Archive for December, 2009

Through these eyes I’ve seen the shape of things to come, and I’ve watched it all fall apart. Ness,Mike. “Through These Eyes.” White Light, White Heat, White Trash Epic Records. 1996.
Link

Christmas is a wonderful time of the year. I am Christian, and I believe it an appropriate time to celebrate the birth of Christ, and I feel that that spirit is manifested best through being with loved ones and sharing communion with them. It is a small way to bring peace and goodwill to Earth. Christmas has not been kind to my family in any capacity in some time.

I am the first grandson born of the first daughter of a man who pioneered aspects of cardiovascular surgery in the county in which I grew up. He was Duke educated, and was fundamental towards developing the concepts of trauma medicine there. He had a doting wife; a very old school southern belle type. They had 4 daughters, the oldest of which was my mother. From the outside, the family was somewhat well-to-do, my grandfather worked hard and made good money as a surgeon. Where he succeeded as a professional, he was less successful as a father. I will never know the entire story of my family. There are too many secrets that have gone to various graves. My aunts haven’t told me everything, and they never will. I do not think I wish to know it all. My grandfather essentially was my father, and he sat on a pedestal too high for even him to stand upon. Long story short; he was as human as everyone else despite the fact that he regularly held people’s lives in his hands. He was the patriarch, a man of no small amount of wealth, and this Christmas was important; it was the first one he would not attend in our family.

It seems Christmas has become an anniversary of the dead than a celebration of the newborn. It started my first semester of law school. Just a few days before Christmas, 2001. I got a phone call at 4:30 am from my mother. I woke up, alone (of course), and realized there is never a good phone call at this time of day. My oldest cousin, 17, who was like a little brother, was dead. He had gotten drunk and ran headfirst into a parked semi at 35 miles an hour. It cracked his sternum on impact and he bled to death fairly quickly. He had gotten into a lot of trouble with drugs and alcohol, and was trying to work his way out of the situation when it happened. That aunt was devastated, his little brother, the new oldest cousin of mine, was robbed of a brother when he was 13. He had no role model to look up to, and it would alter their lives permanently, for the worse in my opinion. Christmas was predictably ruined.

Christmas 2002 passed quietly, as my aunt was still devastated at the horrid anniversary. But then it was time to go back to school. The third day of class I got home from trial advocacy. I got a phone call from the patriarch. My mother had died. She was not in good health for some time. In the 1990’s she suffered two heart attacks, got on every painkiller and upper/downer a doctor would prescribe, and developed congestive heart failure around 1999. She was essentially bedridden in 2001. She couldn’t take it anymore and the Rhodes Scholar found her end at the bottom of a pill bottle.
I was destroyed. She and I had a rough relationship through high school. She didn’t think I would make it, but when I got my BA and was accepted to law school, she was very proud of me. I remember being on the phone with her the morning of 9-11. We shared that awful moment together, and we were never closer.

Ironically my estranged biological father died from complications from AIDS in a state mental facility 5 months later. I had only seen him once when he left my mother and I in 1983 to permanently pursue a homosexual lifestyle. I can’t help but think those deaths were linked somehow.

My stepfather died from cancer 8 months after my mother died. All he had to do under her will was make it 6 months and everything passed to him. That will was drafted when they were married in 1992. A revised will giving me everything was drafted in 2000, after the marriage had deteriorated to the point my mother slept with a gun within arms reach. Due to circumstances I dont care to get into, it was never executed. My stepfather sold the home 3 weeks before his death. A beautiful estate that was built on 8 acres of land for 350 thousand in 1990 was sold for 130000. It is little more than ruins now, the land is slowly reclaiming the once well kept landscape. All inherited from the stepfather was the cheap fake diamond wedding ring he couldn’t hold onto. Thankfully my aunts went into the ruins after the sale and recovered some of my mother’s jewelry with substantial value, including a diamond necklace I had cleaned and appraised at 3100 which will become an heirloom.

That was 2003.

2004 came, and it was time to graduate from law school. I had my degree, and my lease at school was running out. I had nowhere to go, so I went to live with my grandparents. My grandmother was suffering from a terminal illness which had her health deteriorating throughout 2003 and 2004. By the time I moved in with them to help out around the house for the elderly couple, she was bedridden. I cooked dinner nightly, suffered through my first bar failure, clerked during the day and cooked at a Ruby Tuesday at night. Then it came Christmas time.

2 nights before Christmas my grandmother took her last steps. She made it halfway to the bathroom then collapsed on the carpet. My grandfather knew this was the end. My grandmother did not have enough oxygen in her blood due to her illness. She laid in the floor, gasping for 2 and a half hours as we summoned my 2 aunts who lived in the area to the house. I sat at her head and my oldest aunt held my grandmother’s hand as she breathed her last. In the corner of the bedroom, Thus Spake Zarathustra comforted the 81 year old surgeon. Everyone broke down in tears. I was the only one who knew what had to be done. I called the police and the funeral home. The family objected loudly when the police took photographs of my deceased grandmother. It was SOP for any death, just so they can close the file as a natural death. The funeral director himself showed up with the hearse. I helped load my grandmother onto the stretcher, and carried her over the banister, down the stairs, and loaded her into the hearse, never to see her face again.

I’ve had a lot of beer, and I just got back from jail. I think I’m going to leave part 2 for another time. I’ll pick this up in a few days. If you liked the song at the top, this one’s good too. Same band. Insane album. Shame they lost the guitarist.

Crown of Thorns

You never really get to appreciate the disconnect between lawyers and laypersons. Sure, everyone cracks a wry smile at a lawyer joke; the Bard himself got cheap pops condemning us to special layers of Dante’s inferno and suggesting that our liquidation be the first thing to do. I don’t claim that the hundreds of thousands spent on a legal education makes me better, to the contrary, many would argue the venture to be complete Posnerian economic waste. But I see things differently than most people.

I am economically conservative/mostly socially libertarian. However, because I deal in criminal law I am more involved with the direct punishment and the severity of prison sentences. I am not necessarily light on crime, mind you, but I know that when a judge hands down a 20 year sentence, that is a hell of a lot of very hard time, and it is not something to be taken lightly.

A major case of ours finally went to sentencing. Despite our best efforts, we did not get the judge to agree to a departure from the guidelines. The Defendant will easily spend the next 23 years in prison. We did our best, and to be honest, it was an expected result, at the low end of the guidelines. Despite our expert testimony, despite family testimony, despite preachers and high school coaches, it was what it was. However, if the client pursued trial he faced stiffer sentences, including the possibility of life imprisonment. I know this person will have a very hard life ahead of him, and he deserves it for what he did. However, I make no bones about it, and if he does his time, he will have paid his debt to society.

The hearing was written up in a fairly objective manner in the local rag. I can’t argue with the journalism. What got to me though was some of the comments left in the online section.

There were people blaming Obama (because the Defendant was an illegal immigrant)
There were people blaming Bush (same)
There were people blaming Clinton (same)
There were people legitimately advocating chemical castration (a practice banned by the Supreme Court under 8th Amendment considerations)
There were people advocating the death penalty for noncapital offenses
There were people looking forward to the likelihood of prison rape.

I saw every manner of ignorant utterance the depth and breadth of which would stagger the mind. These are the people who elect officials, who blindly listen to political pundits without individual analysis, who struggle to make sure they’ve tivo’d every episode of Dancing With The Stars, who hang on every word Paula Abdul says on Idol. This is the idiocracy. For a brief moment, I contemplate whether constitutionalists like me should even bother defending the bill of rights.

On a lighter note, after the sentencing I proceeded to a casino and drank Bacardi and diet and played Early Retirement, a little known slot that for whatever reason really REALLY fucking likes me (Buyin 380):

Someone takes a diarrhea dump in the toilet and just leaves it there and doesn’t flush, and you haven’t had a client this morning, and you just got here, and the only other fucker who is here is Milton.

Death to Milton, Death to Middlebury, Death to Billed Hourly, Lifeat160 is great.

Instead of waiting for something to pop into my head, I decided to just post these one offs as a feature of this fine, respectable legal blog.

YOU KNOW YOU PRACTICE SHITLAW WHEN:

1. Your client pays you to take his case. You look his docket up and say “See you Monday morning for your pretrial hearing.” Then when Monday comes around you spend 80 minutes sitting on your ass in court texting him asking where the fuck he is and step out to call him 3 more times. You realize you could be billing a number of different things instead of wasting time on this flat fee bullshit, then call his case where the judge inevitably issues a bench warrant. On the way back to the office, the dumb fuck calls you and says “Oh man I didnt know I had court; I slept in man,” and you spend the next hour drafting a motion to recall the capias and drive right back to the courthouse to drop it off so it gets heard two days later and you stand a chance of getting the bond reinstated.

God damned motherfucking Milton. He is the king of the sperglords. Every day something abysmally stupid comes from his mouth. Before his first “err or uhh” which escapes the gravitational black hole of his ignorant face, I automatically think of filling that face with a cement wall a la Poe. I’d give anything to bury him behind concrete as he spergs on about the origin of all of his spergy stories: Middlebury fucking college.

I’m sure Middlebury is a fine place, a hoidy-toidy 40 large per year liberal arts hippie douchebag generator. It’s fine, it can stay in Vermont I don’t care. It and I have led perfectly happy lives without intersecting.

But not until Milton. Fucking Milton came from Middlebury, and the shitfucking cock commander goes out of his way to remind you. ALL THE FUCKING TIME. I’m talking to my boss about this aggravating divorce case, when the ambulatory cumstain oozes around the corner and announces he is taking his lunch break. Whatever, nobody cares. But then he launches into a 4 minute monologue about Middlebury Rugby or Lacrosse or Cricket or some bullshit sport that is mostly played in Europe or some equally faggy enclave of the United States.

My boss, all 5′3 and 120 pounds of her 50 something year old frame, is like a deer in the headlights. Milton has worked for her for a long time, whereas I am dying to get the fuck out if i hit the job lottery in Jurisdiction X. I can only imagine the horrors she has sat through, the endless bullshit about how fast he runs, the people he went to school with, the upper crust parties, the various times he has bested someone younger, stronger, faster than him at whatever sporting event he’s sperging about. Its probably piled on for years. She has to be jaded to it. But then I realize how she puts up with it. He is a 42 year old billing baby. He bills everything, from when he turns on the office light at 745 am till he closes the office door at 6pm, and is a literal toddler. He has no social skills yet spends his time perusing dating sites. He can’t communicate very well, but loves to show mommy whatever obscure iota of bullshit about Middlebury College he can. And mommy, now having to help care for two new grandkids, just sees him for the 42 year old infant he is.

I mean he shits the carpet in the office, so I guess his immaturity is both physical and emotional. I did not mistype that. Take that one in.

I honestly swear Milton has Asbergers. I normally mock Asspies because on the internet they attribute any antisocial behavior to it as an excuse, but this guy, man. This fucking Milton can’t be right. Something is really wrong with him, and it can all be fixed by blowing up Middlebury College. You can warn the students to get out first. Except the pre laws and poli sci. Thin their numbers out a bit.

I don’t know why you come to this blog. I thank the few thousand kindly souls each month who do, earning me fractions of pennies which become ever cheaper by the day thanks to our government’s fiscal policies. Every once in a while though I have to stop the endless reams of shitposting (much like my job) to indulge some manner of intellectual discourse. If you just want cursing and woe is me and how fat I am (ive dropped 20 pounds since 11-3) you can wait till my next post. I’m going to get a little deep here.

I belong to a group of writers collectively writing under the banner of subtledig. You can find the roster at SubtleDig_Homepage. We’re not all Psycopaths, Pornstars, Webcomics (PS death to CAD, Buckley is shit), or soon to be Unemployed. Some of us, well one of us, actually used to do something very important. I’d like to point him out and some comments he recently made.

I am referring to TrembleTheDevil, who used to work in a position of great sensitivity in the United States government. In the post I have just linked, he has gone through great trouble to analyze the war on drugs and how it primarily targets the poor, uneducated, and ethnic.

Now I am usually the first person to spit on the ground when the race card is played like the canard it is. Everything bad in the world somehow gains special attention by adding “Women, Minorities, hardest hit.” (That quote is attributed to everyone’s favorite Right wing half deaf drug addict Rush Limbaugh.) And usually I dismiss claims like that. But as a criminal defense lawyer, I get to see how the drug business works on an international and local level.

We get many clients who face drug conspiracy indictments. “Well, good,” says Mr. and Mrs. Taxpayer, “These evil men need to be put away for long prison sentences.” Drug conspirators invoke thoughts of dark skinned, scowling, scarred Columbian druglords named El Jefe, who oversee the distribution of hundreds of thousands of kilos of coke and possess Halo-esque arsenals of weaponry you see on shitty TV shows. Oops I cursed, oh well. So much for intellectualism.

And there are people like that. Leftist narcomilitaries and dictators certainly control a great portion of South America, and they have their share of Dons, Capo de tutti capos, who rule over extremely large webs of smaller drug rings that import metric tons of cocaine into the United States. But the arrests of these men are few and far between. Let me paint for you the picture of the average codefendant in a international drug conspiracy case.

His name is Pedro (name changed). He is the most pleasant man in the world. He has never been to the United States. In fact, he grew up in a small village in Columbia. He is a talented musician, and I am trying to learn more Spanish by listening to his music. He is handsome, affable, and probably could make it as a cantador. He has never been to the United States, yet he is going to spend at least the next 8 years in a Federal prison, after which, he will be deported. How did he get involved in a drug conspiracy? Five thousand dollars.

What most people make in a relatively short time is a few years salary for most of these men. They are given this proposition, sometimes at the business end of a gun. Poor fisherman, unsuspecting youths looking to make a quick score, who have never used drugs and in most cases solely serve as a mariner, are brought in to make 2 to 3 day trips between South America, stops in Mexico, and back. They get paid some up front, and the rest on completion. That is, until Navy helicopters spot them and fire teams come and scuttle their rickety tubs and make shift submarines.

The people on board are then photographed, the boat sank after the drugs are confiscated, or the boat is taken to a near port for a thorough search. The drugs are lost, but the men are in worse condition.

Sentencing in drug offenses in Federal court are a function of drug quantity and drug equivalency tables. Its a byzantine system that in actuality punishes those who have harsher drugs more than the users of lesser drugs. This might make sense, but the practical result is that users of “cocaine base (crack)” took substantially lesser amounts to invoke harsher sentences than users of cocaine or marijuana. This did have a disparate impact on blacks in the Federal system, and only recently did the US Sentencing Commission make any changes.

A ten year minimum mandatory awaits most of these men, with the upwards possibility of life in prison. Now, most of these people have no history in the United States and after a prison term will never be here again, but think about it. The average drug boat crew has say 6-7 people, and there are dozens and dozens of these prosecutions each year which take up military resources, DEA and FBI resources, the US Attorney’s Office, strain an already thinning District Court judiciary, and cost millions of dollars to put a fisherman in a prison cell for 10 years and then spend money getting him back where he came from. It is a hurricane in a teapot. A tempest of thunder, lightning, and explosions, signifying nothing. And little is going to change there. There is no drug court in the Federal system, no way to funnel first time offenders into treatment programs.

At the local level, I have another client, Al. Al is a nice guy, who wouldn’t hurt a fly. He has a drug problem, and is borderline retarded. He got conned into bringing some drugs to a hotel whereupon he was stung. Three year minimum mandatory sentence for trafficking. Al has a drug problem, but whats worse is, Al will likely die in a state prison due to the fact that he has been diagnosed multiple times with pulmonary embolisms, and has a cardiovascular system that is failing him below his waist. His legs are becoming almost necrotic from a lack of blood flow. Al is on SSI, and has parents who care deeply for him. However, unless he is willing to become a CI, the odds of the State approving a departure sentence are low. Even though the cost of housing him in a prison and the medical cost of caring for him there is significantly greater than if he were to be given house arrest where he could see his private, medicaid paid doctors who would see him and give him more than flinstones chewables for his what is in all likelihood a terminal illness. Al is barely able to make his monthly attorneys fees payments, but thanks to my efforts I’ve kept him out on bond for the past 14 months due to having him found incompetent. However, competency restoration lasts only so long for borderline cases like him. Al has no violent criminal past. He has a drug problem, but because he is charged with trafficking he cannot enter the drug court program where he might be placed in residential programs that could allow him medical care and rehabilitative services. I don’t feel a great deal of sympathy for Al, as he knew what he was getting into, but again, he is not a large figure on the food chain.

What is the solution? I am a free market capitalist. However, I beleive that government regulation over things we put in our body is called for. A legalization regime allowing for intense government regulation would permit states to criminalize some aspects of consumption (akin to DUI laws) but also release so much pressure upon our judicial system. Also, for first time drug boat offenders, deportation is far preferable to imprisonment, since these are men we are likely to never see again after sitting in local jails awaiting trial. Anyways thats just the liberal hippy asshole part of me coming through.

Go over to tremble the devil and read his analysis. It’s more substantive than mine, and his unique background gives an insight I couldn’t appreciate. I’ll post more shitjokes and pee pee doo doo he is a bad lawyer shit next time.

(edited to make it look less like the ramblings of an incoherent 8 year old)

I got free lunch today. I get free lunch practically every day. It’s one of the few perks of my shitlaw job. Every day I get to go down to a local deli and get the equivalent of a 7 dollar lunch for free. It’s almost like 2500 or so bucks untaxed every year. Alert the IRS so that they can kiss the fattest part of my ass.

But today’s lunch wasn’t at the deli. It was sushi. A friend of mine asked me to cover something for her because she had to go Georgia all of a sudden. I had to go to Georgia once all of a sudden and it became 36 hours of pure hell riding with motherfucking Milton the whole way. Long story short it involved me handing him his fucking toothpaste and brush 14 times in the car ride because everytime the useless fuck put something that wasn’t water in his maw he had to brush right away. Not to mention he had to adjust his AC from cold to hot to medium at least 70 times over the trip. And fucking radio stations man, he had to have switched radio stations at least 600 times. Death to Milton. But that’s not the point of this post.

My friend needed me to cover some administrative thing. In this state if you get a DUI your license is suspended pretty much automatically after a short grace period. However, you can postpone it if you apply for an administrative review. It’s a low percentage play but it buys time for your client to get to DUI school and lessen the amount of time before they can get a restricted license. All you can basically do is argue the evidence doesn’t sustain a DUI conviction. You can’t go into 4th amendment or intoxilyzer things. “Don’t worry about it” my friend says “It’s a dog case and i didn’t even subpoena the cop.” Dog is putting it nicely.

So I head over to the tiny little building at the appropriate time and wait 30 minutes for my hearing officer. I trundle into his tiny office, he lets me see the file. Motherfucker had blood in his alcohol stream. .251 BAC. He was weaving, hit a curb, 4am stop. The only thing he didn’t do was drive into a Chapaquiddick Island tidal channel and leave some 20 something whore to drown and wait till the next day to call someone. I look it over and groan. But hey she said she’d pay me to do it and I need poker money so whatever. Off the record I laugh about how fucked the guy is. The hearing officer says “you want to waive the hearing” Hell no. I call my friend and tell her this case is pure unadulterated donkeyfoam, and she says just repeat after me “We dispute that the evidence is sufficient for probable cause for arrest.” So I say pretty much that and the officer says he reserves jurisdiction to review the file and thats about it. I guess it takes a couple weeks for him to sustain the suspension which is the point of all this. Its pretty much routine for DUIs. My friend later admits that out of the 40 times she did this she had won only once.

Anyways she owes me and hits me up on facebook for lunch. IMO she’s pretty hot. She has a really cute face and the rest aint bad either. She and I went to the same TTT and I alienated her my first semester by making a drunken offhand comment or gesture about her breasts at a student party and that was that. Good thing I never owned up to the anonymous love poem I sent her. God I was such a fucking douche. We go to sushi and we catch up since we really havent done any hanging out in ages.

She strikes up conversation, and its a quiet small restaurant. Her voice booms. First topic: Motherfucking Eldrich Q Woods. I dont give a flying fuck about it, its celebutard nonsense, but we argue about it anyways. She says he’s captain numbnuts with a big friggin N because he’s a role model and he’s so horrible. I say he’s just a golfing robot we put on a pedestal and turned into a god, and he basically did some stupid shit most of our clients do, and nobody should care and he isn’t a role model. It’s basically the Barkley argument. She says I’m completely full of it and analogizes the average idiot’s relationship with “ranger rick on the golf course” with that between a patient and doctor, parishioner and priest, and client and lawyer. My head hurts. Instead of pointing out how ridiculous that is, I look at her breasts, getting lost in the mocha colored delights, and she wins the argument.

I fill her in on my life, how im trying to move to jurisdiction X to work and be with the same woman I met in law school. I’m about to tell her the job market is beating me down like Elin Nordegren with a nine iron but bite my tongue mid-analogy, and explain how it’s basically SHIT SUX. I even explain how the guy from our TTT wouldn’t even give me a pity interview or handy j or hell spare change for a bus. I explain how its even tougher since we have to contend with grads from in state and even the T14′ers. Our TTT is about as prestigious as the cheap cubic zirconia bullshit sold by Israelis and Guidos in mall kiosks.

“But we went to a good school. TTT is a very well respected school.”

I wish I could slap her with the octopus on the end of my chopstick. I instead give it a second soaking in the wasabi and soy sauce. How could such a smart woman who is making it as a solo be so oblivious! Then she goes on about how intimidated she is by federal criminal practice. I fill her in on the CJA panel and how any git who’s had 4 or 5 trials is missing out if they’re not on it for that sweet gubmint cheese. Not my fault if she wont do it. She slides me the envelope with the cash for covering for her, we chat some more about how she’s not getting laid and how I would drive dicktatorship home if the future Mrs Toiletlawyer didn’t exist. I inform her of a conflict of interest grand theft case I’m going to refer to her and dont tell her I’m also giving that defendant the number for my ex prosecutor law school roomie as well to see if any lulz ensue. I head off on my way just in time to catch Jim Rome reset eldrich with the same tired audio drops for the umpteenth time and realize some people just dont fucking get it and that’s alright, sweet America. Because sometimes those people post lurid bikini self shots on facebook, and thats enough for some crown royal infused spank sessions.

City 17 is a medium size metropolitan city boasting a few million residents. The county in which it resides merits its own judicial subdivision of the State Court. However, there is only one courthouse for the entire county, which is of course in City 17.

Mondays are usually docket sounding days when there are no trials for the week. When you need something done quickly, such as in my case, asking for a sentencing continuance, you draft the notice of hearing and motion, and get it in by thursday for the following monday. So this morning I was supposed to go in and get this continuance. 20 minutes of driving and about 45 seconds of lawyering. If only it were that fucking simple.

The gits who run security at City 17 courthouse recently fucked up big time. Someone snuck in a weapon in their purse, and they didnt catch it until 2 hours after it happened. So the entire courthouse was evacuated and the weapon was never found. Heads rolled. So the natural response being to pay the fuck attention to the xray machines was ignored in lieu of less lines, less scanners, and making people take off practically everything like a airport security line. Now lines to get in are the norm.

Now cue in a backed up docket since there was no thursday or friday court last week, and every son of a bitch and his sister had to go to court today. Lines stretched around the block. And 3 days a week some black preachers are out front with megaphones yelling at you about how racist and evil the court system is, and you just trundle along in line waiting to get in to do your business. So I had to wait in line for 30 minutes after a 20 minute drive to do my 45 seconds of lawyering. It gets better.

The judge for my continuance just got moved to the civil division. And since half the docket was still outside waiting to get in, the judge who was standing in decided to break until 915. So now tack on another 20 minutes of waiting where i get to ogle the prosecutors and think about how hard I would hatefuck some of them.

Then of course my boss bounds in just as court is about to resume. “I thought you werent going to handle this?” she says. “Well, you told me to get it continued, so I figured I might as well do that.” We laughed and I told her about the judge rotation. The good news was the judge coming in to take this divisions place is a real hang em high, but he is no longer going to sentence rape boy. The bad news is he is going to hear the sentencing hearing on my state appointed teen strong arm robbery case.

So my boss tells me to head on, and I stop by the clerk of court’s office to pick up some judgments on a different appointed case. I hate waiting in line for any clerk of court. Especially the criminal clerk since half of the people waiting in line are complete fucking morons who are waiting in the wrong line or are in the wrong building altogether or could have saved us all a lot of trouble by using a fucking phone. So I wait for another 30 minutes behind lovely disadvantaged urban minorities who never know what the hell is going on. I just need some judgments. Enter case number, hit print.

Well I finally get to my turn at the window, and the clerk starts pulling everything up. Problem is the judgments I’m looking for are 50+ pages (from the gang case a few posts ago) and the line behind me gets longer. And of course more poor disadvantaged urban youths queue up and get loud and mouthy since its taking a while to get these fucking papers. If only our docketing were online like most modern jurisdictions this wouldnt be a problem and I’d never have to deal with the dickhead clerks and wait in line with morons and assholes wondering when their next court date is (as if their bondsman didnt know).

Anyways I am starting to hate the fucking courthouse and all the people in it can eat glass.