True crime

I'm currently reading The Lost Night: A Daughter's Search for the Truth of her Father's Murder by Rachel Howard. I'm finding it interesting, but not nearly as compelling as James Ellroy's My Dark Place, on his investigation into his mother's murder. I'd rate Lost Night as one worth getting from the library, but not a keeper.

One early frustration I had with the book was with Howard's mother - I have a hard time believing that an woman in the 1980s, working as a nurse and making over $80,000 a year, would feel all her options were gone and she had no choice but to stay with a heroin addict, even choosing to marry him after she got pregnant (with Howard's little brother), and then staying with him for years.

Life on the farm

I just finished The Old Buzzard Had It Coming, an enjoyable mystery set in Oklahoma in 1912. The main character is Alafair Tucker, the mother of 9 and a hardworking farmer's wife. When one of her daughters gets involved with a young man with an abusive father, and the father is later found murdered, Alafair gets involved in investigating the crime to save her daughter. Not a lot of twists and turns, but a well-written nostalgic look at the past. I'll definitely keep my eye out for the sequel.

What I learned this week

Did you know that if you spit in a patrol car in Oregon you can be charged with third degree vandalism?

I was called in for jury duty and I learned that there. The defendant was being charged with DUII and vandalism.

14 of the potential jurors were considered for a jury of 6. 2 were dismissed during the questioning stage - one after a private session with the attorneys & the judge and one after he disclosed that he had been hit by a drunk driver a few years ago and had some permanent damage.

The defense attorney asked everyone what magazines they read - he stopped me after 5. Overall we were a pretty educated bunch - the pool included 3 engineers from HP, 2 college professors, a graduate student, and a retired bookkeeper - that makes sense since Corvallis is a college town. He also had this strange technique - he asked each of us "Do you believe that you will be able to find this defendent not guilty if the state doesn't prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt?" and he put his hand on the defendant's shoulder every time he got to "this defendant". Since he did this 14 times, it was a little surreal by the time he got to the 14th juror.

After the attorneys finished questioning us (this took almost 2 hours), we were excused from the courtroom while they picked the jury of 6 from the 12 of us who were left in the pool. Since I wasn't picked, that was the end of my civic duty for the day.