"You have a constitutional right to be a dumbass"

July 27, 2016 3:48 AM

Justin Roiland - the voice of Adult Swim's Rick and Morty - reenacts a truly ridiculous court transcript from a Georgia county courtroom, as Rick and Morty. (NSFW)

The complete court transcript, for your incredulous reading pleasure.

posted by His thoughts were red thoughts (41 comments total)

As was mentioned when I saw this on Twitter, the exchange gets a lot less funny when you realize it's a murder case in Georgia, the judge is white, and the defendant is black.
posted by phack at 4:01 AM on July 27, 2016 [8 favorites]

The defendant - Denver Allen - appears to be white. Not that it matters - the judge is highly unprofessional no matter the colour of the defendant.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 4:09 AM on July 27, 2016 [16 favorites]

Yeah, phack, I didn't find this funny at all =(
posted by Cozybee at 4:12 AM on July 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

Oh. My
posted by Autumn Leaf at 4:29 AM on July 27, 2016

Yeah judges really need to be able to handle provocation from defendants better than this. Even leaving aside not taking his accusations against his attorney seriously (which easily might be total nonsense, who knows), if you can't handle someone you have more or less total power over saying "fuck you," you really don't belong on the bench.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 5:17 AM on July 27, 2016 [14 favorites]

An elected Judge, I assume.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 5:22 AM on July 27, 2016 [4 favorites]

I found it funny.
posted by fungible at 5:31 AM on July 27, 2016 [14 favorites]

If I think to pretend it isn't real, it's actually quite funny. If I think about it being real, it's extremely depressing.

I'm probably going to consider these two strands separately.
posted by solarion at 5:45 AM on July 27, 2016 [3 favorites]

An elected Judge, I assume.

Yes

Here is an article defending the judge; bottom line-judges are people too, and sometimes lose their shit just like everyone else. Not sure I completely agree, but something to think about. My bigger problem with the case is that it seems likely the defendant is mentally ill, and putting him in jail in lieu of treatment has served neither him nor the community well.
posted by TedW at 5:46 AM on July 27, 2016 [9 favorites]

bottom line-judges are people too, and sometimes lose their shit just like everyone else.

Well, I'm not sure that literally demanding that the defendant masturbate in your courtroom is ever going to be reasonable reaction for a judge no matter the circumstance.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 5:54 AM on July 27, 2016 [21 favorites]

Whoa, this is better than the one where an attorney is deposing someone and spends like ten pages of transcript trying to get him to admit that he knows what a photocopier is.
posted by Naberius at 6:28 AM on July 27, 2016 [11 favorites]

Yyyyyyyeah, that's some textbook delusion stuff. The bizarre context-free sexual allegations, the conspiracy musings. It's not very funny, really. Just kind of depressing.
posted by Scattercat at 6:54 AM on July 27, 2016 [4 favorites]

See also: Follow the Chicken.
posted by fifthrider at 7:02 AM on July 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

red thoughts - oh well. I think my point still mostly stands, though that'll teach me to repeat random tweets as fact.

FWIW, I thought it was funny when I first saw it. The dialogue really does sound just like an exchange Rick and Morty would have. I'm going to echo Solarion and say that it's funny only if you don't think about it as a thing that actually happened.
posted by phack at 7:08 AM on July 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

The judge said "dadgum" immediately after saying "I'll bet everybody enjoys sucking your cock." Like, it's ok to use that language, but he gets squeamish about saying "goddamn." That's pretty funny.
posted by giraffe at 7:11 AM on July 27, 2016 [4 favorites]

I don't understand why the judge wouldn't have just ordered the defendant escorted out around the same time his charged him with contempt?
posted by Kurichina at 7:12 AM on July 27, 2016

See also: Follow the Chicken.

Oh shit. The NYT reenactment of that is too good. You don't want professional actors doing this stuff. I came out of that video thinking that chicken guy has a wisdom that we've lost track of in our modern world...
posted by Naberius at 7:14 AM on July 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

I mean, yeah, I guess it's funny when two people argue loudly in public and make a bunch of dick jokes. If you're a middle-school-aged boy. And one of them isn't facing a capital murder charge, and obviously mentally unfit to stand trial, much less represent himself. And the court doesn't openly admit its bias. And the judge isn't disgracing his office.

Yeah, if not for all that, I'd be I L-ing the hell OL.
posted by Mayor West at 7:17 AM on July 27, 2016 [4 favorites]

bottom line-judges are people too, and sometimes lose their shit just like everyone else.

If I 'lost my shit' the way this guy did I would be fired immediately, and I'm just a cashier not a public official whose supposed to be administering justice.
posted by bracems at 7:29 AM on July 27, 2016 [7 favorites]

That was hilarious. Rick and Morty's voices add much to an inherently absurd proceeding.
posted by dazed_one at 7:55 AM on July 27, 2016 [4 favorites]

Pretty funny, if I said any of the things that judge says in retort to a member of the public while in my professional role I'd be suspended, written up and investigated for other bias issues. And you know what? I'm fine with that, I think it makes the world a better place.

And none of you know, but I'm a dude who is permitted to show up to work in huaraches and a greasy T-shirt, not some high-falutin' elected judge with an education who arbitrates "justice"!

Also, what a great demonstration of how easy it is to abuse contempt charges.
posted by Matt Oneiros at 8:02 AM on July 27, 2016 [4 favorites]

I think this is funny.

Of course having a mentally disturbed person (who in a more generous time would be in psychiatric care instead of a criminal court) stand trial in a system severely biased and backwards in its attitudes towards the mentally ill is tragic. It sucks. It's a cruel mockery of justice that is perpetuated daily in our courts in the U.S. That's not what people are laughing at.

It's funny because the judge loses the game. He breaks rather quickly under the taunts of the defendant and breaks his role of a judge to adopt one similar to the defendant. He gets in the mud to wrestle and that's exactly where the defendant wanted him. The high almighty role of a judge is replaced by one of a petulant child, and it turns the otherwise boring and damning process of a trial into a ridiculous farce played out in this reality.
posted by Philipschall at 9:04 AM on July 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

Can anyone tell me if the defendant actually is in the right in the beginning? With the lack of documents his lawyer has given him etc. Is this yet another failure of the public defender system or has the guy watched too many procedural shows and is expecting too much?
posted by ymgve at 9:22 AM on July 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

Allen was housed at the Augusta State Medical Prison from September 2009 to March 30, 2015.... Allen also spent time in 2007 at Milledgeville’s Central State Hospital, the state’s largest facility for treatment of mental illness and development disabilities.

This is a judge baiting, badgering, and gay-shaming a person who is obviously dealing with significant mental illness. It's just about as funny as it would be if the judge had tossed someone out of a wheelchair and then spent ten minutes laughing and pointing because they couldn't get up off the floor.

The judge, meanwhile, "hopes that his leadership on the bench teaches people how to take responsibility for themselves."
posted by mudpuppie at 9:24 AM on July 27, 2016 [5 favorites]

Naberius: the one where an attorney is deposing someone and spends like ten pages of transcript trying to get him to admit that he knows what a photocopier is

This has also been dramatized, and by the New York Times, no less.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 9:30 AM on July 27, 2016

So, I laughed. Honestly, I don't know how anyone couldn't start to listen to this dramatization and not laugh, it's so incredibly absurd and Roiland's voices are just too good. It started being a lot less funny to me when he started talking about murdering the judge's family...

That said... I'm curious if there's anything to be said about the fact that I would assume the documents he's asking for (autopsy report) seem fairly standard to me. And there's no question that the judge acted totally unprofessional but I mean... the guy is clearly unhinged and unwilling to let anyone help him.
posted by the_querulous_night at 9:46 AM on July 27, 2016

And there's no question that the judge acted totally unprofessional but I mean... the guy is clearly unhinged and unwilling to let anyone help him.

And accordingly unfit to stand trial. Which the judge should have picked up on and, presumably (I am unfamiliar with the specific process in the US/Georgia) asked his lawyer whether he wished to request psychiatric evaluation to determine capacity to instruct. It's not complicated. Unless you're incompetent/racist/both.
posted by howfar at 10:59 AM on July 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

Whoa, this is better than the one where an attorney is deposing someone and spends like ten pages of transcript trying to get him to admit that he knows what a photocopier is.

In which, if the testimony in the transcript is to be believed, it is the attorney who is ignorant for not knowing that there are, in fact, places where everyone says 'Xerox' and the word 'photocopier' is sufficiently unfamiliar that someone would reasonably want to get clarification to make sure they knew exactly what the lawyer was asking about.
posted by straight at 11:09 AM on July 27, 2016

You have a right to an attorney, but you do not have the right to an attorney of your choice, unless you can demonstrate that your appointed attorney is providing inadequate representation. I'm not up on Georgia's discovery rules, but I imagine the defense is entitled to all of the things the defendant mentioned. It's incumbent upon the state to provide these things. I'm not sure how defense counsel hasn't received this discovery when they are apparently two weeks from trial date, and if he has not it would be grounds for either exclusion of the evidence or a continuance of the trial.

With respect to his fitness to stand trial, the standard (at least in my jurisdiction) is whether the defendant understands the proceedings against him and can assist his counsel in preparing his defense. Nothing in this transcript suggests that he fails either of these tests. He may be mentally ill, or just particularly hostile, but (at least in my jurisdiction) he'd be competent to stand trial.

Honestly, I think the judge acquitted himself pretty well up until he used a homophobic slur against the defendant, but after that it quickly got out of control. Considering he was threatened with the rape and murder of him and his family, I can understand why he reacted without the proper decorum. The proper course of action would have been to order the bailiff to return him to the jail once he'd held him in contempt, but it's hard to get a sense of the pace of the proceedings from the transcript.
posted by enjoymoreradio at 12:07 PM on July 27, 2016 [6 favorites]

This falls into one of those quantum-esque places where I can find it simultaneously hysterically funny as well as depressing and sad.
posted by phearlez at 12:34 PM on July 27, 2016 [11 favorites]

> In which, if the testimony in the transcript is to be believed, it is the attorney who is ignorant for not knowing that there are, in fact, places where everyone says 'Xerox' and the word 'photocopier' is sufficiently unfamiliar that someone would reasonably want to get clarification to make sure they knew exactly what the lawyer was asking about.

If I recall, the issue in that case was that some government agency was making a contrived argument that burning a CD full of PDF files fell under some statute that covered photocopying, and thus when a company requested public information by CD the agency felt entitled to charge them at the per-page photocopying rate as though it would take a civil servant hours to copy a 1,000-page PDF instead of just the ten minutes it takes to burn a CD. Which led to extortionate fees for things those companies used to get very cheaply.

Hence I think the lawyer questioning the IT guy is trying to make the point that “photocopying” is commonly understood to cover Xerox machines but not the copying of digital files, and the IT guy (and his counsel) are playing dumb and suggesting that “photocopying” is not a word that has a generally understood meaning. If the dude were merely confused, he wouldn't have repeated “I just want to make sure I answer your question correctly” like it was a mantra. He was coached by his lawyer to say that.
posted by savetheclocktower at 1:03 PM on July 27, 2016 [5 favorites]

If you look in the comments of the NYT dramatization you find a comment from someone who claims to be the lawyer running the depo.
posted by phearlez at 1:13 PM on July 27, 2016

it's funny only if you don't think about it as a thing that actually happened.

This is pretty much Rick & Morty's wheelhouse though. It's got an amazingly dark heart, which is part of what makes it such a hilarious and compelling show.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 2:03 PM on July 27, 2016 [3 favorites]

Honestly, I think the judge acquitted himself pretty well up until he used a homophobic slur against the defendant, but after that it quickly got out of control.

Really? When it was open to the judge to have him removed at any time?

I've encountered some real prick judges, but no, this judge did not, in my view, acquit himself pretty well. It's a courtroom, and while it may have a bar, it's not actually a pub. Ridiculous unprofessionalism.
posted by howfar at 2:28 PM on July 27, 2016 [4 favorites]

simultaneously hysterically funny as well as depressing and sad.

See also The Philosophy of Rick and Morty.
posted by sfenders at 5:50 PM on July 27, 2016

Aw, man, y'all had me all primed to get super indignant, but that was really funny!
posted by Bugbread at 8:43 PM on July 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

Besides acting unprofessionally, isn't the judge actively lying to the defendant when he tells him there are only two choices, to either accept that particular public defender or represent himself? If it's true that you can request another public defender, then it appears to me that the judge repeatedly responds in a deceptive fashion to the request, by for example stating that the defendant doesn't have the right to a specific attorney when he doesn't appear to have asked for any particular attorney, and continues to act deceptively even after the defendant explicitly says that the reason he doesn't want to work with the attorney is that he believes he's being misrepresented.

The defendant doesn't start swearing and acting hostile towards the judge until the judge openly lies to him by saying the "two choices" thing, and then starts behaving as though the defendant has said he wants to represent himself before he's actually said anything like that, and starts rattling off the list of things the defendant doesn't know.

I mean yeah, the defendant obviously has mental health issues, but he appears to simply be recognizing that the judge is willing to actively deceive him and put words in his mouth (and maybe was actually testing whether the judge would treat him this way by making the request in the first place) and once the guy in charge, who is supposed to be the impartial judge, adequately demonstrates a willingness to feed him bullshit and twist his words, he doesn't care any more.

I laughed (while also finding the death threats chilling) because the judge tried to act haughtily and push the defendant around, but then completely did not get away with it. He brought a social status to a bullshit fight.
posted by XMLicious at 9:36 PM on July 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

Except that's not a lie. You do not have the right to fire your public defender without showing that he has been ineffective. Nothing here indicates that the PD was anywhere close to that.
posted by enjoymoreradio at 9:43 PM on July 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

But the judge didn't say that. If in addition to representing himself and being represented by his current public defender there was the third option of firing his public defender by successfully demonstrating that he had been ineffective, then yes the judge was lying to state that there were only two options. On top of being deceptive by pretending that third option doesn't even exist when he's being explicitly asked about it.

I can certainly believe that it's a lie and a type of deception that a judge would normally expect to get away with, perhaps even must be allowed to get away with because of constraints on resources within the justice system, but it's still a lie and a deception.
posted by XMLicious at 10:22 PM on July 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

I mean the judge rattled off a list of all of the things the defendant didn't know about the law, so he really can't say he thought the defendant already knew he was pursuing a valid option and only failed to acknowledge it, after repeated specific inquiries, for that reason.
posted by XMLicious at 10:27 PM on July 27, 2016

That judge is very much the stereotypical backwater asshat and the defendant just doesn't have a chance. On the other hand, I totally respect the defendant's ability to troll. That was textbook. When one is reduced to the position of asymmetrical warfare, all that is left are the small victories.
posted by Fezboy! at 8:30 AM on July 28, 2016 [5 favorites]