Lead Story
Paul Zellerbach, a judge in Riverside County, California, was publicly admonished by a state board in August for an incident from October 2004 in which, with a jury in its second day of deliberations in a murder trial, he left the courthouse to attend an afternoon playoff game between the Los Angeles Angels and the Boston Red Sox. When his clerk called at 2:30 to tell him the jury had reached a verdict, Zellerbach didn’t immediately return the call; the clerk therefore arranged to have another judge handle it. On calling back and hearing of this, Zellerbach said he wanted to take the verdict himself and insisted (over both lawyers’ objections) on rescheduling for the next day, meaning the jurors, the defendant, the victim’s and defendant’s families, and counsel all had to come back in the morning.
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People Different From Us
In August Reuters reported on the death of a man on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro; police believe he had tried to open a rocket-propelled grenade with a sledgehammer. And a few days earlier near Clay City, Indiana, a 31-year-old man was killed when one of the homemade pipe bombs he’d brought along on a fishing trip (possibly intending to use them to stun the fish) went off and sent a piece of shrapnel through his heart.
