You know, recently IRL I had jury duty, and the defense lawyer is actually an ex-con, a former convicted felon many years ago, who studied the Law while he was in prison and after he got out he went to law school, took the bar exam, passed it, and he went into practice as a criminal defense attorney, something he's been doing for many years. He's actually not that good at being a lawyer, sometimes he says things that make his clients look MORE guilty instead of LESS, but he's one of the local lawyers who advertises on TV. But I guess he is pretty passionate about prison being a bad place that he doesn't want to see people end up in. Either that or he's only in it for the money, I don't really know. Then again if he were only in it for the money, he could make a lot more money by going into the more lucrative field of corporate law rather than being a criminal defense attorney. Oh yeah, and I forgot to mention, this guy is willing to take ANY criminal case, no matter how heinous the crime. Whenever there's a murder, he's on the case, defending them. Although maybe he just tries to take the heinous cases to get more publicity so he can attract more clients. Oh yeah, and if he's your lawyer, everyone assumes you're probably guilty, since he's such a scumbag, and guilt by association and all that. But he still wins a fair amount of cases since he's so experienced and has been doing this so many years (he's like 80). I think he might be starting to get a little senile though. Anyway that is a real story about a real lawyer who I saw in action 2 weeks ago when I had jury duty. Unfortunately, I only saw the beginning of the case, I didn't make it onto the actual jury, there were like 30 of us prospective jurors and the ones who got called up were randomly selected, and I didn't get randomly chosen. It was a pretty interesting criminal case, too, about a nurse accused of physically abusing a disabled patient at a home for disabled people. The guy is apparently a quadriplegic who can't move any of his limbs, who needs nurses to bathe him, move him around, and do everything for him, and a co-worker observed this nurse hitting this guy in the testicles 4 or 5 times in the row for no apparent reason. Then again, I doubt he can feel any pain down there, being a quadriplegic and all. He may not even have been aware of it, or maybe he knew it was going on but didn't complain to anyone else there because he didn't think it was that big of a deal, I'm not sure. But he wasn't the one who made the complaint, it was a co-worker. Oh, and since I didn't end up on the actual jury, I didn't get to see what the actual verdict ended up being, whether this nurse (actually a former nurse, she got fired) got found guilty or not guilty. That was a total bummer, I really wanted to be a juror, but they never called my name... the slip of paper with my name on it never got pulled out of the jar full of slips of paper with prospective juror names on it, that the court clerk pulled out randomly to select jurors. Oh yeah, and the prosecutor, the assistant district attorney for the county, is this young guy in his 20s with a stylish goatee and emo-looking glasses, looks like a total hippie, when I first saw him I assumed he must be a public defender, but no, he's a prosecutor, apparently. An emo prosecutor. I bet he used to be a goth kid. Oh wait, goth kids and emo kids hate being mixed up, I forgot.