Breaking news as it breaks! Broken news after it broke!
In a shocking turn of events, Judge Crooks has declared a mistrial in the case of Ms. P. Dant, who has been accused of murdering her husband, Mr. Kni Alodgi, for the way that he spoke.
Ms. Dant’s defense attorneys have sought to portray Mr. Alodgi’s speech patterns as so offensive to any reasonable person that Ms. Dant’s alleged actions should be considered either self-
Expert witness and linguist Niu Bea, from the University of South Central New Caledonia (USCNC), had spent two uneventful days on the stand explaining that Mr. Alodgi’s habit of “trailing off”, as Ms. Dant described it, could in fact be analyzed as a novel form of NP-dropping.
For example, in the sentence, “Did you put the1... in the2... ?”
All was going... well? for the prosecution
Events came to a screeching halt near the end of Ms. Bea’s testimony, when she answered prosecutor E. Skillty, Esq.’s seemingly straightforward question, “In your professional opinion, such a dialect would be as equally valid as any other, correct?”
Ms. Bea’s initial reply was as engaging as the rest of her testimony
Had she stopped there, the prosecution might have won the day. However, she continued: “...though, I have to say
The courtroom exploded into verbal chaos. Prosecutor Skillty tried to object to his own witness, and asked Judge Crooks to strike her comments from the record. Defense attorney A. Quittum, Esq., strongly objected to Mr. Skillty’s objection, saying that Ms. Bea had all but vindicated her client’s (alleged) actions.
After more than ten minutes of vigorous debate and vimful dissent from both sides, the Judge decided that, in theory, Ms. Bea’s comments should be stricken from the record, but that the jurors would almost certainly not realistically be able to disregard them. This was likely especially true for Jurors #4 and #9, who were reprimanded by the judge for yelling out, “Exactly!” and “That’s what I’m sayin’!” after Ms. Bea’s incendiary testimony. With that, Judge Crooks declared a mistrial and released the jury.
Judge Crooks is reported, by witness who asked not to be named, to have had many choice words for Ms. Bea, accusing her of wasting the people’s time and money by tanking the trial. She was sentenced to 3 days in jail, a $1500 fine, and 700 hours of community service for “egregious contempt unbecoming an academic expert”.
As news of the debacle spread, USCNC announced that it was shutting down its Expert Witness Internship Program immediately. USCNC did not respond to our request for comment, only issuing a short statement: “The... has decided that it is in the best interests of the... if we close down the...”.