Jury Time!

What's playing right now while I'm writing: Trouble of My Own by Slumber Party.

The trial was a personal injury lawsuit. I'll try to keep this short.

Background:
Landlord own building. Building has two stories. Landlord, Cynthia, lives on 2nd floor. Jennifer Gray (not the famous one), lives on the 1st floor. There's a small room aread in the basement, Brad, Cynthia's good friend and hair stylist, live there. Cynthia and Jennifer both have dogs. They have both helped each other out in walking each other's dogs when the other was away. Cynthia's dog is an 11yr old, 130lb dog. Huge dog, but old. Cynthia has a holistic vet fot the dog. She even got the dog accupunture sessions to help his arthritis. His name is Budha. Jennifer's dog is named Moxie.

Time line:
1. Cynthia goes to California for vacation. Asks Brad, who is usually hanging out in Cynthia's place to use her kitchen, to look after Budha. Also asks Jennifer to help out if she can, like take him out on walks.

2. Jennifer pops her head into Cynthia's apt to check to see if Budha needs a walk, since she is about to take Moxie out for a walk. Brad and his friend are in the apt eating a steak dinner. Brad says that he and his friend took Budha already out for a walk earlier in the day but if Budha wanted to go out, then fine.

3. Jennifer gets the collar and leash and puts it on Budha. Budha lays down indicating he doesn't want to go out. Jennifer tugs lightly on leash and calls his name to get him to get up. Budha growls. Jennifer wait a bit before tugging on the leash again. Again Budha growls. Jennifer then talks to Brad about stuff for about 2 minutes later, to let Budha cool off.

4. Jennifer crouches down to take Budha's leash off of him. As she reaches for it, Budha bites her hand. The bite is pretty bad.

5. Brad takes Jennifer to the hospital. They treast the bite.

6. The next day the hand swells up. She goes back to the hospital. They keep her there for 3 days while they keep her hooked up to an IV to give her antibiotics for the infection of skin on her hand. Jennifer's hospital bills - or at least what she had to pay out of pocket - were around $8,000. She also missed a vacation to the British Virgin Islands since she was in the hospital. Expense for vacation added with loss of wages from her job, as a producer for Harpo, amount to around $2,000. her lawyer is also asking for pain & suffering, disability, and disfigurement losses. Suggests amounts of $35,000, $30,000, and $15,000.

The whole trial lasted two days. It was pretty much boring and much of it was spent waiting around for it to start on time, which it didn't and waiting for sidebar sessions to end, which there were a lot of. Every person involved were characters. I watched them very carefully so that I can sometime in the future can play them on stage.

The judge was this very old black women. She was sort of scatter-brained and at times it looked like she wasn't even paying attention to the case. Sometimes when one of the lawyers had an objection, it looked like she was mentally flipping a coin to make the judgement, as if she had missed what had been said just a minute ago. Some of the other jurors said they saw her asleep at one moment. I didn't see that.

One of the three court deputies, but the main one we dealt with, was this black man with super thick glasses. He seemed a little slow and maybe a little blind. When he would hand out our check to us, he would call our names and when someone said it was for them, it seemed like he had trouble figuring out who said it. He also didn't like it if anyone questioned his authority, which I witnessed one time when on of the more disagreeable jurors wanted to make the calls on something.

When Cynthia took the witness stand, she was in tears for a good portion of it. Very distraught and her answers were pretty evasive. The plaintiff's counsel took to reading transcipts of a deposition taken a month or so before the trial to get her to answer the way she had during the deposition.

Jennifer seemed still and devoid of any real emotion while on the stand. I'm gonna guess she was heavily coached or at least she's just a cold woman.

The doctor who examined Jennifer couldn't be there so they read from the transcipts of the depostion to hear what he said during it.

The plantiff's counsel was this large fat man who could be compared with a bull dog. At times he could get really angry. All the blood would rush to his head, causing his face to get real red. The defendent's counsel was this rail thin man who took his time with things. He seemed a little unorganized and low in energy. Whenever any of his questions would be sustained he had a hard time of rephrasing them to make them okay.

My fellow jurors were a neat bunch themselves. But I wont go into detail since I'm already bored of talking about this whole thing. We went into deliberation on the second day. Under the Illinois Animal Control Act, we found that the defendent, Cynthia, was liable for what her dog did to Jennifer. We decided that Jennifer should receive full compensation for the hospital bills and for losses due to her being in the hospital, like missing work and her vacation. So that's $10,000 right there. I believe for pain & suffering, we made that equal to the hospital bill (I thought it should have been less at first but in the end agreed to the amount). For disability I think we gave her $1,000 and $1,500 for disfigurement. So the whole total was around $20,500.

If you see me in person, ask me about the jurors and what characters some of them were. I'm leaving a bunch out but, like I said, I'm tired of typing about it right now.

Song playing right now as I finish this post: Wild Horses done by The Sundays.