Mistrials and tribulations...

This was an unusual one. Today was supposed to be my first jury trial that I was handling myself, but it ended in a mistrial. We had jury selection, everything was going smoothly, we took a break, but right before opening statements a big issue came up. Our officer, the first and only witness for the State, was the best man for one of the jurors, and it never came out during jury selection.

The judge felt he had no choice but to declare a mistrial, and reset the case for March, when we'll do the whole thing over again. I'll have to skip class if I want to do it, but I should be able to swing it.

On another note, our office purchased one of the new iMacs for video purposes, so we wouldn't have to farm out our redaction work before trial. I spent a significant amount of time today trying to get it to do what we wanted to do. iMovie doesn't allow you to import directly from DVD discs, even unprotected ones, which was a big surprise to me. I used a third party program called HandBrake, which appears to work, albeit very slowly. It's not intended for Intel based Macs, and has to run in an emulated mode, but I just noticed they have a beta version which might do the trick. I'll check that out tomorrow.

I really need to make sure this setup will work. I pushed for it with a couple of attorneys in the office, and while they probably have some credibility to burn, I'm in a different situation being an intern. I'll probably go in tomorrow and try to get it going. Hopefully it will work better than it has been.

Early to bed tonight, I think. I'm pretty beat after today.

Edit: It works like a champ. So does the printer we picked up. I think it will be a good deal for the office.