Every edition of CALJIC — “California Jury Instructions, Criminal” — includes a page that memorializes the members of the committee that worked on the book. The page is captioned “The Committee on Standard Jury Instructions, Criminal of the Superior Court of Los Angeles County, California.” That caption should be reworked. It should say, simply, “Saints.”
The Sisyphi who struggle to push the rock of jury instructions up the shifting dunes of judicial review certainly merit sainthood — as do their counterparts on BAJI and the Judicial Council’s pathologically courageous Task Force on Jury Instructions, who are endeavoring to overhaul and revamp the entire instructional system. For these even-more-latter-day saints, the more appropriate classical allusion might be the Augean stables, but I’m afraid two Greek mythology metaphors in the same paragraph will cost me my Turkish readership, so we’ll just agree they’ve volunteered for a crummy job for which none of us is grateful enough, and let it go. OK?
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