AgentCooper.NET

The local new station KOMO 4 (http://www.komotv.com) did an article on the regarding the the mall shooting suspect and his “innocent” plea. Anyways, I felt like ranting about the use of the term innocent\innocence as opposed to properly using not-guilty…

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Dear Komo News,
I was reading your article this morning on komo4news.com titled “Prosecutors May Upgrade Charges Against Mall Shooting Suspect” and I have a concern over that statement “He has pleaded innocent to assault, kidnapping and firearms charges”. My concern is your substitution of “not-guilty” for “innocent” as they have two different meanings…

First off the state of Washington there is no recognizable plea as innocent; there is guilty, not-guilty, and the Alford plea. You can not plea innocent because our law system already presumes innocence until a court of law determines a different verdict. Even a plea of not-guilty is by no means an exclamation of innocence; it’s not considered a testimony nor is considered lying under oath but rather a formality in our law system to demand a jury trial. Even during acquittals, the jury finds the defendant not-guilty, not innocent. This is because with the evidence and testimony provided relative to the charges they were unable to determine guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. For example a defendant may have been charged with first degree murder, in which it must be proved that a deliberate and unlawful act caused the death of another person. The defendant provides a defense that he killed the victim in self defense, and the jury ultimately finds him “not-guilty”. They are able to find him not-guilty of homicide because the state was unable to prove the defendant acted with premeditated malice aforethought, this by no means the defendant was innocent in the victim’s death.

Even the associated press revised it’s stylebook on the issue last year…

Old entry:
“Use innocent, rather than not guilty, in describing a defendant’s plea or a jury’s verdict, to guard against the word not being dropped inadvertently.”

New Entry:
“innocent, not guilty – In court cases, plea situations and trials, not guilty is preferable to innocent, because it is more precise legally. (However, special care must be taken to prevent omission of the word not.) When possible, say a defendant was acquitted of criminal charges.”

I guess my point is that we as society and especially the media be more careful to ensure words such as innocent\innocence are not misused. As you can see there is certainly a difference between not-guilty and innocent. Anyways, I’m through with my rant now…

Cheers,
Carl Gibson

So I’ve begun the process of posting my pictures from my recent adventures. Rather tahn maintaining a local gallery on this site I’ve chosen to use that whiz-bang “Flickr!” service. It’s not a shabby service at all, you should check it out…

The link to my Flickr! site is in the links section, but you can also access it here.

Oh wow, so much to say and yet not energy to type it…

I’ve been meaning to blog along my trip but unfortunately my internet connectivity has been limited so far, so it may take some time for me to catch up. I at least want to start with my departure from Seattle. I was flying business class (courtesy of Microsoft), which meant I was allowed to enter the airline’s airport lounge. I had never been privileged enough to enter one of these before but damn was it nice; free food and drinks. The interesting part was that if you wanted a beer or cocktail, you had to make it yourself. They had the drafts there which you could walk up to a top off your pint, or even the vodka, rum, and whiskey bottles in case you cared to make a mixed drink. It was kind of neat!

Anyways once on the plane, it was a direct flight to Amsterdam; damn was that a long flight! Anyways, the person sitting immediately next to me worked for Microsoft and was quite familiar with my friend Peter, but more oddly enough the person two seats over was Nk, a Director in my own organization! So here I am being offered glass after glass of champagne more or less directly in sight of upper-management, it was odd but I didn’t care, in fact all I can say is DAMN that champagne was GOOD.

For those of you who know me well know that I’m quite an anxious flyer. It doesn’t mean that I freak out (at least noticeably), but let’s just say I’m not completely comfortable throughout the flight. I’m amazed at how well I did on this flight, I wasn’t uneasy at all and in fact I was able to get a couple hours of shut-eye while on the plane (I’m sure the booze helped a little). Hopefully this lasts through out the trip as I have many more flights to take in the coming weeks!

So I landed in Amsterdam safely, said my goodbyes to Nk and headed on my way. At this point in time I was officially on vacation! The bollocks of it all is that given my next flight was with another carrier I had to go though immigration, claim my baggage, check-in with the new airline, and go through airport security twice (once for the terminal and once for my gate). I did all that and I still had a couple hours to spare before my next flight. This is where I found a flaw in regards to the airport, there is no place to sit back and relax! You would figure you could do so at the gate, but no… There are several other flights at that gate ahead of mine and you’re not allowed to being the vicinity unless you’re on those flights. So here I am looking for a place to relax (keep in mind it’s 1:00am Seattle time) and I was having no luck, let’s just say I was one cranky motherfucker. Anyways, I finally made it on the plane although I wasn’t the most confident in the airplanes performance. It didn’t seem to phase me much, I was so fucking tired I was wanted to get to my destination and frankly if that couldn’t happen expediently I could care less is plane ditched in the sea; we made it though. I had some eye-candy to look at (one of the flight attendant’s was HOT) which chilled me out a little bit.

I had an AWESOME weekend! I got a call from Ryan on Saturday asking if I wanted to go out to Wenatchee Lake to go sailing at his family’s lake house. A couple hours and 125 miles later we got there, I met his parents (both of which are truly wonderful) and we went out for a sail with his neighbors and a couple of their friends. I can not even explain how much fun it was! After dinner we went for another sail, Ryan and his dad letting me do the sailing; I’m not sure if this was such a great idea given it was DARK… but I pulled my mad sailing skillz out and somehow got us back to the dock safely (for the record I only almost went overboard once). After that Ryan and I headed down to the only dive within 15 miles, had a couple beers and played some pool. The lucky sucker somehow accomplished an 8-ball break on his first break! Anyways we ended up staying the night and we went sailing again today for a few hours… I AM NOW A MASTER SAILOR! OK, maybe not but it was a lot of fun nonetheless!

Yay, my very first blog entry!!!!

So you may be asking why I’m starting a blog, the answer is not as simple as it seems… I had an online type of journal going a few years back, before these “blog” things even existed. I had a lot of fun doing so and now that I have my OWN domain it only seems resonable to do so again. This may not the traditional sort of blog you may be accustomed to, it’s meant primary for myself as a journal of sorts, but also for a little fun too (for those friends of mine who choose to read it). All I can say is if you don’t like it then don’t read it… it’s as simple at that!