Gather ’round, children, and I will tell you the teeeeerrifying thing that happened to me last night. I know it’s a few seasons too early for supernatural tomfoolery, but tell that to whatever happened to me and Tyler.

It was a windy night, and rain was falling softly outside, but not enough for the hoot owls to not sit outside my damn window and hoot at me every few hours. At one point, the wind slammed my door shut, and I checked to see that Scamp was inside on my chair, which he was, and he usually slept through the night, as part of his daily 20 hours of sleep. I made a mental note to keep my go-go-Gadget ears awake to listen for him scratching at the door if he needed to use the restroom, which was unlikely. This was probably 4:00 AM.

At 5:00 AM, I was settling in to an only-slightly upsetting dream about various people from high school working at my current job, when I suddenly awoke to seven or eight persistent knocks on my bedroom door. It’s not out of the realm of possibility, as both my roommates stay up pretty late, and sometimes things come up. I wasn’t too concerned except for the fact that it was really loud and 5:00 AM and only bad things happen loudly at 5:00 AM.

Half the knock happened in dream, and I continued to hear the other half as I was waking up. I nudged Tyler, as he was closest to the door. I called him my brother’s name, which isn’t as creepily Freudian as it may seem. My brain ran a search query for a close male protector in my life and came up with two results. “Ryan? Uh, um. Tyler?” And I motioned towards the door. “Someone’s knocking.” He was still pretty half asleep, too, and the knock was so urgent sounding, that I just said, “Yes?” expecting a roommate to burst in and tell me that Law and Order WASN’T canceled or that they just made cookies and could I help eat some so they don’t eat them all. Nothing. Not even a shuffling away.

Sleepy Tyler looked around for Scamp, who may have been the source of the sound, and found him in my chair, as I had. “The door’s closed,” I said, with probably more of an undertone of: “So why don’t you go open it and see what knocked?!”

He wearily got up and opened the door to what I’d feared — nothing. At this point, though, I resigned to myself that it had been a stupid dream. I swore I’d heard something, but my dreams are always weird and hyper realistic. But, then again, I’m a light sleeper, so my Buffy and Wolverine and flying dreams are too often interrupted by my cat licking himself or something.

“Let’s go back to sleep,” Tyler said. “I’ll bet that knocking was just Bryn trying to get into Melli’s room.”
…
“Wait, so you *did* hear it?” I asked, heart suddenly racing.
“Yeah.”
“What did it sound like?” I asked, getting into skeptical Ghost Hunter mode, hoping and anticipating for a soft, irregular shave-and-a-haircut-type knock. Not so lucky. He knocked the bed sheets seven or eight times really loud — exactly what I’d heard.

We both stared up at the door, me fully anticipating Slenderman or someone was going to burst through any minute.
“Let’s go to bed,” Tyler suggested.
“Are you crazy? We both heard the same creepy knock and it was nothing!”
“What do you want me to do?”

He knew what I wanted him to do. I wanted him to put on my pink robe and go out and see that Melli and Bryn were awake and knocked on the shared wall accidentally or that some lunatic was outside past the deadbolt, knocking on people’s doors, unable to get to us, but solving the mystery. And bless Tyler’s heart, he did.

I got scared while he was away, really, sincerely hoping that Slenderman didn’t get him, but deciding it had been a pretty good run if he had, and he came back with the better news of being alive, but not much past that.

“Melli and Bryn are sound asleep and all the doors are locked. No one’s here. Let’s go to sleep. I’ll protect you.”
“Not from ghosts and Slenderman, you won’t,” I muttered, but I don’t think he heard me.

I, of course, lay awake for about an hour after that, trying to blame it on anything else, but everything had the wrong frequency and rhythm. The metallic door stop that Scamp liked to play with would start out strong and fast and then fade away. The dreamcatcher hanging on my window would be blown by wind and then ricochet, but that would start out slow and get faster and quieter as it calmed down. I couldn’t figure it out, and I still can’t.

Whooooo knows what will happen when I go to sleep tonight?! I think I know. Tyler will play Red Dead Redemption until 12:30, by which time I will get so sick of playing Peggle next to him, I’ll just fall asleep. Until Slenderman pounds on my door again for a drink of water.

Int: Lauren’s Car — Day
A song from Mama Mia plays.

Tyler: Oh, this is the weird song where the women are all dancing around the men.
Lauren: I haven’t actually seen Mama Mia.
Tyler: You should!
Lauren: Well, I’ve seen “Three Men and a Baby,” so…
Tyler: Yeah, you know that’s totally different, right?
Lauren: I’m sure it’s the same.
Tyler: You know, they’re making another one of those movies.
Lauren: Yeah, it’s called “Three Men and a Little Lady,” which I also saw.
Tyler: …It’s called “Three Men and a Bride,” and everyone from the originals is signed back on for it. Even Nancy Travis!
Lauren: Wait, I thought the mom died.
Tyler: That’s “My Two Dads”! You’re mixing up all your Paternity Mix-Up movies!

So…I was thinking…

Just wondering!

You can find parts 1 and 2 by clicking on those numbers!

So, when we left off, the scent dog pointed out both bad guys — Rocksteady a little more than Beebop, but more or less both. Sure. I hadn’t come to a decision BECAUSE WE WEREN’T ALLOWED TO, but the notes in my spiral notebook telling a pretty straightforward tale. The audio tape didn’t send me any way or the other.

The scientist took the stand for the DNA evidence, and this part was so complicated, we had to have the COURT transcript read back to us by the court reporter during deliberation, which was actually kind of fun. Sort of like TiVoing real life! I could have used a court reporter during arguments with my ex.

It was so complicated that I’ll just tell you the basics. The two shirts were used almost solely for the dog scent, as almost no DNA could be extracted from them. They could have worn them for a short time or just not sweat very much, but they weren’t as helpful as Crime TV shows might lead you to believe. The latex gloves, however, were another story, as perfect prints would have been kept on the inside of them. There were also prints on the hood and inside mirror of the car. The prints belonged to Rocksteady, who admitted living in the neighborhood where the car was parked and having a backyard party where he may have leaned against the car, or been asked by his brother-in-law to back it out of the driveway (and the first thing you do in a car you don’t usually drive is adjust the mirror).

The DNA is what made the case 12 years old. Instead of labeling the t-shirts “Beebop” and “Rocksteady,” the police who logged the items wrote “Boobep” and “Lockstoody.” It was also discovered that the “control” samples — willingly given by each of them — were accidentally swapped. Beebop’s was labeled Rocksteady and vice versa.

Testing was done 12 years ago, and it was found that Rocksteady had a 1 in 1 billion chance of being the donor of the t-shirt. Beebop had a 1 in 5 chance, which is terrifyingly vague. That could be anyone.
Only, and thankfully, the police send their findings to an outside scientific source to double-check their findings, and this scientist found that…actually ROCKSTEADY had the 1 in 5 chance and Beebop had the 1 in 1 billion. It was like a roller coaster being in that courtroom. “I guess that guy will end up being totally guilty. Oh. Well, now I guess THAT guy will.”

So that was it. Dog pointed out Rocksteady and only sort of pointed out Beebop. DNA pointed to Beebop and only sort of pointed out Rocksteady. They talked about SOMETHING in a car that (to me) didn’t really point either way.

There were two bits of circumstantial evidence also to be weighed. One was that, during a search of Beebop’s aunt and uncle’s house, $7,000 cash was found. His uncle said it was a bonus from work, but he didn’t have a pay stub. But he could be an illegal worker, in case he wouldn’t have had a pay stub, but it wasn’t necessary suggestive of murder money.

Then Rocksteady’s baby mama took the stand and admitted that she canceled child support sort of around the time of the robbery. But she protested that she was automatically and unknowingly signed UP for child support when she filed for welfare. Later, when she realized her mistake and decided not to make Rocksteady pay (since she had a legit job and he was struggling to get by), she canceled it on her own accord (NOT because she suddenly got a huge payment), and admitted that the timing on that one really sucked.

So weigh that. Weigh it against everything else. Me? I like DNA evidence. You pretty much can’t fight it. It’s you. There. Dog-scent evidence is a little trickier (though not an “art rather than a science” as Raphael tried to protest), which is why I was the last hold-out on Rocksteady’s possible guilt.

Why did I hold out? It was because of everything Splinter said at the beginning. Innocent until proven guilty. If you’re half and half, go with innocence.
Why did I eventually concur that both Beebop AND Rocksteady were guilty? The part he mentioned about “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

I had a little doubt. Maybe almost reasonable. But if you’re LOOKING for an out, you’re going to find one. I remember when Donatello first was weeding the jurors out, he asked us; “If someone breaks into your house and steals something, and you see a trail of wet footprints from your pool to where the object was stolen to outside on your lawn, where a guy is sleeping in wet clothes, you have to go with what’s obvious.” I remember at the time trying to come up with some alternate method why a guy would be found like that and have it NOT be him, and it just got to be too convoluted to be worth it. And he was right. I’m sad he was right, because Rocksteady’s baby mama cried hysterically when the verdict was written. Then he looked over at us with these eyes that were just pleading and hurt. It made me cry, too, and I probably looked like a weirdo in front of everyone. Beebop stayed stone-faced the whole time, which is not an admission of anything, but I felt sorry for the both of them, and I still do. I’m sorry on every level that what happened happened, but I was there to do what I thought was right, and I did.

I don’t pat myself on the back because 11 people agreed with me, either, because 11 people can be idiots. 2 of them were late every. single. day. which irked me to no end. Okay, lateness doesn’t make you a bad decision-maker, but if they have no respect for us law-abiding people waiting on their no-alarm-clock-using asses, what do they care about the criminals?
Then Granny over there admitted to having her mind made up from the beginning. There was also a foreign man who admitted not understanding many words used in court. Two other men came from gang neighborhoods (and shared the race with the defendants), and one of them even recognized someone in the audience who was there with Rocksteady’s family. He told the judge, and the judge said he could either make the decision to stay or go, and he opted to stay, even though his safety back in the rough neighborhood might now be at risk.

It was a weird and emotional chapter of my life, but trials like that happens every day. Maybe more often in California, which is depressing, but we also have like a skillion people here, so reconsider it however you want. I am glad I was a part of it, and I sort of never want to do it again.

A coworker walked behind me as I was writing this, saw the title, and asked if I had tried to get out of Jury Duty by wearing a Ninja Turtle costume. Maybe next time, I will. I’ve done my duty! I’m out.

If you missed ahht on Part 1, you can find it hizzear.

I’d like to start this entry by saying — it’s sort of inappropriate for me to give Ninja Turtles names to the counsel because…I didn’t like them. The whole time, I felt like I was being lied to. I felt like both of them were bending words deliberately to confuse me. And I’m smart! We weren’t allowed to speculate as to why objections were made, but sometimes they were during things I thought it was necessary to hear. Other times, they were during things that were so arbitrary, I couldn’t figure out why they were made. “Is your shirt blue?” “Objection!” “Sustained.” “Your shirt — is it blue?” “Objection!” “Sustained.” “If you were wearing a shirt today, and it was blue, would you say, ‘yes’?” Oh, that one’s allowed! Carry on.

I should also let you know that, as were the rules of being a juror, you are supposed to ASSUME the person is innocent, and then let the evidence convince you otherwise or not. If you’re 50/50, you were supposed to go with “innocent.” Beebop and Rocksteady were also on trial separately, and one could be guilty and the other innocent. We were also supposed to consider that being involved in the crime was a crime itself — ie. the driver was no more or less guilty than the passenger who was said to have pulled the trigger.

Let me skip ahead and spoiler alert myself by saying that I was the final holdout maintaining Rocksteady’s innocence. I’m not proud of this, as I don’t like being in the minority or having people ganging up on me. I am also not easily swayed. While Judge Splinter was swearing us in, he brought up these very topics. You weren’t supposed to “just go with the flow” because you were too meek to oppose, but you also weren’t supposed to stand alone just because you’re stubborn. You also weren’t supposed to let other people’s opinions change yours, if you feel the opposing viewpoint in your heart — and, you know, your brain, as influenced by a pile of evidence.

It all came down to Dog Scent Evidence versus DNA Evidence.

Scientists were brought up to the stand to “teach” us about DNA, so that those of us who had to pretend to ignore anything we’d known from before could have those gaps legally filled in. Raphael and Michaelangelo, the defense team, hilariously tried to discredit these scientists in the most ridiculous ways possible, and it was hard not to laugh out loud while looking at the scientist’s face, who was also trying not to laugh out loud.

“Isn’t DNA, like, really small?” “So a fingerprint can CHANGE LENGTH?! NOT VERY CREDIBLE, IF YOU ASK ME!!” *
*This one took me a sec, but, yeah, if you lightly touch something, the grooves of your fingerprint will be closer together than if you were to mash your finger into the surface, which is why they take the design into account more than the fingerprint-groove distances.

Then, dog trainers came in to explain to us about dog scent training and identification, and I had to pretend I hadn’t captioned all those shows for Animal Planet about how flawless the dogs are and how well-trained they are, and also forget dogs I’d actually seen find objects in real life. Come ON, isn’t this “Blatant Ignoring Things You Know” the stuff they were supposed to weed me out for in Jury Selection? Oh, I forgot…Things you see on TV don’t count. Discovery Channel is obviously run by liars with their own agendas.

So, last we left off in the actual STORY, Beebop was in jail for something else. Rocksteady was free and being watched by police, and he knew it. Testing on t-shirts and latex gloves found in and around the car, though, takes time, and although the lawyers never explicitly say it, the only thing that the police have going for them is the positive ID by Baxter Stockman, which, to me, is shady at best.

The cops did a sweep of the neighborhoods where Beebop and Rocksteady had been known to frequent. The two said they don’t know each other “very well” but as was revealed in gasping testimony later, they’re actually brothers-in-law. One dog, led by his trainer, got a sniff of Beebop’s shirt and walked down the road. He stopped briefly by an address that the trainer didn’t know, but was later proven to be his aunt and uncle’s house where he stayed. The dog didn’t go in, though, which the turtles had a field day with. On the stand, the trainer said he was scared to go any further into a house where there may be a criminal. “Ah,” Raphael says, “but you said the police didn’t tell you ANYTHING or it would taint your ability to give a blind search! But yet You KNEW it was a criminal! So they could have EASILY told you something ELSE? HMM? LIKE WHICH HOUSE TO GO TO!” I wanted to stand up and yell, “Yeah? Well, they don’t do dog scent searches to give you Publisher’s Clearing House awards, you manipulative jerk. Of COURSE he assumes it’s a criminal!” I mean, the sheer fact that he stopped at Beebop’s house…out of ANY house on the street…is pretty significant. People can argue that police dogs WANT to find things and want to please their masters so much that they feel let down if they turn up nothing, but I mean, it is the house of Beebop — the guy who (skipping ahead) ended up matching the DNA evidence.

When a different dog did a search for Rocksteady, he was still free and at home. The dog pointed near the house, “signaling” that he had found the source of his scent. Some police radioed to the trainer to pause, as they knocked on Rocksteady’s door and ask him to come outside for more questions — since, remember, he already knew they wanted him for SOMETHING. The trainer calmly walked past and the dog, sniffing Rocksteady as he passed, stopped and sat right in front of him — which was HIS “signal” that he’d found the source of the scent.

Now there were DAYS of witness testimony about this. First, people argued that: Isn’t a dog SITTING sort of a sketchy tell? It would be different if he made a digging motion or pointed or barked or something else that wasn’t “normal dog behavior.” What if he was just tired? What if, as Rocksteady’s family SWORE, the trainer stopped first, and the dog followed suit, being well-behaved?

Then, in what was the most tense moment in court (and when I almost busted out laughing again), Michaelangelo, in what was granted a pretty snarky tone, asked the dog trainer on the stand WHY he had the dog sniff the articles 4 times — once at each end of the street, before he did a pass. Wasn’t the scent strong enough to sustain him? And if it was such a weak scent, how can it be reliable?
“Well, Michelangelo,” the dog trainer started, “that’s because, if I didn’t, people like YOU would ask me if I were certain he were following the correct scent.”
“Peop-PEOPLE LIKE *ME*?! DO YOU ASSUME TO KNOW WHAT I’M ABOUT TO ASK YOU?!” His face got all read and everyone held their breath, because it was really strange to see such a lack of composure in what was otherwise a smooth waltz of polite justice. I tried not to laugh. Calm down, buddy. I think you just got served.

The dog sitting was enough to get a warrant for the arrest of Rocksteady, and the police put him in the back of a tapped cruiser. They then got Beebop out of holding and left them in the car alone together before moving them both to a new cell. I also knew enough from movies and television to know that this sort of tapping is totally legal, and when the bleeding-heart hippie juror exclaimed it was an injustice of human rights, it was all I could do to roll my eyes. Of course, when we did the tally, she thought they were both guilty and I thought Rocksteady was innocent, so who’s the bleeding heart now?

So, they’re in the back of the cop car, and they have a conversation in Spanish, of which we are given a translated transcript and asked to hold the translation AS PURE TRUTH even if we speak Spanish and find a mistranslation. For example, if someone answers a word that can be translated as “Sure” or “Right,” and it’s translated as “Yes,” you, as a Spanish speaker, are REQUIRED BY LAW to take the transcript’s translation instead of your own. I guess the difference here is small, but as a linguist, “Right” and “Yes” can mean very different things. One can mean simply “Keep talking, even though I don’t necessarily agree with you,” but I guess we weren’t there to discuss the ins and outs of Spanish translation.

In Spanish, these two men have more or less the following conversation.
Rocksteady: Do you know why we’re here?
Beebop: No. Do you?
Rocksteady: No, but if I had to guess it has to do with that robbery.
Beebop: Hmm.
Rocksteady: Why us?
Beebop: I don’t know.
Rocksteady: They said they have some evidence, like, fingerprints and stuff.
Beebop: Hmm.
Rocksteady: Do you have guns at your house?
Beebop: No, but there’s ammo.
*English speaking cops get in and drive them to the station*

Now. Two things annoyed me about this conversation, which seemed to “seal the deal” for some jury members. Which, by the way, you’re not supposed to come to a conclusion until the end of the trial. You’re supposed to keep an open mind throughout. So when Grandma in the deliberation room says she knew Rocksteady did it from early on, I wanted to kick her in the teeth.

Anyway, 1) this conversation did not necessarily implicate either of them. What if you lived in a small neighborhood, where almost everyone’s family or at least friends, and a robbery goes down a few blocks away? You might hear about it. Hell, you might even KNOW who did it. It doesn’t have to be your friend. You don’t even have to know EXACTLY who did it. If you know someone who is in a gang who knows another gang…I mean, word travels, and people like to talk. But are we allowed to assume even this? Is this common sense? If a kid steals a ball on the playground, and everyone’s crying about the ball, is knowing about the stolen ball a crime?
2) The officers also spoke in English on the tape. Deciphering completely garbled audio was my job for almost 5 years. I caught at least 4 errors in the English-to-English transcription. Can I really to trust this Spanish one? I guess I had to.

This is getting way too long. Part 3 tomorrow. PROMISE!