Speaking of cats:

The very feline-looking cat Lucy and the very feline-looking Vicky Pryce

OK, I’ve just got to take a break from doing all I can to find my missing cat Lucy (and to those of you who wondered what happened earlier this week from the two-pronged approach using forensics, all I can say is as much as I wish it were, life is not CSI, and it’s dragging out but at least moving in the right direction and I will give you full information when there’s something to report.)

So, desperate for distraction, I turned to my favorite British newspaper, the Guardian, and came across this article:

“Vicky Pryce faces retrial after jury ‘fails to grasp basics’:

 “Judge dismisses jury in case of Chris Huhne’s ex-wife, saying panel

suffered ‘fundamental deficits in understanding.'”

I find this funny because I’ve been on juries in the US–Manhattan, to be exact–and despite the dimness of individual members of the jury, I’ve never seen an entire jury called “fundamentally deficit in understanding,” as this English judge pronounced the jury for the Vicky Pryce trial.

The case is rather simple:

A cabinet minister “persuaded” his wife to tell the police that she was driving when he actually was, because if they’d known it was he who was driving, he would have lost his license for a year.

This same cabinet minister then proceeded to have an affair with a woman other than his wife (talk about “fundamentally deficit in understanding”!)  His wife–now ex-wife–ratted him out.

He lost his Cabinet position, and he and his ex are both facing trials.  Somehow the jury failed to understand the fact that he coerced his wife to take the rap for him, and the judge had to dissolve the jury to apparently do it all over again with a somewhat smarter group of jurors.

In the jury trials I’ve been on, there is always some dimness somewhere–most often in the defendant, who in one trial for which I was on the jury was arrested on the way to his trial for fare-beating (jumping over the New York City turnstiles).  His friend also got arrested on his way to court to testify as to the defendant’s good character.  Not a good move, guys.

And there was a woman on my jury who did her level best to deadlock the trial because she said the defendant had “nice eyes” and so couldn’t have been dealing drugs.  But we ratted her out to the judge and we decided that he was guilty, without this woman’s input about his nice eyes.

But never have I known of an entire jury to be adjudged, well, stupid, by a judge. Thank you, English judge, for raising my mood!