Alabama Municipal Judge Carlton Teel is packing more than legal principles under his robe. When a defendant Brian (Bryant) Keith Ford reacted badly to a sentence and started swinging his crutches at the judge, Teel whipped out a gun and then a deputy shot Ford in the side.
Accounts differ on how much danger the man posed — with some witnesses saying that he was not attacking the judge when he was shot. Others say he tried to grab the gun.
Ford was in the courtroom on a harassment charge from a neighbor who said Ford had cursed at her in December after accusing her of talking about him to police.
Teel reportedly fined him $800 — a rather modest sum when one considers he now faces serious criminal charges and remains in critical condition.
The most disturbing account was:
Sara Williams said she was sitting in the front row when the man, whom she knew, got agitated after the judge fined him $800. He waved one of his crutches in the air.
“The police were hollering for him to get down” when an officer opened fire, she said.
Williams said she yelled “Don’t shoot him no more!” right before the officer fired again.
If that is true, it is hard to see why potentially lethal force was used. However, others describe Ford as attacking the judge.
Do you believe judges should be allowed to pack heat in a courtroom?
Source: ABA Journal
@Kay: What would be the point of this arrangement? Convenience for the witness at five times the cost for the government?
Let me do a little thinking inside the box:
When the government makes you drive to the courthouse, you pay for the gas, the parking, and the travel time. Government employed court reporters (like my niece) can work all day.
Your proposal would turn them into, primarily, drivers, and electronic technicians. It takes me 45 minutes (due to downtown congestion) to get from my door to walking in the front door of our courthouse. Round trip, that is 1.5 hours. That is time the court reporter can be reporting, instead of fighting traffic.
Presuming a testimony or deposition takes an hour, a single reporter could do 3 or 4 a day, instead of 7 or 8 from inside the courthouse. So we have to pay twice as many court reporters to do the same work.
In terms of efficiency, rapidity, reliability and economics from the court’s point of view, it makes far more sense to demand that you appear there, than for them to try and show up wherever you are.
And what if you aren’t there? Say you forgot, and ran to the store… If you don’t show up at court, they can just call the next witness, or take a short recess. They cannot do that if court reporter has to drive an hour to the next witness, who might not be there because the reporter showed up an hour early.
Speaking of recesses, when and where does the reporter get to use the restroom? Does this have to be a full Camper/RV they are driving?
Speaking of Camper/RVs, you understand these would have to be bought, parked, insured and maintained, and that will cost millions of dollars a year?
How about safety? Do you understand that some reporters might be extremely fearful driving into strange neighborhoods, to sit beside sketchy (and possibly career criminal) witnesses in the close quarters of a Van without the protection of a bailiff and police officers and weapons detectors they enjoy in a courtroom? They are skilled typists, not trained police officers or self-defense martial artists.
kay sieverding 1, February 17, 2011 at 2:31 pm
To think beyond the box, just brain storming here….
what if court was a portable office van that came to you. You are seated in front of live video with all the modern controls. The driver is a court clerk.
The magistrate comes on video and everything is recorded.
################################
I recall that Scientific American ran an article during the reign of Bush I, in which three “photographs” of Bush I and Margaret Thatcher showed:
1. The two of them walking together more than a foot apart, (the article indicated this being the original arrangement).
2. The two of them walking together, holding hands in a manner typical of cupid-struck lovers.
3. The two of them walking perhaps two feet apart looking away from each other as though furious at one another.
That article indicated that computer technology has arrived at sufficient capability as to begin to allow making any image into any other image such that there would be no way to determine, from the two pictures, which was the original.
Evidence? CG in recent movies.
To think beyond the box, just brain storming here….
what if court was a portable office van that came to you. You are seated in front of live video with all the modern controls. The driver is a court clerk.
The magistrate comes on video and everything is recorded.
The natural language of the just newly born is screaming. Nothing else. And of course that isn’t a language, it is an involuntary act which we (with formed brains) interpret as a signal and nothing more, for a newborn has no sense in which it seeks to be “understood.”
The idea that newborns have any language at all is mystical claptrap. Language and concepts depend upon brainstructures that do not exist in newborns, these structures are literally grown in the newborn brain in response to neurons being trained by the sensory organs providing inputs. This is well demonstrated in the lab using animals, and since the human progression follows the timing and progress of the animal experience precisely, there is no reason to suspect humans are any different.
Congenitally deaf people do not hear, congenitally blind people do not see. If the structures are not present, the function is not present. That is the real world, and newborns (as we know from autopsy) simply do not possess the necessary structures in the cortex to have anything remotely resembling language.
So once more, Brian is a liar, trying to deceive others to make himself feel better.
No, Brian.
I am neither your ally nor am I your validation.
What I am is consistently proving you are a propagandist with an antisocial/anti-legalist agenda attempting to hide from criticism under a veil of obfuscation.
Keep squirming though.
The harder you try to get out from under the pin of historical fact and logic, the more you illustrate your agenda and true trollish nature. But please, regale us with some religious nonsense again to justify that you have no proof for your assertions about the law and the necessity of adversarial process. It just makes that hole you’re in get that much deeper.
BiL,
I continue to illustrate how, in the world of the broad path leading to perdition, the language of the teachings of Jesus is impossible to comprehend, and you keep validating my illustrations.
You make a wonderful ally. When your learning has become sufficient, you shall understand this, and you shall not understand it before before your learning has become sufficient.
When you are ready, in this life or not, you shall understand.
You have not the power to accomplish else.
I am an ordinary person who asked, in early infancy, with every smidgen of my lifelong being, that I might be given to learn, know, understand, and share an understanding of deception sufficient to invite all of humanity to forsake deception for the sake of humanity.
From The New American Bible, Hebrews 11:1, “Faith is the realization of what is hoped for and evidence of things not seen.”
I am given unbreakable faith in the directly observable, ongoing process of existence every moment of my life.
By the way, making up a word to describe your nonsense?
Doesn’t change that is sits on a foundation of lies and mischaracterization.
For the true name of obfuscating nonsense you propagate is recubologue.
Or as Orwell dubbed it, “doublespeak”.
Like everyone else, I make mistakes.
The proper spelling, without finger-keyboard blunders is:
Veritalogue
Veritalogue is a word coined from Latin and Greek language origins, and the combining of Latin and Greek is of of the possiblity of humanity having a language shared by everyone without ineluctable misunderstandings and confusions.
The process of Veritalogue is inescapably error-correcting.
If you think your language is not deceptive, the only person you are fooling is yourself.
Within the language of misunderstanding and confusion, the only language, regardless of dialect (Dialects being such as English, French, Swahili, and such), that is the language named in the Bible, “Babel,” the language of my life, the language free of misunderstanding and confusion, is, by the dichotomous structure of the language division into Babel and non-Babel, what I say and write is difficult to impossible for people to understand inversely in accord with their acquired skill in Babel.
All things true in un-Babel, the language I use and have named “Veritaolgue,” are as though false in the language of Babel, and all things false in Veritalogue are true in Babel.
Veritalogue is my natural language and it is the natural language of the just newly born. Babel is an acquired skill needed for a person to be deceptive with no awareness of so being.