A Downside of Celebrity Megatrials

CBS Online News, AP Wire, (July 22, 2005) reports:

Santa Maria County taxpayers are on the hook for $2.7 million for the unsuccessful prosecution of Michael Jackson on child molestation charges, and the bill is climbing.

Most of the money went to sheriff's deputies who were posted at the Santa Maria courthouse from January 2004, when pretrial hearings began, through mid-June, when the 14-week trial ended. Crowd control also consumed a substantial amount of the money.

Not included in the costs are prosecution, investigative and grand jury expenses [emphasis added], Jette Christiansson, business manager for the County Executive Office, said in a statement.

Strange Justice

Sarah Lyall, Polanski Wins Vanity Fair Libel Suit, New York Times Online (July 22, 2005):

Vanity Fair's editor, Graydon Carter, was quick to express his unhappiness with the outcome. "I find it astonishing that a man who lives in France can be permitted to sue a magazine published in America in a British courtroom," he said in a statement after the verdict. "And that he can do so without ever having to show up in person." "Furthermore, as a father of four children, one of whom is a 12-year-old daughter," Mr. Carter added, "I find it equally outrageous that this story is considered defamatory to a man who can't be here because he slept with a 13-year-old-girl and has been a fugitive from justice for more than a quarter of a century."

Papers Wanted

This is one of my periodic reminders that Law, Probability and Risk, a peer review Oxford journal, welcomes submissions.

The current editors are Colin Aitken (chief editor; fields: mathematics & statistics; Edinburgh); James Franklin (mathematics, University of New South Wales; Jonathan Koehler (decision theory, statistics, McCombs School of Business, The University of Texas at Austin, Franco Taroni (forensic science, statistics; Ecole des sciences criminelles, University of Lausanne ) and Tillers (law, law of evidence, structure of fact investigation).

Papers may deal with scientific evidence or with statistical evidence and methods (or both) but papers may also deal with matters such as rigorous accounts of uncertain ordinary (non-scientific) evidence and inference, the relationship between legal reasoning and evidential inference, the psychology of inference, inference and economics, inference and choice, inference and argumentation theory, inference and rhetoric, inference and scenarios, inference and temporal logic, inference and four-dimensional scenarios, induction and abduction, uncertain inference and uncertain perception, evidential inference and fuzzy perceptions, evidential inference and fuzzy legal rules, evidence and inference about human meanings and intentions and similar matters, visual representations of evidential inference, and inference and computational intelligence. (These examples of suitable topics are only examples.)

Spatial-Temporal Logic; Sequential Planning in Multi-Agent Settings

Did you know that now there is a field called spatial logic?

I didn't. But it makes sense that such a field should exist. I welcome it!

Confession and avoidance: I did know that serious people had been thinking hard about making rational decisions and judgments about actions and events in three-dimensional space. I just didn't know that some people had begun to call reasoning about actions or events in three-dimensional space a logic.

Well, now that we have this new logic, there is an interesting possibility. You will recall that I have mentioned temporal logic from time to time. I can't say that I am proficient in the technicalities of temporal logic. Hardly! But now it is inevitable that we shall have a new logic: spatio-temporal logic.

I confess I did not come up with this idea on my own. Rather, I saw a paper with the intriguing title Combining Spatial and Temporal Logics: Expressiveness vs. Complexity (2005). The paper is by D. Gabelia, R. Kurucz, F. Wolter & Zakaharyaschev. Judging by the impressive and extensive technical detail in the paper, people have been hard at work at combining spatial and temporal logics for quite some time.

As the title of the paper suggests, combining the two logics aggravates combinatorial problems -- before all combinatorial explosion problems have been solved in stationary and one-dimensional worlds with a lot of details. Why are to welcome this additional aggravation?

Well, perhaps we should. I can't expatiate at length about this now -- but consider that adding space to time raises some very interesting (and baffling) questions about the law's assumptions about the way the world (cosmos) works. For example, suppose we assume three-dimensional settings rather than one-dimensional time lines or scenarios. Where do "mental events" and "decisions" go in the three- (and four-) dimensional picture?

This question brings to mind another intriguing paper whose argument I can only sniff in by osmosis here and there if at all: P.J. Gmytrsaciewicz & P. Doshi, A Framework for Sequential Planning in Multi-Agent Settings (2005). The abstract states in part:

Agents maintain beliefs over physical states of the environment and over models of other agents .... ... Models of other agents may include their belief states and are related to agents types in games of incomplete information. We ... [postulate] that ... models [of agents] are not directly manipulable or observable. ... [We take a certain approach] at the cost of having to represent, process and continuously revise models of other agents.

In the paper the authors state:

The main idea behind our formalism, called interactive POMDPs [interactive partially observable Markov decision processes] (I-POMDPs), is to allow agents to use more sophisticated constructs to model and predict behavior of other agents. Thus, we replace the "flat" beliefs about the state space used in PODPs with beliefs about the physical environment and about the other agent(s), possibly in terms of their preferences, capabilities, and beliefs. Such beliefs could include beliefs about others ... They are called interactive beliefs. ...

I like it! Now we're getting somewhere -- i.e. into a position where we can begin to think (systematically) a bit of the way that litigators think about litigation and the other actors in litigation. But ... hmmm ... how do we get spatial logic into this picture? The thought of doing something like that is literally mind-numbing. Of course, another question is whether building three-dimensional space into the picture of multi-agent interactive processes such as litigation would be at all useful. I think the answer must be: yes, sometimes.

AI & Law in Law Schools

The following paper by Tom Gordon looks very interesting:

Artificial Intelligence and Legal Theory at Law Schools

I wish Tom Gordon all success.

I am not an "AI person"; for example, I cannot (alas!) write even very simple code. But I have a strong interest in AI work, which I think has an enormous amount to contribute to the study (and practice) of law. One lovely thing about AI is that it is deeply "theoretical" but, like other sciences, it supposes that there must be proof in ("of"?) the pudding: AI recipes, if they are any good, must -- it is thought -- "work" in the ("some"?) "real world." What a refreshing thought. Are you listening, legal theorists?

SIDS a/k/a Cot Death & the Doctrine of Chances in the UK: The Sally Clark Case

Michael McCarthy, "GMC [General Medical Council]: Meadow failed in his duty as expert witness,"The Independent Online Edition (14 July 2005):

One of Britain's most eminent paediatricians, Professor Sir Roy Meadow, gave "erroneous" and "misleading" evidence in the trial of a solicitor, Sally Clark, who was found guilty of murdering her two sons, but later cleared, the General Medical Council ruled.

Sir Roy, former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, failed in his duty as an expert witness to explain the limited relevance of his findings, a GMC fitness-to-practise panel said yesterday, when he told Mrs Clark's trial the chance of two babies dying of cot death within an affluent family was "one in 73 million".

...

Mrs Clark was arrested in 1998 over the deaths of her sons Christopher and Harry, and in November 1999, after Sir Roy had testified against her, she given two life sentences for their murder. But in January 2003, she had her convictions quashed on appeal, with the judges criticising Sir Roy's evidence.

The Fuzziness of Natural Thinking

Lotfi Zadeh, From Computing with Numbers to Computing with Words -- From Manipulation of Measurements to Manipulation of Perceptions (1999):

The depth of scientific tradition of respect for numbers and derision for words was reflected in the intensity of hostile reaction to my ideas by some of the prominent members of the scientific elite. In commenting on my first exposition of a linguistic variable in 1972, Rudolph Kalman had this to say:

I would like to comment briefly on Professor Zadeh's presentation. His proposals could be severely, ferociously, even brutally criticized from a technical point of view. This would be out of place here. But a blunt question remains: Is Professor Zadeh presenting important ideas or is he indulging in wishful thinking? No doubt Professor Zadeh's enthusiasm for fuzziness has been reinforced by the prevailing climate in the U.S. -- one of unprecedented permissiveness. "Fuzzification" is a kind of scientific permissiveness; it tends to result in socially appealing slogans unaccompanied by the discipline of hard scientific work and patient observation.

In a similar vein, my esteemed colleague Professor William Kahn -- a man with a brilliant mind -- offered this assessment in 1975:

"Fuzzy theory is wrong, wrong, and pernicious," says William Kahan, a professor of computer sciences and mathematics at Cal whose Evans Hall office is a few doors from Zadeh's. "I can not think of any problem that could not be solved better by ordinary logic." What we need is more logical thinking, not less. The danger of fuzzy theory is that it will encourage the sort of imprecise thinking that has brought us so much trouble."

What Lord Kelvin, Rudolph Kalman, and many other brilliant minds did not appreciate is the fundamental importance of the remarkable human capability to perform a wide variety of physical and mental tasks without any measurements and any computations. Familiar example of such tasks are parking a car; driving in heavy traffic; playing golf; understanding speech and summarizing a story.

A Fuzzy Anniversay

The year 2005 is the 40th anniversaty of the publication of Lotfi Zadeh's Fuzzy Sets in 8 Information and Control 338-353 (1965).

The Ability of Enlightened People to Ignore Evidence of Totalitarianism and Barbarism

"[T]hough nothing is left of Marxism as scientific prediction (that is, nothing left of its substantive claim to attention), there remains the vague notion that it for the first time opened up various historical perspectives--or some such rather vaguer pretension. But it can easily be shown that those who accepted this were proved completely mistaken about almost everything that has happened within the past century.

"There seems little point in going through the argument--if only because ... the holders of certain opinions, at a certain level of conviction, are both argument-proof and fact-proof, as was the case with their grandparents in the USSR. It is, unfortunately, only too easy to show that many of the then intelligentsia in the United States, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere were deceived into accepting and supporting a huge fabric of lies. The Soviet Union, despite its horrors, remained acceptable or even praiseworthy, until Kruschev's 'secret speech' of February 1956, and even after that with some.

"But how was it possible? The truth ... was available in scores or hundreds of firsthand accounts. It was clear, too, that foreign correspondents were not admitted to vast areas from which hostile evidence was available. It might even have been thought consequential that dozens of the highest leadership under Stalin simply ceased to be mentioned. The census figures, even as given in 1939, after the public denunciation of a 1937 census as the work of enemy agents, must have been seen as inexplicably low (though in fact even the 1939 census was exaggerated by some three million). Where had the still-missing millions cited seven or eight years earlier got to? And so on, and so on. There were even Westerners who believed that Trotsky was an agent of Hitler. In the second section of this book, we examine the Communist order and all the falsifications that took in the Webbs--not only the Webbs, but a whole mob of others, and this in spite not only of a mass of contrary evidence but even of apparently direct observation. They would often reject these data as irrelevant, and excuse them as, at the worst, superficial defects of a regime heading in the right direction. The USSR also managed to Potemkinize its future--which no evidence, or sense data, could refute."

Robert Conquest, The Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History 50-51 (W.W. Norton & Co., 2005).

Unimportant Facts

"[A] large circle of the 'thinking,' 'educated' class take ideas as more veridical than facts." Robert Conquest, The Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History 56 (W.W. Norton & Co., 2005).

Pi on You!

"A Japanese mental health counsellor has broken the world record for reciting pi, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, from memory. Akira Haraguchi, 59, managed to recite the number's first 83,431 decimal places, almost doubling the previous record held by another Japanese." BBC News (July 2, 2005)

I suppose one might justifiably call this a useless recreation. Or does the exercise promote mental health?

But it's my job here to talk about evidence.

The mental health counselor's exercise is even more impressive than the feat of multiple games of blindfold chess played by some chess masters: the numbers that Mr. Haraguchi remembered conform to no order and do not make any (discernible) sense within some larger scheme or order.

How did Mr. Haraguchi do it? I don't know. (I suppose he practiced a lot. And no doubt he has a great deal of patience.) In any event, Mr. Haraguchi's success does suggest that we academics ought to take care before being seduced by the siren song of heuristics that supposedly simplify complex problems of evidence to levels that ordinary mortals can manage. (I'm all for strategies and mnemonic devices that make problems more memorable. See P. Tillers, Picturing Factual Inference in Legal Settings (2005). But I'm against strategies that wipe out important detail.)

Well, perhaps we don't really need Mr. Haraguchi's example to ward off such seduction. Have any trial lawyers or trial judges been seduced by the siren song of simple heuristics? (I regret that I was unable to sustain this alliteration to the end.) Where? When? How?

"In 1947 Miguel Najdorf broke the world record for blindfold chess by taking on 45 opponents simultaneously at Sao Paolo, Brazil. The display started at 8 pm on January 24, 1947 and finished at 7:30 pm on January 25. He won 39 games, drew 4 games, and only lost 2 games." Bill Wall, Blindfold Chess

Mmm ... [Tillers thinking] ... Do you suppose that extraordinarily powerful computers were somehow implanted within the skulls of Haraguchi and Najdorf?

:-)

The Logic of ... Investigation ... Inference ... This & That

Some old riddles just refuse to go away. I was reminded of this on seeing the lovely NYTimes article by Dennis Overbye, The Remembrance of Things Future: The Mystery of Time (June 28, 2005). I have been interested for quite some time in ... well ... er ... the logic or ... well ... er ... the structure of fact investigation (and, also, of factual inference).

Well, but which is it, Tillers: logic or structure?

Well, that's the problem, you see. I'm not entirely sure which word I should use to characterize my subject: (i) logic or (ii) structure.

"Logic" is a strong word -- perhaps too strong. "Structure" is a warm and flexible word -- perhaps too comfortable and flexible, too ... cheap and easy.

There is a lot of awful talk around about the role of stories in proof and inference; it is said that (i) a good story has an actor (or that a story [good or bad] does not necessarily have an actor), (ii) a good story has a beginning, a middle, and an end (or not); (iii) a good story has a theme (or not necessarily); and (iv) so on.

In response to such assertions (of either kind), one often wants to scream: Who or what sez so?!?

The answer might be: well, (i) most people do; (ii) my intuition sez so; (iii) respectable thinkers think so; and (iv) so on.

But -- one again (perhaps) wants to yell, "That's not good enough! Prove to me -- demonstrate -- that what you say is true -- and don't just tell me that you think it's true or that many people do ... and so on."

But then the tables are turned on me: "Do you really think, Tillers, that logic alone can prove the importance of stories -- and of a specific kind of story?"

My honest answer: "Well, I'm not sure it can. Granted, I can (and should) tell you that there is now a logic that goes by the name (sometimes) temporal logic. But I must 'fess up: I can't prove or demonstrate -- I am probably just intellectually and logically weak --, I can't prove that temporal logic (and all that it implies) tells us necessary things about human existence and (less grandiosely) about matters such as factual inference or fact investigation."

Sensing the weakness of my "logical" position, but sensing (and believing) that some kind of "story" is a fundamental feature of human existence and (less grandiosely) of any rational argument about any question of fact, my instinct is to turn to "ontology" -- a theory of being, a theory of the way the world (the cosmos) is made -- and say, "You see, time and space are fundamental and unavoidable features of human existence and, thus, they must be part of any argument from evidence about what happened, is happening, or will happen in the world!"

Well, this ontological turn is all well and good. The trouble is that the people who know a few things about the cosmos, the "space-time continuum," and all that sort of thing -- I mean modern physicists -- they would (if asked) almost invariably say, "Well, Tillers, you're wrong! You really don't understand our best understanding of nature, the world or cosmos in which human beings live and act. There is nothing in physics that shows that time runs only in one direction and that it cannot run backward. Au contraire! The direction of time means nothing for the kinds of puzzles physics works with!"

I am left in despair.

But now a ray of hope (see the NYTimes article): some physicists who are smart enough to be invited to take part in a conference at MIT say that physics must do better: it must develop an account of the kind of time that human beings experience - unidirectional time - and (perhaps) this new account must be one that acknowledges that for human beings time really does run only forward, and not backward.

So I am reassured; my ontological intuition is not necessarily hogwash, not even in the eyes of (some) reputable physicists.

But I am still left in a bit of a pickle, nicht wahr? For even if time runs forwards (for many purposes), accounts of how events are connected to each other can still vary a lot.

But perhaps once the temporal character of existence (in some sense) is admitted, temporal logic can take over and drive us to some conclusions? I have some hope that this is the case -- although I strongly suspect that it will turn out to be the case that we will have to feed experience back into our logic -- now our temporal logic -- and the difficulty here (as always!) will be that our experience will fall short of a strict proof of telling us which variant of temporal logic best explains the world in which we live.

Conclusion: You must forgive these sophomoric ruminations. But in my defense I say: problems such as this one -- the role of time in human existence -- are very old. If problems such as these do not plague us and weigh on us, it is usually only because we have decided that we just shall not dwell on them. Don't you agree?

Perhaps Narcissistic People Can Take Heart

UK lawyers representing a youth who killed his parents sought to have the charges against the youth reduced on the ground that the youth had been afflicted with the malady of narcissistic personality disorder. See Guardian Unlimited (June 29, 2005). The strategy may have worked; the youth was allowed to plead guilty to manslaughter.

Dead Man's Violent Disposition Helps Harvard Student -- at Least Temporarily

A Massachusetts trial judge, applying a (wise) ruling (in another case) by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court last March, Commonwealth v. Adjutant, 443 Mass. 649; 824 N.E.2d 1 (March 14, 2005), vacated the conviction of a Harvard student -- Pring-Wilson -- who had been found guilty of stabbing and killing a man on a Cambridge street late at night. See Boston Globe (online) (June 25, 2005). Defendant claimed that he had killed the dead man in self-defense. Forty witnesses had been prepared to testify to the dead man's violent behavior and propensities but the trial court refused -- under the law applicable at the time, correctly refused -- to admit any of that evidence. (Before Adjutant evidence about the alleged victim's violent nature was admissible only if there was evidence that defendant knew of the alleged victim's violent nature.)

Under Adjutant, whether or not defendant knew of the alleged victim's propensity for violence, evidence about an alleged victim's propensity for violence is now admissible in prosecutions for criminal homicide in Massachusetts courts -- and possibly also in prosecutions for other crimes such in which defendant relies on self-defense or claims mitigation as a result of a physical attack by the alleged victim. (It will be interesting to see if the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court extends the rule of Adjutant to non-violent crimes and thus allows, for example, a defendant in criminal fraud case to offer evidence of the alleged victim's fraudulent propensity and acts to show that the alleged victim engaged in fraud in the transaction on which the prosecution for fraud rests. [But question: Can there ever be a fraud case in which a defendant's fraud is a legally-legitimate defensive measure to an attempt by the alleged victim to defraud the defendant?])

Eight of the jurors who returned a verdict of guilty in the original trial of Pring-Wilson were polled and said that their votes for a verdict of guilty would not have been different had they heard evidence of the dead man's violent propensities.

Under the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision -- Adjutant -- not only is evidence of the alleged victim's propensity toward violence now admissible to show self-defense even though a defendant in a criminal homicide case was unaware at the time of the killing of the victim's propensity, but specific instances of violent acts by the alleged victim are also admissible to show the victim's propensity toward violence.

Legalities aside, one thing impeding the chances for an acquittal if there is a retrial is the fact that defendant was carrying a concealed knife when the fracas that lead to alleged victim's death began.

Despite the results of the newspaper poll of the eight jurors from Pring-Wilson's trial, I predict an acquittal if Pring-Wilson is tried again. It's one thing for a juror to hear a newspaper account of evidence, and it's another to hear the evidence in full-bodied form (and at length) in a courtroom. If even just twenty witness testify to nastily violent behavior by the dead man, an acquittal is more probable than not.

Law school exam question: Could a trial judge exclude the testimony of 20 of the 40 defense witnesses about the violent acts of the dead man on the ground that the testimony of the second set of twenty witness is unduly cumulative -- or on the ground that once the first twenty witnesses have testified about the violent behavior of the dead man, testimony to the same effect from 20 more witnesses is irrelevant?

N.B. The favorable opinion I have of Adjutant is not in the slightest degree due to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's mention in that case of some written text that I authored. I am a scholar and worldly repute matters not one whit to me! (If you believe what I have just said, I would like to talk to you about a bridge in Brooklyn that might well be for sale -- at a quite reasonable price.)

Disagreeable Opinions; Anti-Religious Tests for Academic Employment at Cardozo?

If I understand him aright, the dean of my law school proclaims that opinions rooted only in religious faith are divisive. See my prior post today.

A divisive opinion is ...

... a disagreeable opinion.

A disagreeable opinion is ...

... an opinion that I disagree with.

Now, let me see, if I have this right, ...

... a divisive opinion is an opinion that I disagree with.

&&&&

My venerable dean apparently thinks that opinions about controversial issues such as abortion should not be influenced by religious beliefs, but only by non-religious reasoned debate.

Does Dean Rudenstine actually believe that controversies about matters such as abortion can be resolved exclusively and satisfactorily by the application only of the sweet light of reason -- non-religious reason, that is?

Mmmm ...

I say:

Give me your premises, and I will give you your conclusions.

Give me my premises, I will make you yield to my conclusions.

How will we resolve differences of opinion about our premises? Shall we flip coins or throw dice?

And how will the sweet light of reason resolve questions that are not decidable by evidence?

Will the sweet light of (non-religious) reason tell us whether or not we should kill elderly people because ... well, er ... just because they're too old? What non-religious evidence will tell us that this is the wrong thing to do?

Legal education is incompatible with faith, Dean Rudenstine informs us. He can't mean all religious faith, can he? That would be taking things pretty far.

Mmmm... [... Tillers thinking ...] Rudenstine suggests that only some religious faith is obnoxious. He suggests that faith unsupported by evidence is obnoxious. Yes, that's it: he only objects to dogmatic religious faith in the law -- and in law schools.

Well, that's not so bad, is it? But does it follow that Cardozo Law School will have a religious test (an anti-religious test?) for employment as a law teacher? Will the Cardozo appointments committee henceforth be required to scrutinize the religious beliefs of job applicants to see if their religious beliefs are supported by evidence? I can imagine the questions:

1. You say, Ms. Jones, you believe in the Resurrection. What leads you to think ...

2. You say, Mr. Smith, you believe in Nirvana. Or is it Karma? In any event, Mr. Smith, what leads you to think ...

No, no, no! That's too troublesome. Surely henceforth Cardozo can only hire non-believers!

Mmm... Do you suppose you suppose Dean Rudenstine was just trying to twit us ... and all of those college counselors who visited Cardozo Law School on June 9th? Yes, that must be it! (I can only hope that those guidance counselors did not take him seriously.)

Religious Faith and Legal Education

If I understood him correctly -- and if he was correctly quoted -- my dean -- the dean of Cardozo School of Law, a law school that is part of Yeshiva University --, the dean of my law school said that religious faith is incompatible with legal education. Last Friday's issue (June 17, 2005) of the New York Law Journal reported:

Mr. [David] Rudenstine [dean of Cardozo Law School] said that America's law schools have a social responsibility, especially at a time of religious fundamentalism, to foster reasoned debate over the facts and science of such controversial matters. To shirk this role, he suggested, would be to leave the way clear for faith-based organizations to impose "divisive" views.

"Faith challenges the underpinnings of legal education," Mr. Rudenstine declared. "Faith is a willingness to accept belief in things for which we have no evidence, or which runs counter to evidence we have."

He added, "Faith does not tolerate opposing views, does not acknowledge inconvenient facts. Law schools stand in fundamental opposition to this."

Well, that's interesting. But I suppose St. Augustine was not a scholar. Neither was Newton. Nor Maimonides. Perhaps not even A. Einstein.

The Trial Is the Punishment

The Milosevic trial has been going for ... how many years?

Sometimes Less Is More; Reality Trials

California has not yet learned the rudimentary lesson that sometimes less information (evidence) is better than more.

Or perhaps the explanation for megatrials is simply venality or egomania or cowardice or the adversarial spirit run amok?

Sometimes institutions cannot cure their ailments even when the existence such ailments is palpable to almost everyone. Institutional dysfunctionality. (There's a mouthful for you! Translated: The system has a serious defect. )

But we don't need a reincarnation of the earlier Jerry Brown, who once derided the rule of law as "legalism." (He left California with a Chief Justice who was not much wedded to legalism.) We need "legalism"; i.e., we need the rule of law. We just need remedies for megamaladies such as sex megatrials.

Ah, now I have it! California does believe in soap operas; it cannot resist them; it wants unreal reality trials. The real thing -- a Real.Ordinary.Trial -- apparently just isn't good enough for Californians.

Three Days versus Three Months or Three Years

The trial of Edgar Ray Killen took three days. In California it would have taken three months or three years. Who would venture to say that the quality of justice is better in California than in Mississippi (today)?

What explains the phenomenon of California megatrials?

Not a Reenactment

Yesterday C-Span carried chunks of the 2005 trial Mississippi v. Edgar Ray Killen. I have watched some of these broadcasts. They were fascinating.

Killen is on trial for the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi.

Killen was not at the scene of the killings. The prosecution's theory is that Killen was the mastermind of the plot to kill the civil rights workers. The defense theory is that though Killen may have been at a Klan meeting where the "elimination" of the civil rights workers was discussed, Killen was a "loudmouth" and not a ringleader.

Despite changing times, there were many references to religion. Of course, that was partly -- but only partly -- because Killen himself was a preacher.

Last night's news reports said that the jurors had reported that they were evenly divided, 6-6, on guilt or innocence. Jury deliberations resume today.