Random Friday Morning Thoughts

The video is still up, and it's still glorious.   

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• Add the new numbers for August 5th of 8,130. The Pandemic of the Unvaccinated is soaring.  
  
  
  
• If you want an insight into the anti-vaxxers, just listen to a conservative locally based talk show on WBAP or 660 The Answer during the day when they take calls. It's insane. And the real crazies get absolutely no push back from the hosts. Heard one caller say yesterday that one co-worker got Bell's palsy from the vaccine and another got the shingles.
• As I predicted, former Dallas police officer Amber Guyger's conviction was affirmed on appeal late yesterday. Quick observations:
• Here's what I said in April after oral arguments: 
  
  
  
• I was dead on. Of all the complicated issues in the case, it boiled down to this on appeal: The key is that the jury rejected the defense that Amber's use of deadly force was necessary even if the jury believed she actually thought she had entered her own apartment. Bottom line: The jury rejected self-defense  -- which means they found there were options she had other than killing him -- and the evidence supports that conclusion. 
  
  
  
• I was always 100% right that this was not a criminal negligence case instead of a murder case, and the appellate court said the trial court was 100% right on not giving the jury that option. Amber intended to kill him (that's a murder charge) instead of accidentally killing him while doing something incredibly stupid (criminal negligence.)
  
  
  
• I was always confused why some experts were calling the case a "mistake of fact" legal defense situation. It was not, and the court said so. Mistake of fact would be a situation where, say, you were on your ranch and fired your rifle into what you truly thought was a fallen tree trunk. Turns out, it was actually a person who had entered your land and was asleep. You were mistaken about a critical fact (you thought it was a log) and that mistake "negated your culpable mental state" (intent to kill a human being.) 
• Now whether she was mistaken about being her apartment was relevant as to whether she reasonably thought she needed to used self-defense. And, if she was truly mistaken, it would have justified some use of self-defense. Once again, the jury just rejected her assertion of self-defense that the reasonable option for her was to kill him. 
• Back when I read Amber's lawyer's brief when it was filed, I made fun of him spending multiple pages on some case he found from a court in England. It didn't escape the court's notice either, and they took a mild shot at it in a footnote. My flashback bullet point and the court's footnote: 
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Legal nerd stuff: I went nuts about how the jury instructions were actually so wrongly worded in favor of Amber that I couldn't believe no on caught it at trial. On appeal, the State did catch it and tried to get the court to say the instruction shouldn't have been worded that way. My post about that is here.  The appellate court, as expected, didn't address the issue because they jury ignored the instruction and the State just doesn't get a free advisory appellate opinion on what is now an irrelevant matter. (Footnote 4.)
• Here's a pretty good legal question for you: Is deadly force justified when someone who has stole beer from you is in the process of running away?
  
  
  
• If you ever wanted to see what the inside of a "chop shop" looks like, we got pictures from one in Dallas County yesterday.
  
  
  
• The No-Big-Government-Conservative-Republicans are very difficult to figure out. So not only do they not want local school district making the decisions, they don't even want the individual states to tell the districts what to do. No, they want the federal government to control local school districts. 
  
  
  
• Back to COVID: Bexar County (San Antonio) has halted all jury trials. Jefferson County joined the halt as well.
• Breaking: Unemployment rate drops from 5.9% in June to 5.4% in July.
• I've got serious questions about this. It is 100% undisputed that Fentanyl overdose by exposure is a myth. He may have fainted, but it wasn't Fentanyl related.
  
  
  
• It would be a perfect circle if these boys had been the ones who had written Idiocracy.
  
  
  
• This would have been a fantastic picture last night but they had Jerry and Troy's trophies in the wrong places. 
  
  
  
• Time which has passed since the Wise County Sheriff's Office has failed to solve the murder of Lauren Whitener in her home at Lake Bridgeport: 763 days.
• Messenger: Above the Fold