WRTV6 had an interview with the jury foreman in Charlie White’s criminal case. The interview makes it seem as if White stood a chance of acquittal if he had testified or if the defense had put on evidence of its own.

Speaking for the first time since White was convicted of six felony charges early Saturday, foreman Gregg Weidman said it was a shock when White’s attorney, former Marion County Prosecutor Carl Brizzi, rested his case without calling any witnesses.
“I don’t know if you saw the reaction when Mr. Brizzi said he wasn’t going to call anybody, but I looked around the jury, and everybody’s eyes were about this big, like, you have to be kidding,” Weidman told RTV6’s Derrik Thomas.

Inevitably, folks are second guessing White’s lawyer, Carl Brizzi. I wouldn’t be so fast. Maybe he made a poor decision, but we don’t know what information he was working on when he made the call. Perhaps one of White’s witnesses in the Recount civil matter was not going to be willing to give such helpful testimony in the criminal matter. Maybe he knew that White’s own testimony was likely to fall apart under cross-examination or to simply reinforce the evidence that the defense had put on. Maybe he feels like, on appeal, there is some critical deficiency that will go in his favor but which could have been remedied by the prosecution while White or other defense witnesses were on the stand.

I’m not a criminal lawyer, and maybe it was simply a bad gamble on the part of Brizzi, but I think the possibility exists that he did the best he could with what he had to work with.

Update The Indiana Law Blog has an entry noting some differences between the WRTV6 write up of the interview and the video itself. Per ILB:

So I just watched the video that is available online, and have a third version — about 1:23 into the video, the juror says instead, when asked if testimony would have made a difference, and noting it would have added 3 or 4 hours to the deliberations: “It would have made his case a lot stronger.”

The Thicket at State Legislatures has a blog post entitled Prohibition Era Laws Falling by the Wayside. Connecticut, the last state in the Union besides Indiana to still prohibit Sunday alcohol sales, is considering a repeal of that ban.

Since 2002, fifteen states have repealed bans on Sunday sales: Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia, and Washington. Georgia is the most recent state to loosen its alcohol laws, passing local control just last year.
. . .
Thirteen states restrict Sunday sales, but only Connecticut and Indiana ban selling all alcohol, including beer and wine, on Sundays. But if lawmakers in Connecticut have their way, the so-called blue law policy, a relic of the Prohibition era, could soon be no more.

Carrie Ritchie, writing for the Indianapolis Star, has an article entitled Jury finds Indiana Secretary of State Charlie White guilty on 6 of 7 felony charges. (Ritchie, by the way, did a phenomenal job reporting on the trial as it happened via Twitter. Really a great mix of the old media using the new media, in my ever so humble opinion.)

White was convicted of three counts of voter fraud, two counts of perjury, and one count of theft. He was acquitted of committing fraud on a financial institution. Basically, he lied about his residence and registered to vote at a place where he wasn’t living. He did so because he had moved out of the precinct where he had been elected to the Fishers Town Council and, had he been honest about where he lived, would have no longer been eligible to continue serving and get a paycheck. He claimed he was living in his ex-wife’s basement when, in reality, it appears he was living with his fiance in the town home they’d bought. One of the most telling pieces of evidence Ritchie tweeted about was that cell phone towers near the town home picked up something like 400 (or maybe it was 600) calls from White’s cell phone after business hours versus only something like 60 from the tower near his ex-wife’s home.

I feel a little bad for White, not because I believe he made some kind of honest mistake or because I feel like the jury got the facts wrong. Rather, at some level, voter registration laws don’t seem like “real” laws. I know they are, and I know we don’t get to pick and choose our laws, but at a gut level, the voter registration requirements feel like just so much bureaucratic paperwork.

For the state, the bigger question is for the office of Secretary of State. The suit before the Recount Commission resulted in a reviewing trial court determining that White was not a properly registered voter at the time of the election and, therefore, was never an eligible candidate. (As a matter of fact, this jury verdict helps support that determination — though, I’m not brushed up enough on my collateral estoppel rules to recall whether this criminal jury verdict could be used at some point in the legal proceedings to bolster the claim in that civil matter). The upshot of that Recount case is that White was never an eligible candidate and, therefore, the eligible candidate that received the most votes gets the job — Vop Osili (Democrat). The felony conviction, on the other hand, results in an officeholder’s removal from office; with a replacement appointed by the Governor (Republican).

Political parties being what they are; the matter of whether the Governor’s appointment as replacement or Vop Osili as highest eligible vote recipient gets to keep the job will be litigated three ways from Sunday. Conceptually, I’m pretty firm on the idea that this is Osili’s. Someone could run me through the law to show me why I’m wrong; but right now I’m fairly certain that White’s election was void ab initio. He was never the valid winner because he never was an eligible candidate. As such, the later conviction is of someone who never legally held the office in the first place. Under IC 3-12-11-25, Vop Osili was entitled to a certificate of election.

[W]henever the [recount] commission makes a final determination under section 18 of this chapter that the candidate who is subject to a contest proceeding is not eligible to serve in the office to which the candidate is nominated or elected, the candidate who received the second highest number of votes for the office is entitled to a certificate of nomination or certificate of election even though a certificate may have been issued to another candidate upon the tabulation of the votes.

Under that statute, Osili was entitled to a certificate of election. Just as a thief can’t pass legal title to property to someone else; White’s actions can’t serve as the basis for conveying the office to someone else. The property rights still belong to the original owner; and the right to the office, by virtue of the certificate of election, still belongs to the eligible candidate that received the most votes. Even if I’m correct about that, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Governor’s replacement is allowed to occupy the office through the 2012 elections which could, potentially have consequences for those elections.

Just came across this page entitled Letters of Note: To My Old Master (h/t Mike Godwin). It’s a letter from a former slave to his old master in August 1865. Because the Northerners aggressively stopped southerners from exercising their state’s rights to allow one person to own another, Jourdan Anderson had been emancipated and moved to Ohio. His former owner, a Col. Anderson, apparently wrote to him, requesting that he return to work on the colonel’s farm.

The whole thing is worth a read, but I like where Jourdan pretends to consider it, but asks for a token of the colonel’s good faith. He figures if the colonel isn’t willing to pay back wages, he has no assurance of future wages. Calculating past wages based on what he’d been able to land work for in Ohio, he asked for $11,680 (about $161,125 in current dollars) plus interest less deduction for clothing and a few other items.

No wonder guys like Col. Anderson was fighting for the Confederacy and that the Confederacy was so reluctant to give up slavery. The colonel had been legally allowed to steal $160k from Jourdan and his family.

But, sure, the Lost Cause apologists will tell you it was all about tariffs or some nonsense.

Update Apropos of this someone brought to my attention that the Tea Party of Tennessee wants to, among other things, change how we educate kids about the history of slavery in the U.S.

“My biggest concern is that important information is being omitted, which creates a negative light on our Founding Fathers,” said Tea Party activist Brian Rieck.

Many members of the group are asking Tennessee lawmakers to tweak textbooks so that doesn’t happen. Notably, they’re hoping to make changes in how slavery and encroachment on Native Americans are portrayed to students. “Slavery is of course portrayed in the textbooks nowadays I’m sure as a totally negative thing. Had there not been slavery in the South, the economy would’ve fallen,” Rieck said.

The Southern economy just couldn’t survive without rich white people stealing labor from poor black people.

Judge Posner has an interesting blog post entitled Taxing Wealthy People More Heavily. One of his arguments against increasing the taxes on people with a million or more in income is that they would then have a strong incentive to keep their income under a million. I hadn’t understood President Obama’s proposal of 25% on such incomes to refer to 25% on everything made that year; but maybe he did. I figured he was referring to a marginal tax rate – income, regardless of the source, in excess of a million at 25%. That would, I think, negate one of Judge Posner’s arguments against increasing taxes on high incomes.

He disregards proposals to switch to a consumption tax for practical reasons:

While there are good theoretical arguments for replacing income with consumption taxes, as discussed by Becker, the administrative and transitional costs would be staggering; and so with any effort to overhaul the federal income tax system rather than just tinker at the edges of it.

He also describes a tax on wealth (as opposed to income) as “an uncommonly silly idea.”

My proposal is simply to revert to the Clinton-Gingrich era tax structure. We know that it worked better than the present structure in terms of funding the government, and I don’t recall folks at the time crying out under the oppressive boot heel of communism.

Mostly I’m linking this New Yorker article: The Caging of America so I don’t forget to go back and read it. I’ve read the first few paragraphs, and it seems worth going back to. (h/t Roger).

Catching my eye right at the front “In other words, there’s the scientific taste for reducing men to numbers and the slave owners’ urge to reduce blacks to brutes.” The former is the Northern impulse whereas the latter is the Southern.

The Evansville Courier Press has a column entitled EDITORIAL: Still more planets are found. The column notes that there seem to be about 1.6 planets per star and about 100 billion stars in the Milky Way. The universe is lousy with planets, and we’re huddled up on one of them. And a stray meteor could trash the joint at any given moment.

Of course, as Bill Bryson pointed out in his book, a Short History of Nearly Everything, space is extremely aptly named. Despite all the stuff, space is still so large as to separate the stuff with vast, vast emptiness. As yet, we don’t have the technology to get from place to place in anything like human lifetimes.

When I think of the immensity of the universe, it always brings to mind The Total Perspective Vortex from Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhiker’s Guide” series; described as the most horrible torture to which a sentient being can be subjected:

When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little mark, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, “You are here.”

No real point to this post; I’m just kind of rambling since last night’s storms made the night less than restful.

Just got an e-mail from The Indiana Lawyer with an article entitled Indiana Legislature proceedings from 19th century now available online

A joint project between the Indiana University Maurer School of Law Library and the IU Digital Library Program has digitized nearly 8,000 pages of General Assembly proceedings from the 1800s, creating an online repository that is accessible free of charge.

The Brevier Legislative Reports, published biennially from 1858 to 1887, offer a verbatim accounting of day-to-day activities in the Indiana Legislature. All sessions are covered, with the exception of the latter part of the 1875 Regular Session, the 1875 Special Session, and the 1877 Regular and Special Sessions.

The archives are available here. I probably won’t geek out over this too much.

I don’t have a lot to add to what others are saying and have already said about the man and what he stood for. Anecdotally, I can report that my son seems to lack a context in which he is able to grasp why folks would have taken issue with Dr. King’s principles or would have wanted to treat people differently based on their race; any more than he can grasp why people would want to discriminate based on hair color. I think that’s a good thing. In his school, primarily because of the proximity of Purdue, there are kids from a wide array of cultures. From what I can tell, they all seem able to play together without thinking a thing of it.

But, I probably want to make sure that I don’t oversimplify things by allowing Dr. King’s opponents and detractors to become caricatures of what they really were. As a kid, I remember digging in a little against the folks who said that the only difference between blacks and whites was the color of their skin. I knew there was more to it than that. There was a cultural and economic component — there still is, but I think it is diminishing. The differences between black and white, whether caused by nature or nurture, went beyond pigmentation alone; and, so, when someone would tell me that skin color was the only distinction, my reaction was to be distrustful of the rest of what the person had to say.

Race relations have come a long way since Dr. King died even if they they still have a good ways to go. He was instrumental in a lot of the progress that was made. I think we can all be thankful for that.

As Mitt Romney’s primary challengers make last ditch efforts to stop him by looking at his record at the helm of Bain Capital, he has fought back, trying to characterize this as “an attack on capitalism.” The problem is that not all “capitalism” is created equally. If Bain was just making money by taking risk and adding value to the companies they dealt with, that’s one thing. But we all know that’s not the only way to make money in the finance business. And the looters shouldn’t be allowed to hide behind the growers.

Matt Taibbi brings us a finance story entitled Everything You Need to Know About Wall Street, in One Brief Tale. A guy who worked for Bear Stearns personally enriched himself, in part, by doing the following:

1) Bundle a bunch of crap mortgages that you know to be crap.
2) Have them insured.
3) Sell them to investors.
4) Don’t tell the investors about a deal whereby the original mortgage lender would pay you back if a mortgage goes into default.
5) Pocket the default payback money when it comes.
6) Bet against the insurers.
7) When the insurers crash under the weight of your crappy mortgages, cash in on your short bet.

Then, apparently, you’ll have enough money to rent out 94 Aspen hotel rooms for three days to throw a party for your daughter.