Trance Energy Australia, today at Belvoir Amphitheatre.

Kayo came up with the idea of wearing a uniform, Kitty came up with the words, and I came up with the font. And now, 10 of us will be wearing these words printed on white and black tees on the day.

Easter Sunday. 4 more sleeps. Trance Energy Australia. Can’t wait.

I’m a strong adherent to the code of “bros before hos“. One part of my particular version of the code is that I will not place blame on a friend just because a girl I like fancies him more. Emotions are funny like that – you can’t control how you feel, so feeling resentment for a guy just because the girl I like happen to like him more is silly. Especially when the guy is a good and longtime friend.

Recently, a friend came to me expressing concern about a situation like the above. I had told him that there was no need to tell me. “You know me, I’m not like that” I’d said. He said, “I know but it’s always good to be completely sure rather than assume that you’d be ok about it.”

And that is why he is one of my bff bros.

My friend Kitty has been looking around for a car. She thought she had found one for about the right price so she called the dealership. During the bargaining, and somewhat inappropriately, the car salesman mentioned the fact that his masseuse had quit and he was looking for a replacement, and had asked Kitty if she does massages.

Hahah, alarm bells started ringing right? But never mind, Kitty thought. She’d just say no and carry on bargaining. The sleazoid will not budge on the price but kept on dropping hints about the massage. Like WTF.

Ok, forget it. This was getting ridiculous so Kitty ended the call. Then it got creepy. The guy messaged Kitty to try to close the sale. He was willing to drop the price a bit but it was still not what Kitty wanted to pay for it. He kept on about how he really wanted to sell her the car and that he could drop the price a bit more if there were some side arrangements. *wink wink*

Kitty messaged no and said that she was no longer interested. And you think it would end there. But nope – the guy then toss out all decency and asked for sex in exchange for a lower price even though they’ve never met. As this wasn’t bizarre enough, it got even more bizarre after that. He messaged back and said that he didn’t send the previous message and asked her to not be alarmed. But he was persistent, “Do you still want to buy the car?” Hah!

Anyways, Kitty has now done what any normal person would do – she reported the guy to the Department of Consumer and Employment Protection. We hope that the business loses its license.

In order to avoid any possible legal issues, I won’t mention the place or the guy’s name. Suffice to say though, there’s at least one sleazy car salesman in Perth who assumes that women will take him up on such an offer and that it’s ok to ask it like it was an everyday occurrence.

Though I must admit, I found it all very amusing when Kitty first told me the story.

Last Friday saw the end of my 9-day stint on the juror’s bench. I had told you about the experience on that first day. And I told you know how that experience ended.

As luck would have it, I was balloted from the group who went into deliberation. I didn’t know the verdict until today when I called up the Department of Public Prosecutions but I won’t tell you about that yet. Not until I tell you about the case itself, which was a case of sexual assault that happened in January 2008.

In a nutshell, and in point form:

• A woman got drunk at an acquaintance’s home. She went along with the acquaintance and the acquaintance’s friends to Fremantle for more drinking and clubbing. As they progressed from Rosie O’Grady’s and then on to The Clink nightclub, she got even more drunk.
• She was ejected from The Clink for being too drunk, and ended up sitting on the public stools just outside the club. The group she was with gave her a bottle of water and left her to her own devices.
• Two men came along and started talking to her. At this point, no one could be sure exactly about what happened. She either walked with them to the men’s car, or she was helped along, possibly carried or lifted.
• They drove somewhere and parked. Unprotected sexual intercourse with one man, and unprotected oral sex with the other occurred. After it had completed, she was left by the verge and the men drove off.
• She was lying on the ground for a few minutes before she woke up and walked in a daze towards another street corner where she fell asleep next to a lamp post. Two women passing by in their car saw her and tried to rouse her. When they couldn’t, and because of her disheveled appearance they called for the police and ambulance.
• When she was being helped into the ambulance, she started screaming that she had been raped. But she remembered nothing about it – about what happened in Fremantle, and how she came to be in that part of Fremantle where she was found. She only knew she was raped because of how she felt down there and what she tasted in her mouth.

And so that’s where the case began. DNA collected from the woman’s body and mouth led police to the first man (we were never told but us jurors think that the police got him because they had his DNA record from a drink-driving charge), who then implicated the other. The older man was married to the younger one’s sister – they were brother-in-laws.

The men admitted to having sex with the woman, and that she gave consent and was a willing partner. The prosecution argued that she was too drunk to give consent. They brought in witnesses to describe how drunk she was. These included her acquaintances on that night, whom I might add I felt distaste for because of how they left their friend to fend for herself, and the bouncers and the door man at The Clink.

A professor of pharmacology who headed the forensics lab that analysed the woman’s blood, which had a blood-alcohol level of more than 0.22% about 5 hours after she was kicked out of The Clink, gave his professional opinion of what a person with that much alcohol would be like, what they can or cannot be capable of, and how they’d behave. Under cross-examination by the defense, the professor conceded that a heavy drinker can seem to be lucid and functioning and therefore can mistakenly believed to be giving consent. Another side effect of high levels of alcohol is that long term memory never gets formed which explains the woman not remembering anything.

The defense argued that the prosecution cannot conclusively prove that consent was never given. They tried to imply the woman was a heavy drinker and that it is possible for her to have given consent even if she normally wouldn’t, and then completely forgotten about it due to the alcohol and that is why she cried rape. They have argued that what the men did may be morally reprehensible – having sex with a woman and then just leaving her by the road side – but it wasn’t a crime.

It all boiled down to consent.

I have not revealed much about the accused and the complainant because I had wanted you to form an opinion of the case in the absence of any kind of preconceptions and prejudices. But obviously that doesn’t work in the real world.

The two men are Iraqis and the woman is white and is a 39 year old mother of three, and who is now separated from her husband. As jurors we are supposed to be impartial and to base our decisions purely on the facts presented. Though not surprisingly on that first day of jury duty I saw a pattern in the kind of jurors that the defense lawyers rejected: mainly white and mainly blue-collar working class types whom they probably perceive to have negative views about Arabic folk, but interestingly, not women.

Some of the women in my juror team had commented that the complainant should not have gotten herself so vulnerable in the first place, and was almost blaming her for bringing it onto herself.

The older types including both men and women had commented that “they”, meaning people of Middle-Eastern origin, do not fit well into our society and do not assimilate. I don’t think their comments stem from racism as much as from what they can see in day to day life, an example of which I had mentioned before here.

The judge’s strict instructions to us in his summation, and which the defense lawyers emphasised repeatedly and greatly during their closing arguments, was that by bringing these allegations the State has the burden of proof, and these allegations must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

In my mind, the State failed to do so. The evidence were very circumstantial and as is probably normal in a rape case, involved a lot of he-said she-said. And because sending people to jail and marking them as sex offenders for the rest of their lives is serious stuff, I had to be 100% convinced by the prosecution’s arguments of which I wasn’t.

So I was going to vote “not guilty”. But I perceive that I was probably in the minority and would have relented in the end due to the need for a unanimous decision.

And I was right: the men were found guilty. Thus ends the entire sorry affair and a lot of what-ifs that I had formulated in my head:

• if only she didn’t get so drunk
• if only she didn’t go out with a bunch of people who couldn’t be bothered with looking after her
• if only the two men weren’t tempted by an easy lay
• if only they’d use condoms
• if only they didn’t park in a place with CCTV cameras where the woman can be seen lying on the ground and then walking unsteadily afterwards

There are at least 3 families whose lives are forever marred, and although a case was fought, there are no real winners at all.

After sitting through 7 days of testimonies and evidence, and 1 day of closing arguments, this morning we listened to the judge’s instructions and summation of the case, and how the law should be applied in our decisions.

Just before we were released for deliberation, another ballot was performed. This was to select the final 12 jurors who would ultimately deliberate on the verdict. I was not one of them. How anti-climatic!

So I went home at around 1pm and felt both relieved and mildly dissapointed. Relieved because this was a case of he said, she said and I know it was going to be hard for the diverse group of jurors to come up with a unanimous decision. I had asked the other juror who was balloted off as well how he would have voted, and I found out that he would have voted for “guilty” and I would have voted the other way. And I felt relieved also because the thought of possibly sending innocent persons to jail weighed heavily on me throughout the trial.

At the same time, I was mildly dissapointed because after having sit through the entirety of the trial, which I’ve found to be fascinating and reaffirming of our justice system, I would have liked to be able to make that one last contribution for it. But alas, it was not to be.

I will talk more about the specifics of the trial next week. Until then, the weekend beckons.

As you might know I was summoned for jury duty about a month ago. Obviously I can’t talk about the case but I can tell you the experience so far.

Yesterday morning, I showed up around 8:15am at the District Court in Perth where I saw two long lines at the security checkpoints where the metal detectors and x-ray machines are set up like those at the airports. I passed that and then proceeded to wait in two long lines to take the lift upstairs to juror reception.

Once I was on the second level, I joined another queue where I was ushered to one of two lines where they issue you with your juror number – from then on, you are known only by your number. I walked into the big juror reception hall where they scanned my number and asked me to verify my name and address. Then I sat down with 400 or more other jurors in rows of cramp seats. This was by then 8:45pm.

There were 11 cases commencing that morning and we were told how it was going to work: 40 potential jurors will be randomly chosen for each case and then we’d be led up to the court room, where ultimately 14 will be chosen for each case.

They did the call up about once every 10 minutes. To kill time, some read books and magazines, some watched the TV and I played with my iPhone.

I was amongst the last group of people to be called – this was now 10:45pm. After we were introduced to the juror officer who will be our guide for the entire case, we were taken to the court room and then told to sit down in the back.

This was when we saw the accused, their lawyers, the crown prosecutors, other court officers and the judge. Our numbers were then randomly chosen once more by the courts clerk. As your number is called, you are supposed to walk to the juror’s bench and sit down. At this point in time, the defense lawyers and prosecutors may look you up and down and decide that they don’t want you as a juror. This was when they yelled “Challenge!” and you are basically dismissed. Then, another juror is randomly chosen again.

Even after there were 14 jurors available on the bench, as we were being sworned in, the lawyers can still challenge. I was slightly amused by the process (some people were stopped as they were walking to the bench or just as they were about to sit down) and I can sorta tell what the lawyers were wanting by seeing the kind of people that they were rejecting.

Anyways, in a nutshell, I didn’t get dismissed and so I’m now on a case that is scheduled to last 5 days. I can’t tell you much until the verdict has been given but I can tell you that it’s a sexual assault case.

So far, the experience has been interesting. The other jurors on the case are nice and friendly, and it’s quite fun during our group discussions even though the whole idea of deciding someone’s fate is still kinda surreal for me.

Our days start at 10am and usually finish at 4pm as it has been this past 2 days. Once in the court building, we are pretty much like kindergarten children and we get told where to go, where to wait and what time to be where. The rooms are highly secured and we can only go in and out with our guide.

And man, are lawyers pedantic or what?! Hahah, but I guess it’s the crux of their profession. For good reason, the meaning of every work uttered or written has to be precise. Still, it can get kinda boring and repetitious when the lawyers grill the witnesses on their answers and how they phrase them.

And unlike what I had gleamed from US TV cop shows, the court is only in session on weekdays and the jurors get to go home at the end of every day. Yay! Which means I still get to go to Future Music Festival this Sunday even if it goes over 5 days. Also, CCTV videos cannot be enhanced infinitely.