Dave Danforth:
"...Small claims courtrooms are full of cases in which one party went in demanding money, only to find the defendant countersuing and eventually winning. Judges see through the vanity of plaintiffs. The winner is not always the one who fires the first shot.
They go in counting on winning. Not only do they come up empty, but they finish in the minus money.
In Aspen years ago, an ad agency sued a small company for an unpaid bill. The small company’s partners felt that they agency had overcharged it. They’d let bygones be bygones, but when the case was filed, decided to fight back. They countersued.
The judge decided the ad agency had breached its pricing and hadn’t put its desired charges in writing. Its owner, the would-be winner, was told to pay up instead.
Call it pushing your luck. It infects politics. Candidates miscalculate the effect of the rough and tumble. Opposition research is a field all its own, and nearly everyone is vulnerable. The mess often splashes out of bounds, causing collateral damage.
If you’re Herman Cain, one-time presidential material, how many women had to serially come out of the woodwork talking about your groping past to persuade you to give it up? What morsels will emerge about the remaining candidates before the race is over? The gamble that a piece of their past won’t be dislodged with time, particularly in an unforgiving digital era when bits of the past don’t yellow with age.
No candidate, asked to write up his or her own life, would do as nearly an unforgiving job as members of the public, press, and opposition research teams. Nearly every candidate has sworn that photographers were out for blood, capturing an unexpected moment of a growl or grimace. It gets worse on television, where cameras catch a napping moment and later repackage it for prime time.
Juries are notoriously unpredictable, but that doesn’t stop high-stakes gambles. Jurors feel a spell while the case is on, but afterwards, there is little anyone can do about them. Free speech follows. In one Aspen criminal trial, jurors decided that prosecutors had completely botched the case. A not guilty verdict would not do justice. So they appointed a spokesperson and declared that the district attorney (not the incumbent) had got the case entirely backwards. The defendant was the victim and the “victim” was the perp, the panel declared. They even apologized.
There’s only one thing worse than a judge who believes a case to have been a waste time. Juries come in two sizes: six-packs and twelves...." (Read more? Click title)
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