Silicon Valley hype machine.

Theranos received glowing media coverage and raised more than $700m from investors on
claims it had invented a machine that could conduct hundreds of laboratory tests from a single prick.

The tests were rolled out in Walgreens stores and Theranos reached a $9bn valuation before it became clear that many of the claims about the supposedly revolutionary blood test were bogus.

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Sacklers look likely to get the bankruptcy ruling they sought

Just as I feared, a bankruptcy judge has approved the deal that the odious Sackler family sought that would enable them to preserve and even increase the ill-gotten fortunes that they amassed from aggressively pushing their addictive pain-killers on the public, resulting in massive addiction levels and deaths from overdoses.

A US federal bankruptcy judge on Wednesday conditionally approved a sweeping, potentially $10bn plan submitted by the OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma to settle a mountain of lawsuits over its role in the opioid crisis that has killed a half-million Americans over the past two decades.

Under the settlement reached with creditors including individual victims and thousands of state and local governments, the Sackler family will give up ownership of the company and contribute $4.5bn but will be freed from any future lawsuits over opioids.
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Evolution has won the war over creationism

We seem to be awash in various culture wars that seem to never end. So it is good to consider one that was major war less than two decades ago that seems to have ended quietly. A new survey suggests that the war between evolution and various forms of creationism has resulted in science winning a resounding victory. A paper based on survey results gives the reasons for this shift. Its abstract says:

The public acceptance of evolution in the United States is a long-standing problem. Using data from a series of national surveys collected over the last 35 years, we find that the level of public acceptance of evolution has increased in the last decade after at least two decades in which the public was nearly evenly divided on the issue. A structural equation model indicates that increasing enrollment in baccalaureate-level programs, exposure to college-level science courses, a declining level of religious fundamentalism, and a rising level of civic scientific literacy are responsible for the increased level of public acceptance.

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Faking a vaccination card is a federal offense

I had been curious about the legal consequences of issuing and using fake covid-19 vaccination cards. I had assumed that it would be at most a violation of state laws and would depend upon what the individual states had decided. But it turns out that it is a federal violation and can thus be prosecuted anywhere in the country. This is because the Centers for Disease Control is a federal agency and the CDC logo is on the cards.
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Sackler exploitation of bankruptcy laws

In an earlier post, I linked to an episode of Last Week Tonight where John Oliver explained how the odious Sackler family are trying to use the bankruptcy laws so that, while they claim that they will be paying $4.5 billion, they will end up with total immunity frrom future lawsuits, will not have to admit guilt, and likely end up even more wealthy than they are now. This article explains why this is such a bad deal for the public and how it lets the Sacklers off the hook.
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