Lookie what she's buying for me!

This is kind of amusing if you like a bit of puppetising.

This last week has been insane. Work from morning to end of the day, fighting one fire after another, going to one meeting after another, writing one urgent thing after another. And then going home and doing more writing and preparation all night.

It hasn't been fun.

TheFuckOffGirl has had a big couple of weeks too. More on that below.

But for now, she's been Youtubing like a fiend, and she found this cover of Outkast's best known song, which at least some of you might enjoy.

That's taken a back seat lately, much to my chagrin. Tomorrow morning I jam it out with Anton and blakemitchell, and hopefully we'll at least have some silly fun.

I have had a recurring theme of "why I love my girlfriend" posts in this journal during my years of membership. They're usually about funny things she does or the hard times she gives me.

This is a serious one.

She spent the last two weeks as juror on a rape trial. Of the cases she might have been on, she got the tough one, a tricky he-said-she-said case of alleged rape and sexual assault.

I kind of figured that she become jury foreman. (Foreperson?) Anyway, she didn't, but it was she who made them all put their names in a hat to draw for a foreman. And she was the one who stopped them in the first few days, as the victim testified, from speculating about what her motives were or why she was flaky and hesitant on the stand, and getting them to focus on the facts and the law.

Variations on the following exchange happened a number of times:
Juror X: "She might have led him on..."
TFOG: "That's irrelevant. What matters is whether she was consenting, whether he knew there was consent, and if she refused consent, did he knowingly have sex with her anyway."

She kept them focussed, she challenged the other jurors, both women and men, when they speculated on the victim's sex life and moral values, and she, with her razor sharp memory, was able to recall important facts from the evidence presented and keep the group focused on those.

I won't go into laborious detail, but more and more things, surprising and amazing things, kept being revealed during the trial. The jurors had bonded by now (so that when one guy, we'll just say from a different cultural background, was saying "So sometimes, I throw things at my wife. That's not assault, is it?" to which everyone responded "Yes! It is!"), and were feeling rather shocked and bewildered by surprising new revelations. (Such as: There was a written confession by the accused! Which was presented to the police by his father! And yet the defence were still pleading not guilty!) And there were the hours they were kept out of the courtroom while lawyers argued.

And then the accused got torn apart on the stand, by the prosecution.

Cutting to the chase - they found him guilty on 5 out of 6 charges. There was one minor charge they debated for a while, until TFOG (who was going for not guilty on that one) said "OK, who of us here that are voting for not guilty, think he did this one as well?" Everyone raised their hand. She said "We all think he did it, we just don't have the evidence to convict on the basis of reasonable doubt." Everyone else agreed, and they stuck to not guilty. (Well, there was the one woman who through all the deliberations kept saying how she didn't trust the testimony of the victim. Even when they all kept saying other evidence was sufficient to reach a guilty verdict, the woman kept saying "But I just don't trust her..." But they finally got past that.)

After the verdicts were read out they jurors were taken back to the jury room to get their things and leave. On the way, the court office who took them back and forth each day, told them what they had not been able to be told when they were out of the courtroom. He told them of things the guy had done before, including other sexual assaults, and an assault on his father that explained a mystery to the jurors -- why had his father given the police his written confession? And all of this explained why the victim's testimony had been so nervously delivered.

She spent that night curled up on the couch.

I've never been prouder of her.