Yesterday in the Jim Leyritz’ DUI manslaughter trial, Judge Marc H. Gold explained his earlier ruling that excluded evidence of the victim’s blood alcohol level. Specifically, he referred to a prior judge’s ruling that set a precedent in Florida that only a living victim’s blood-alcohol level is relevant, because a living victim can give testimony and be cross-examined as to his or her perceptions of traffic conditions.

I have to retract my criticism of Judge Gold. He did, as I said, withhold important facts from the Leyritz jury, but he was forced to do so by the prior judge’s ruling.

Precedents like this one are tyrannous, because they take the power of legislation out of the hands of the people’s representatives and put it into the hands of judges.

Dark Age Thinking

American courts are truly medieval in their workings. They’re literally the last bastion of medieval scholasticism. Wikipedia’s definition of scholasticism could easily be applied to the way judges write decisions:

“Not so much a philosophy or a theology as a method of learning, scholasticism placed a strong emphasis on dialectical reasoning to extend knowledge by inference, and to resolve contradictions. Scholastic thought is also known for rigorous conceptual analysis and the careful drawing of distinctions. In the classroom and in writing, it often takes the form of explicit disputation: a topic drawn from the tradition is broached in the form of a question, opponents' responses are given, a counterproposal is argued and opponent's arguments rebutted. Because of its emphasis on rigorous dialectical method, scholasticism was eventually applied to many other fields of study.

As a program, scholasticism was part of an attempt at harmonization on the part of medieval Christians thinkers: to harmonize the various "authorities" of their own tradition, and to reconcile Christian theology with classical and late antique philosophy . . . .

 

Scholastics studied their predecessors’ theological writings, analyzed them, and tried to reconcile them with their predecessors’ predecessors and with the Bible. They didn’t study nature or historical facts. They didn’t even write original theology so much as they wrote exegesis of other people’s theological writings.

That’s what American judges do, too, except that they study and analyze the law, not theology, and they try to reconcile their predecessors’ writings with common law and the Constitution as well as with other precedents.

Judges don’t study the evidence and decide whether it’s valid. They don’t look at the fingerprints, for instance, and decide whether they’re too smudged to be presented to the jury; they only look at whether the CSIs followed standard operating procedure and a proper chain of custody was maintained. They don’t examine the evidence (such as the blood-alcohol level of victim in the Leyritz accident) and then decide whether it’s relevant. They examine prior judges’ rulings about blood-alcohol level evidence of victims in earlier cases.

Judges don’t write new laws or even new rules of evidence. Judges just write opinions of other judge’s opinions.

The Jury

The Leyritz jury was abused yesterday: The prosecution asked a witness about seeing the victim drink before she got behind the wheel (after the judge had ruled the victim’s blood alcohol was not admissible by the defense). Then the prosecution asked the witness to evaluate the victim’s “state” when he last saw her. The defense was forced to object and request a sidebar, because the witness seemed about to give an uninformed opinion about the victim’s sobriety. (In the end, the witness described her as being her usual self, by which I do not believe he meant that she was always drunk; rather that she was coherent and in control.) 

At that point, the jury was ejected from the courtroom and left to sit in silence in the deliberation room, frustrated, confused.

Alcohol and Driving

Alcohol behind the wheel is the real villain in the Leyritz case. It isn’t clear yet which driver was more intoxicated than the other. It isn’t entirely clear yet which driver had the red light when the collision occurred. (Although all the evidence I’ve heard so far indicates the victim is the one who ran the red light.)

Tyranny of Precedents

If the Leyritz trial doesn’t demonstrate what’s wrong with judges relying on precedents, I don’t know what does. Because a Florida judge—a judge who may have been voted off the bench by now (we can only hope)—at some time in the past decided that a victim’s blood alcohol level can only be admitted in cases in which the victim is still alive, the jury will probably never know that the victim in this case was drunk, and far more drunk than the defendant.

In effect, this shifts the decision even to charge the defendant with a crime from the citizenry (grand jury) to the police. If the victim had been wearing seatbelts and had lived, the responding officers would have detected that she was intoxicated. They might have arrested her or both of them. They might not even have arrested Leyritz. But she died in the crash, and her intoxication wasn’t discovered until the autopsy.

The precedent (“Edwards” I think they’re calling it) is stupid. It not only prejudices defendants in manslaughter cases, it prejudices defendants in every car wreck, because victims can die of other causes before a case gets to trial.

Among the sections of the Edwards decision that Judge Gold read yesterday was a reference to the relevance of a living victim’s blood-alcohol level: the jury could take it into account when evaluating the victim’s “perceptions” of what had happened. This is stupid, too. I suppose it might make sense in a civil suit for the jury to evaluate both sides’ “perceptions,” but in a criminal trial the only issue is whether a law was broken and whether it was the defendant who broke it.

The jury is “the finder of fact”: In the Leyritz trial, the jury isn’t being given all the evidence, so they can’t possibly find the fact. If Leyritz’ lawyer is good, he’ll plant the seeds of reasonable doubt in the jury’s mind that Leyritz isn’t the one who broke the law—or at least isn’t the only one.

But why couldn’t the justice system have realized on its own that the evidence wasn’t strong enough against Leyritz to justify charging him with a crime and putting him on trial at public expense?

I’m going to have to say it again: prosecutors shouldn’t be politicians. Politicians pounce on every celebrity case, because they’re sure to get their faces on TV. Is it any coincidence that the Leyritz trial was scheduled to start just before the election this year?