By all accounts it's going slowly in the Conrad Black trial in Chicago, but some moments are slower than others.
"The endless arid desert of Noncompetistan"
The Denver Qwest trial started on the same day as the Black trial, and the Qwest jurors are already deliberating. Meanwhile in Chicago, the prosecution's case continues.
It sounds like the government is mired in its documents. Mark Steyn at Maclean's describes "gazing at the giant projection screen, on which was displayed yet another memorandum" in the "shimmering haze of the endless arid desert of Noncompetistan," where "whole days go by without any witness mentioning Conrad Black." Steyn is a Lord Black partisan, but he's not the only one who's bored. Toronto Life chimes in that even evidence about the island paradise of Bora Bora
failed to lift the trial from the legal mud in which it wallows. The trial has grown so boring that CBC radio updates simply state that Black is there because of non-compete payments and leave it at that.
Death by video clip
You have to wonder whether jurors' hearts filled with hope when the television came out. It was only a video deposition, but at least it was TV. Alas, the deponent's lengthy testimony was "edited down to a rollicking 12-hour director’s cut," said Steyn. The beginning, though, had to be more painful for the government lawyers than for the jury:
It began with an off-camera government attorney asking him to look at three documents and say whether he recognized them. They totaled about 400 pages. He studied the first page carefully. He turned to the second page and studied that. He turned to the third and paid it especially close attention.
It's easy to guess what happened. Somebody on the government's team approved the video clip based on the deposition transcript, without actually watching it. The transcript presumably said, roughly, "Question: do you recognize these documents? Answer: Yes." But the pause -- okay, the extended silent meditation -- didn't show up on the transcript, and nobody looked at the clip itself until the jury was looking at it too. Steyn records the agony:
Outside [the deponent's] window, the leaves were turning quicker than the ones on his desk. By about page 327, I swear I could hear cicadas in between the page lifts.
Moral of the story
Watch your clips, watch your clips, watch your clips. In my own experience, approximately zero percent of video clips are what you thought you wanted based on the transcript alone. At best, the clip is always two or three questions too long when you hear it in real time. At worst, you get -- well, something like this story.
(Image by Adam B. at http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=81766440&size=m; license details there.)
