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Join us each Tuesday as Bob Ingersoll analyzes how the law
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THE LAW IS A ASS for 09/10/2002
DOCKET ENTRY
"The Law is a Ass" Installment # 161
Originally written as installment # 143 and published in Comics Buyer's Guide issue # 765, July 15, 1988 issue
I have no memory of writing this column. If the conditions under which I wrote it are as I described them, and I have no reason to doubt myself on this, that's not surprising. Understand I have plenty of reasons to doubt myself on lots of things. This just isn't one of them. Still, If I were really writing under the handicaps set forth hereinafter, I didn't do a bad job at all.
Of course what did you expect me to say, the column sucked, just skip it and wait for next week's installment? I'm a lawyer; you want that must honesty, go read a column by a barber.
******
THE LAW IS A ASS
Installment # 161
by
BOB INGERSOLL
It's 11:00 p.m.; do you know where your children are? Mine are where I should be, in bed asleep.
It's late. I'm bone tired. I'm chugging Pepsi by the two-liter bottle just to shoot enough caffeine into my system to keep me going until I get to the next sentence. And I chose this time to start writing a column--fully expecting myself to be funny. (How am I doing so far?) (That's what I thought.)
I owe Don and Maggie a column. Work has been piling up faster than cars in a Los Angeles fender bender. I've been putting in full days just to maintain "The Red Queen's Race," but I still owe Don and Maggie a column. The only chance I'll have to write one for a week is right now. So it's write now.
As soon as I can remember what my topic is for this week--I know I had one, when I came in. Oh yes, Wonder Woman # 20, "Who Killed Myndi Mayer?"
Myndi Mayer, Wonder Woman's former publicist, is dead. She was murdered. The police suspect, and have even arrested, her recently fired art director, Steve London. Wonder Woman doesn't believe Steve is guilty. She offers to prove this fact by binding Steve in her lariat and asking him the question. The lasso, you see, was forged from the girdle of the earth-goddess, Gaea, and anyone snared in it is forced to tell the truth. (I wonder if we could make these things standard issue for presidential press conferences?). The police turn her down.
This was hardly surprising. A statement which was coerced out a suspect by Gaea's girdle would have been less admissible as evidence than one from a suspect who had the word Everlast tattooed repeatedly on his face. (To any who might not have gotten the last joke, Everlast is the most commonly used brand of boxing glove in the professional tour. Of course, I'm remembering that brand at 11:10 p.m. without having looked at a sports page recently. Just in case I remembered the name wrong--it's probably really something like Fortesque-Smythe--go back and substitute in the right name.)
In the first place, we have the interesting problem of Wonder Woman, the lady who would have to testify about the process, being nothing more than an animated lump of dirt. What court is going to let a mud pie testify before it. Would you let your back yard testify? I mean, what were they going to do about an oath; ask Wonder Woman to solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help her clod?
But let's assume we get past that problem. Next we have to convince the court that the results of Steve London's bondage babbling are sufficiently accurate to be admissible. After all, using Wonder Woman's lasso to induce testimony is a new technique. Fortunately, the courts have a test they use to determine if evidence derived from a new scientific technique should be admissible, a test derived from the case of United States v. Frye and now called the Frye test. (You were expecting, maybe, the Fortesque-Smythe test?)
Under the Frye test, evidence derived from a new scientific technique is admissible, if the principle upon which the technique is based has attained a reasonable degree of acceptability among the scientific community that utilizes said principle. In other words, if the principle is reasonably accepted as being accurate, then the courts will rule that the evidence derived from an application of this principle is reliable enough to be admissible. In other, other words, if four out of five doctors say it's okay; it's okay.
It is for basically this reason that the results of a lie detector test are not admissible in most courts. The scientific principle behind the technology of the polygraph has not reached a sufficient level of acceptability in the appropriate scientific community. (Ironically enough, and an interesting sidebar to this column, did you know that the inventor of the lie detector was the same Charles Moulton who created Wonder Woman? No wonder the lie detector is having problems getting accepted. Would you accept as reliable the anti-lie technology of a man who came up with Gaea's girdle?)
In the case of Wonder Woman's lasso, we have a scientific community to look to; archaeology. If someone could get enough archaeologists to testify that the principle behind Gaea's girdle forcing the truth was generally accepted in the archaeological community, the evidence would be reliable enough to be admissible. (I wish them luck on that, even with Indiana Jones as an expert witness!)
But let's take it one step further, let's pretend that the judge is satisfied that Gaea's girdle has reached a reasonable degree of acceptability among the archaeological community, there's still another problem with the admissibility of Steve London's statement. They still have to prove that Wonder Woman's lasso was really reforged from Gaea's girdle. How, for example, do we know it isn't a cheap knock off--assume it's real because it isn't stamped Made in Taiwan?
What do we do, get Gaea to come down and testify? "Yes, this is one of my girdles. I grew out of it and donated it to the Goodwill. I had no idea they had done this with it."
No, they shouldn't have bothered letting Wonder Woman tie up Steve London and have her Gaea's girdle get the truth out of him. Better they should stick to the proven methods of getting to the truth in a trial: hiring Perry Mason for the defense.
Later in the same story, Wonder Woman finds out that the real person who fired the shot that London was accused of firing was Skeeter Boyd. At the time Skeeter shot her, however, Myndi was already dead from a cerebral hemorrhage induced by a drug overdose. This, of course, leads to another trick legal question: assuming he hadn't been run over by a truck, could Skeeter be tried for any crime considering he didn't kill anyone.
Certainly. At the time he fired the shot, Skeeter thought Myndi was alive. That made him guilty of attempted murder. He didn't kill Myndi, but he tried to. That's attempted murder.
It doesn't matter that the crime was impossible at time Skeeter committed it. If the facts had been as Skeeter assumed they were, i.e. that Myndi was still alive, the crime he attempted wouldn't have been impossible. Therefore, under the law, he can be found guilty of an attempt crime.
Of course, there is still one other question about this story I can't answer. Considering that Skeeter shot Myndi at close range with a sawed-off shotgun (see Page 20, Panel 6) and, "blew her head apart," how was there enough of Myndi's cerebellum left for the coroner to determine she died of cerebral hemorrhage? There shouldn't have been enough left to determine her hat size.
Bob Ingersoll
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