Have been catching up on 4 days of the Prop 8 trial. The defence have been making their case, with a mere 2 expert witnesses, though the qualifier 'expert' is debatable, and indeed has been the subject of much scrutiny by the plaintiff's counsel and the court. Both witnesses have been subjected to voir dire (what you do when you don't think an expert is an expert, or evidence counts as evidence), which happened to none of the plaintiff's witnesses. Boies has been completely destroying the first of the defence's witnesses, by using the man's own words against him. When testifying in court, you really really shouldn't make opposing statements within 5 minutes of each other.
Now considering this is a trial about the constitutionality of proposition 8, where the cases largely come down to whether prop 8 harms a minority or repealling it would harm society more, and whether the vote of yes on prop 8 was motivated by prejudices, especially religious ones, the 'expert' clearly doesn't know even the basics:
B: You know Catholic Church’s opinion on homosexuality?
M: Uh…
The second witness, whilst a bit more collected than the first, doesnt fare much better under cross:
Boies. You know that same sex couples are raising children?
DB: Of course!
Boies: Hundreds of thousands?
DB: I don’t know.
Boies: Did you attempt to find out how many?
DB: Yes.
Boies: Approximately how many?
DB: I don’t know.
Hmmm, clearly he didn't attempt that hard then. This is the problem with the former generation, they don't appreciate how wikipedia can answer any question when you need to do last minute research.
Also, please go read Blackenhorn's testimony. In direct he is against same-sex marriage, and tentatively for DPs as a compromise, in cross, he is for (note, not even, concedes, he offers the view freely), same sex marriage. Oh dear.... Personally I think this says it all, bear in mind the guy is testifying in a court of law as an expert witness on a matter of federal import here:
DB: It never occurred to me that everything I would say regarding my views had to be documented...
Blackenhorn just comes across as petulant in all of this, he's constantly avoiding saying a definitive 'yes', 'no', or 'i don't know' to Boies questions, no matter how many times the man rephrases them, and constantly tries to attack the definition of terms in the questioning. Finally, Boies gets the following out of him:
DB: ...I can’t answer these yes or no. I do know the answers and I can’t answer when you ask that way.
The trial has now substantially finished. Closing arguements have been postponed until the judge has had time to review the quite frankly massive volume of evidence submitted by both sides, and so we're stuck waiting till February 26th to see any further developments on this. This translates as a return to my normal ramblings for the next month or so.
In other news, I finally caught up on everything that was getting ahead of me, but that's only because my body crashed from 1900 last night through to 1300 today, thus missing all my lectures and tutorials -_- Goddammit.
Mood: Meh. That is all.
Music: http://open.spotify.com/user/jorgamond/playlist/7firS9s8mwBaQr02IBP1GO
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