Saturday, April 30, 2011

Jury selection notes and observations

A few weeks ago, I kinda left you hanging regarding my jury duty.  That note was written after the first day of voir dire, but a whole lot happened later on.

In this post, I’ll describe the experience of jury selection in more detail.  The story won’t be complete, however.  I’m saving the final report on my jury duty for the next post; it’s a post I’m finding difficult to get right, so I don’t want to hold up the documentary portion of it while awaiting the muse to arrive to aid my exploration of psyche, morality, and inner thoughts.  (Is that mysterious enough for you?)

The case under consideration was briefly in the news two years ago—the shooting of a not-very-savory guy at a seedy motel, by an even-less-savory acquaintance who also shot at some witnesses as he fled.  The kicker is that the alleged perp had hightailed it to Memphis, where he was apprehended cowering in his mother’s closet.  Two years after the murder, the case finally went to trial.  Because the trial was expected to last for a month or more—closing statements will be made next week—the court required a very large panel of potential jurors so that they could eventually seat 14 jurors (two alternates). 

Sunday, March 27, 2011

Civic duty

I’d love to give y’all a report on my latest experience with jury duty.  But I can’t, because I’m still in the midst of it.  I was called for jury duty late last week, and after a full day of voir dire I’ll be back at it on Tuesday.  Thankfully, I was called for Superior Court in downtown Seattle, just down the hill from my workplace; had I been unlucky, I would have had to trek all the way down to Kent.

As best I can tell, this will be the fourth time I’ve been called for some sort of jury duty.  It’s always an interesting time, even when (like my previous stint here in Seattle) it ends up as two days without ever actually getting onto a jury.  That other time, I was in a panel for a jury, but before they’d really gotten very far the case was settled (or maybe the accused pled out ... I don’t recall whether it was a civil or criminal case).

My first experience as a juror may have been the most interesting.  It was something like 35 years ago, when I lived in Louisville.  I was called to serve on a grand jury.  In contrast to the standard petit jury, grand jurors determine whether the prosecution has sufficient evidence to indict a potential defendant.  They don’t determine guilt or lack thereof; instead, they decide whether the case will even go to trial.  There are other differences:

• The grand jury serves for a specified length of time (mine lasted a month), taking on a large number of cases during its service.
• Most of the time, the grand jury hears only the prosecution’s side of a case.  Recall that they’re there to determine suitability to be taken to trial, not the outcome of the case.
• Unlike a trial jury in a criminal case, the grand jury doesn’t have to be unanimous in its decisions.  I don’t recall the required percentage, but it must have taken something like 2/3 or 3/4 of the grand jurors in agreement.
• Most importantly, members of a grand jury are permitted, even encouraged, to participate.  They are free to ask questions of witnesses or prosecutors, or even possible defendants if they choose to appear before the grand jury.  It’s anything but the way trial jurors are treated ... solely as listeners to testimony without the opportunity to seek clarification or additional information.

During my stint as a grand juror, we shocked the hell out the prosecutor by refusing to return an indictment in one of the cases!  Though my memory is a bit fuzzy after all these years, I believe it may have been a case of sexual violence.  It was unusual in another respect—the alleged perp testified before us.  He was so convincing, and appeared to have such definitive alibi and character witnesses to call on, that the prosecution’s case appeared to be flimsy to us.

Between those experiences in Louisville and Seattle, I also served as a trial juror in Federal District Court in Pittsburgh.  That was an odd case, in that a huge multinational corporation was suing a bunch of mom-and-pop junkyards for conspiracy, collusion, and price-fixing.  Thankfully, the case was settled out of court after we’d heard a couple of days of painfully dull, repetitious technical testimony on the typology of scrap metals.  Each of the scrap dealers had a lawyer, and each of those lawyers questioned the experts describing the size, shape, and composition of various forms of scrap.  Not exactly a Law and Order experience.

Perhaps I’ll soon have more to say about my current participation as a potential juror of someone’s peers.

Saturday, February 26, 2011

A void in the PacNW blogosphere

It seemed to happen so fast, so very fast.  Lynn Allen (1948-2011) died on Thursday.

The first I heard that Lynn was in the hospital was only about three weeks ago.  When I heard the words stage 4 ovarian cancer, however, I knew her prognosis was extremely bad.  That’s one of the nastiest in the constellation of diseases called cancer, highly aggressive but usually asymptomatic until it’s quite advanced.  I don’t know that that’s how it was for Lynn, but it’s quite likely.  The last I’d seen her, probably in November of last year, she’d appeared to be perfectly fine.

Three weeks ago, and now she’s gone.  After only 62 years on the planet.

The news that her life had ended arrived in an email from Andrew Villeneuve, which pointed me to his heartfelt, sorrowful remembrance of Lynn.  Later that day, Goldy posted his own brief notice at HorsesAss.org.  I urge you to click on those two links, to see Lynn’s dazzling smile and to observe this passionate and resourceful woman who inspired all of us here in and around Seattle.

Lynn was always the “adult” in our Pacific Northwest blogging community, the one who anchored us as we battled through tough campaigns and worked to defeat Eyman’s antigovernment initiatives ... and as various of us became disillusioned or exhausted or nasty.  When she took on a task—rural outreach, leadership development, campaign blogging (for Christine Gregoire in 2004), and many more throughout her life—she was indefatigable.  Her commitment and her hard work were always visible, and she was always vitally interested in whatever one of us might be doing or planning.  Her enthusiasm and support were invaluable for us all, and will be all but impossible to duplicate.

When I wrote a similar post about Lynn on DailyKos, my friend and colleague Ivan Weiss wrote a comment that really sums up all that Lynn meant for us hereabouts.  As he does so often, Ivan got right to the nub:

She was into the “what” and I was into the “how.” She was, for lack of better words, an “urban progressive,” and I was, and am, a rural populist.

She used to spin out these grand scenarios, and she would get exasperated and call me a wet blanket because I would always ask her “how are you going to accomplish that? Where do you begin? What resources do you bring to bear? How do you marshal those resources? How do you sustain your level of activity?”

She was a lovely, accomplished woman, but inside her was a little girl looking for a dashing prince on horseback.she would fall in love (politically) with some of the major bullshit artists in WA politics, whom I would always call out as snake-oil fakers.

Farewell, Lynn.  May your too-short time with us continue to inspire us long into the future.

Sunday, January 02, 2011

Eight, and counting

Billions of you have been not-reading this blog for eight full years now.  Yes, it was on January 2, 2003 that I wrote Opening Day, the very first post on Peace Tree Farm.

In that time, I’ve been quite unprolific.  What can I say?  I’ve never thought of my blog as a place to spew out every little thought that comes into my head ... if I wanted to tweet, I’d be on Twitter (ugh).  Frankly, I don’t find the details of my daily existence all that noteworthy, so why on earth would I want to inflict such uninteresting mutterings on anyone else?

I said way back then that I wasn’t sure where the blog would take me, what subjects I might concentrate on.  Even after 2922 days, I still don’t see any sort of theme here.  Yeah, there’s politics, and there’s baseball.  But I don’t distinguish between local, state, regional, or national politics.  And if I wear my heart on my red-pinstriped sleeve, it’s tough to follow the Philadelphia Phillies from 3000 miles and three time zones away.  So if one of my vanishingly-small number of readers think they detect more thematic consistency here, I’d be happy to hear from you.

As noted, my posts are few and far between.  It’s no surprise, then, that they’re hardly ever noticed by anyone other than people searching for images of the Phillies logo.  By many orders of magnitude, that’s the most frequent net referral source I see on my SiteMeter.  And they almost always click away within a second or so.  Sobeit.

The inattention doesn’t particularly bother me.  If it did, would I have kept doing this all this time?  I’d like to believe that, had this blog somehow drawn an iota of interest out there, the attention wouldn’t have affected my views or the thoughts I put into pixels.  Not that I’ll ever have to test that hypothesis.

So I’ll continue dribbling out the occasional post here on Peace Tree.  And the great internet world will undoubtedly continue not noticing it. 

I fully expect to be here 365 days from today, writing something about nine years of Peace Tree Farm.  How much I’ll write between today and January 2, 2012 remains to be seen.  So too does the range and variety of topics I’ll write about in the next 12 months. 

Happy blogiversary to Peace Tree Farm!

Friday, December 31, 2010

Making Census sense

Last week, the Census Bureau confirmed what many Washingtonians had been anticipating ... that we will gain a tenth Congressional District when the 113th Congress convenes in January 2013.  Throughout 2011, the Washington State Redistricting Commission will ponder, propose, and create the new boundaries for our nine ten Congressional Districts and our 49 Legislative Districts.  In a very real sense, they will redraw the political map of the state.

I’ll be watching the Commission’s deliberations with great interest.  In my work, I’ve made some use of geographic information systems (GIS) to examine patterns of trauma transport and hospitalization, so I have a very basic understanding of the tools they’ll use to construct the districts.  The choices they make will have important effects on Washingtonians for a decade.

I had hoped to complete a post describing the Census Bureau’s methodology for reapportionment and demonstrating how it is that Washington earned a new seat, but as usual I’m running behind [SPOILER ALERT:  WA-10 was the 432nd district apportioned].  Instead, I’ll present a few random observations on the national picture of apportionment over the last century or so.  The data on trends in state populations, percent change, density, and district counts since the 1910 Census were downloaded from the Census Bureau.

• Washington’s count of districts last changed in the 1990 Census; WA-09 was, in fact, the very last district on the priority list in that Census.  The state has never lost a district since 1910.  We had five districts in that Census, moving to six in 1930, seven in 1950, and eight in 1980.
• Sixteen other states share Washington’s good fortune of never forcing incumbent Representatives to face off against each other.  Six of those are special cases.  Alaska (1, since statehood in 1959), Delaware (1), Idaho (2), New Hampshire (2), and Wyoming (1) have retained the same number of districts throughout.  Hawaii was assigned a single seat until the 1960 Census took effect, and has been apportioned two seats ever since.  Eight of the rest are western states—Arizona (1 when it gained statehood in 1912 to 9 in 2010), California (11 to 53), Colorado (4 to 7), Nevada (1 to 4), New Mexico (1 to 3), Oregon (3 to 5), Texas (18 to 36), and Utah (2 to 4).  And it’s no surprise that Florida (4 to 27) makes the cut.  The surprise in this group is Maryland (6 to 8), perhaps reflecting the growth of the federal bureaucracy.
• On the other side of the apportionment distribution, over half of the states have never gained a seat in any Census since 1910.  We’ve already accounted for six of them (the steady states) in the previous bullet point, but there are 22 others whose House delegations have shrunk without ever having increased.  Many of those states are in the Midwest or Rust Belt—Illinois (27 to 18), Indiana (13 to 9), Iowa (11 to 4), Kansas (8 to 4), Minnesota (10 to 8), Missouri (16 to 8), Nebraska (6 to 3), North Dakota (3 to 1), Pennsylvania (36 to 18), South Dakota (3 to 1), and Wisconsin (11 to 8).  Though their decline hasn’t been as precipitous as some Rust Belt states, portions of the Confederacy and its borders haven’t fared well either—Alabama (10 to 7), Arkansas (7 to 4), Kentucky (11 to 6), Louisiana (8 to 6), Mississippi (8 to 4), and West Virginia (6 to 3).  New England’s share of the House has fallen consistently, with Maine (4 to 2), Massachusetts (16 to 9), Rhode Island (3 to 2), and Vermont (2 to 1) in this category; Connecticut is the only New England state that has ever added a seat since 1910, going from 5 to 6 in 1930 before reverting to 5 in 2000.  Finally, Montana lost its second district in 1990 (it’s been the most populous single-district state ever since, falling short of regaining that seat by only five spots this time).
• Washington now ranks 13th in population, jumping over Indiana and Massachusetts in the last decade.  It’s unlikely to move up the ranks in the next ten years, though, as #12 Virginia is over 1.2 million above us at the moment.  With still-growing Arizona up to 16th and only about 300,000 behind us, Washington might drop a spot in the 2020 Census.
• With 101.2 residents per square mile, Washington is the 25th most densely populated state.  It surprises me somewhat that Washington, over half of which is basically empty, is more densely populated than Iowa (54.5 per square mile, ranked 36th), Minnesota (66.6, 31st), and Missouri (87.1, 28th).  As it has been since surpassing Rhode Island in 1970, New Jersey is the most densely populated state at 1195.5 per square mile.
• While the nation’s population increased by 9.7% in the last decade, Washington grew by 14.1%.  That’s nowhere near the state’s highest between-Census growth rate.  Our population more than doubled in the decade between 1900 and 1910, from 518,103 to 1,141,990 (+120.4%).  The Evergreen State has grown by more than 20 percent in three other Censuses:  1950, 1980, and 2000.  In fact, except for the 1930 Census, Washington’s population growth rate has always exceeded the national rate.
• Looking at both the levels and the timing of state population changes reinforces some of my earlier observations about the sizes of House delegations.  For instance, only once has Arizona’s population risen by less than its 24.6% in 2010, topping out at 73.7% in 1960.  Conversely, Iowa’s population has never increased by more than the 8.1% recorded back in 1920, and it even lost population in both 1910 and 1990.  No wonder the Hawkeye State has surrendered nearly two-thirds of the House seats it held in 1910.
• In the long term—the century between 1910 and 2010—Texas and Pennsylvania have essentially switched places.  They had 18 and 36 House seats, respectively, in 1910, compared to 36 and 18, respectively, in 2010.
• Since peaking at 45 House seats after the 1930 and 1940 Censuses, New York has lost at least two districts every decade.  That’s seven consecutive Censuses!  I can hardly imagine the bloodshed in the 1982 election, when the Empire State dropped from 39 to 34 CDs.
• On the other hand, imagine the fun in California over the years, as it added 9 seats in 1930, 7 in 1950, 8 in 1960, 7 in 1990.  The just-completed Census represents the first time since 1920 in which California’s House delegation failed to increase.  California actually came close to losing a seat in 2010; its 53rd district was #434 on the priority list.  By the way, that 1920 Census outcome merits a very, very large asterisk.  For reasons that have eluded my research thus far, Congress decided not to reapportion after the 1920 Census.  One of the items on my to-do list is to simulate a reapportionment for that Census, using present-day methodology.  I also want to hit the library, or at least Google, to find out why there wasn’t a reapportionment in 1920.

Two issues dominate the discussion of Congressional redistricting in Washington:

Where will the new district be located?

and

How will the new districts cross the mountains?

Those questions are linked, of course.  It’s clear that the dry side of the state does not have enough population for two districts, so at least one of the other eight will have to occupy space (and represent Washingtonians) on both sides of the Cascades.  Given the requirement for sensible communication and travel within a district, it’s likely that either the I-90 corridor or the Columbia River counties (or both) will carry a Congressional district into eastern Washington.  We’ll know better after the Census detail tables are released.

In addition to what promises to be a fascinating look at the intersection of demographic technology and political power application as Washington constructs a 10-district Congressional map, I’ll be watching how the Redistricting Commission handles redistricting at the state and county levels.  There won’t be any changes in the number of state legislators or county council members, but the outlines of every legislator’s district will change.  We won’t really know what that means until the precinct-level Census counts are released by the Census Bureau.  If the 2000 Census is any guide, that should happen in late March.  I’ve glanced at the state’s by-LD population estimates for 2010, which are probably quite accurate.  They show significant population differences across the current districts, which by definition had very similar population bases in 2000.  There will be significant reconfiguration of the LDs, all over the state.  How, or whether, these changes will affect the state’s political climate remains to be seen.