October 9, 2013

           This was not an exciting day. I read the texts of the Magna Carta and the Mayflower Compact. Merry Olde England has been one messed up place for 700 years. The only saving grace is that the other major powers were even worse. I’m also reading “Actual Innocence”, the book that delves into wrongly convicted prison inmates and the emergence of DNA testing. According to page six, I would be excluded from jury duty because I don’t watch television. That makes me “so elitist, so out of touch with mass culture and entertainment” that I could not relate to juries. Hey, I totally agree. A thousand times over.

           What I’m getting from the book is a huge stockpile of new knowledge concerning the DNA procedure and the legal system. At the time it was written, around 80 people were found innocent, but there is another more gruesome side to American justice. Innocence doesn’t sell. In a study of 18,000 suspects, 5,000 were dropped before going to trial. I've said before, the system has billion-dollar crime labs to prove you guilty, but not one cent to prove you innocent.
           To me, this is vindication of what I’ve said my whole life. Take a little extra effort now and again to stay off the more common lists used to garner suspects. It isn’t difficult and as just shown, lowers your chances of being wrongly convicted by 36% by the expedienct of not being easily picked off a list. You cannot look at some list of everyone in Colorado last summer and find my name. The nearest is a toll booth in Nevada.
           I may be out of touch with the six o'clock news, but the police are obviously picking the easiest targets. The one common factor in all the innocent people in prison was that everybody knew everything about them, including the witnesses, the police, the prosecutor, and the reporter out to make his rep—and in every case simply did not “like” the accused.
           This book, I find captivating. It quotes definitive sources of material I only guessed at. For example, how many witnesses are wrong or outright lie. In half of the exonerations, prosecutors refused to give up evidence for DNA testing “until litigation was threatened or filed”. Once a person is convicted, he has no legal right to argue his innocence. One particularly disgusting Chief Justice named Rehnquist argued that a claim of innocence is not in itself a “constitutional claim”. I guess he figures you had your day in court, after that innocence doesn’t matter.
           The scariest part is that all this adds up to a huge number of innocent people in prison. And most crimes do not involve DNA that can be tested. Those prisoners are dependent on the real perpetrators confessing, or a snitch witness recanting testimony. And I’m only on page seven.
           Technically, I made my deadline. I could leave tomorrow. But I won’t. All the basic and legal parts of the camper are done and tested. The side marker lights don’t work, but since it is both, there is a grounding problem. Today’s addendum was written before I finished at 10:30 PM. I first connected the battery power after dark and talk about a fluke. Just as I hit the switch, there was a huge flash of lightning. Damn near gave me a heart attack.
           The aggregator (news web site) reports that 35% of the wealth in all of Russia belongs to 110 people. I was thinking maybe the population should rise up and have a revolution, you know, execute the existing leaders and make everybody equal. Sort of, kind of see how that works out. For them.

ADDENDUM
           The Florida rain did its best to stop me, but I got the bolts and weatherproofing done on the camper. It is strange how water has almost an intelligence to find that one tiny gap in the caulk or that single misdrilled pilot hole you forgot to spackle. It was a half-day of fighting with the wiring, but I can extend one great piece of advice. Don’t put any electrical in place until you can draw it out by memory and understand how each piece works. That’s what I did and it paid off. And of course, rather than just rain, Florida throws down a quick shower every 45 minutes so things never quite dry out.

           This marine battery weighs sixty pounds, half as much as the bare trailer. This takes the total weight up to 350 pounds. Still better than a fat girlfriend but I cannot put the battery on the centerline. At least not easily, I mean. I know, why not just buy two batteries and that will balance.
           Yeah, balance everything except the budget. Those batteries are not cheap. I’m thinking that a boat must have a similar problem. You can’t put something super heavy on one side. So how do boat owners solve the problem of heavy batteries? Looks like yet another of those problems I’ll wind up having to solve on my own because all the experts will disappear if I start asking. My guess is two small batteries instead of one big one, sold as a pair.