Today I was in court, where a man was sentenced to death. I won't bore you with the details of the case, but if you want to read about it, here's a link:

http://www.cnn.com/2006/LAW/06/16/vermont.death.ap/index.html

So hmm...it was intense. I had to go through the metal detector about 11 times because I kept on setting off the alarm. Turns out it was the eyelets in my boots that were setting the alarm off. Stupid lesbian shoes.

The only reason(s) I went to the sentencing today was because a) I had written a paper on the case last semester & wanted follow it through to the end because I'm a geek and b) it was a piece of legal history, given the fact that Vermont abolished the death penalty back in the late 1950's.

I got into the courtroom about 15 minutes before the case was scheduled to begin and because it's Vermont, everyone knew everyone else so there was lots of chatting. Then a door opened and everyone got the loudest kind of quiet I've ever heard in my life. So quiet that when the handcuffs were taken off the defendant, he moved his wrists around and I could hear them crack. I was sitting on the defense side of the courtroom because that's where I found one of the last available seats and I thought to myself, "I'm sitting less than 10 feet from a convicted murderer." It was pretty weird. Then the judge came out & a few hear ye hear ye's later, some family members of the victims read prepared statements, which at times made me feel like I was going to start crying. Then the defendant stood and made a statement but I couldn't really hear him because he was low-talking. I guess I would low-talk, too, if I were about to be told that I was going to die. In Indiana, of all places.

The judge read his decision, which was death my lethal injection and it was over. 45 minutes from start to finish. I left the courthouse pretty quickly and when I got outside, there were tons of cameras and microphones and that's when it dawned on me that maybe I wasn't the ONLY person that was following this case rather closely. They all yelled "Verdict? Is there a verdict? Who are you? Can we talk to you?" and I got in my car and left because I left work and had to get back before my boss realized I was gone. More importantly, I didn't want to steal the thunder of the attorneys or the families who are supposed to make statements as far as what the verdict was.

When I got back to my office, I couldn't get the image of the defendant's face out of my head. He sat slumped over for most of the proceedings but when he first walked into the courtroom, he was staring & attempting to smile at someone sitting directly in front of me and he had a really bizarre look on his face. All dead man walking.

On to something lighter...

My girlfriend is in Greece with her family for 2 weeks, returning a week from Wednesday. We're going on vacation for a week and then she's going to spend the summer with me in the Green Mountain State. Between that and the Sundaygirl/Ryan merger in October, both holidays at my sister's house, and hopefully quitting my job and going to school full time for the winter term if Money Watch 2006 continues to go according to plan, I have to say that 2006 is going to end on quite a high note.

And lastly, if I hear one more Coldplay song on the radio, I'm going to hang myself.

xo,
Swan

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