Why was I not surprised to find out that there was a lot more to the story when today's headlines from the Jeremy Christian sentencing read that he was removed from the courtroom for threatening a victim? Why was my reaction even further from surprise when I found out that "victim" was Demetria Hester? I was not surprised because if you look at this video posted by The Oregonian https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArJ1PRaZUQM at about one minute and 40 seconds in you can see the video from the Max train the night before the infamous Max train stabbing. In that video Demetria Hester testifies that Jeremy Christian assaulted her the night before by throwing a Gatorade bottle full of booze at her face at a Max stop. By all accounts they were in some sort of argument right before and body language visible in the surveillance video clearly shows that they were arguing. There is no audio, so the court has been going off eyewitnesses to figure out what was said. I try to discount the witnesses because as time goes by and people talk to people, people almost always forget at least something, so when I look at this case I try to focus only on video. What does the video I linked to show? It shows Jeremy walking away before she maced him. Then it shows her follow him with the mace and keep spraying him as he walked. Eventually he tuned around and threw the plastic bottle in her face. Then she backed off, witnesses said he went to a drinking fountain to wash the mace off, and then he went home. The reason the police did not arrest him when she called was because they had no case. It wasn't that they didn't believe her because she was black like she says. It was because any reasonable officer at the time would have concluded that Jeremy Christian was assaulted by Demetria Hester, but did not wish to file charges. Only after the next day's stabbings was he charged in the Hester case. Judge Cheryl Albrecht should have bifurcated these two cases, but instead combined them into one. I believe that each prejudiced the other. How is it possible for a jury to not use the events of the next day when deliberating the charges involving Hester? I'm not sure if the Judge instructed them not to consider the next day's events properly, but even if she did, jurors are human beings that typically vote more with their hearts than their minds. Most jurors are not capable of looking at evidence like what was presented in this trial and not want to find Jeremy guilty on all charges. They usually don't have the mental self discipline necessary give statutes and cold hard facts more weight than their own personal sense of right or wrong. That is why it is very important for law enforcement, lawyers, and judges to do that for them. They are the ones with years of training and experience that should teach them the mental self discipline that jurors naturally lack. If an incompetent judge lets an even more incompetent jury decide a chase like this one based on their hearts there is only one likely outcome and that outcome defies the purpose of having a criminal justice system at all. On appeal I encourage Jeremy and his legal counsel to argue that Judge Albrecht errd by failing to bifurcate these two cases. I wish Jeremy's comments of today were supportive of such an appeal. It was not right for him to say to her "I should have killed you bitch." I fear that statement will be the only thing about today that anyone remembers. When I was his neighbor in jail I learned that he says things before really thinking or caring a lot. Usually when he does it he is just trolling people. Today he was rightfully angry because as far as the Hester case goes he was being sentenced for a crime he had been wrongfully convicted of. He should have been ready to say something to that effect. Now anyone debating his intentions that night will just play this sound byte. They won't bother to watch the surveillance tape and see that he was trying to leave. Now that I have covered Jeremy's wrongful statement, on to Demetria Hester's statements. I've already covered the false statements regarding the police not arresting Jeremy and treating her like the criminal for racial reasons because the video clearly shows her using force first. Right before Jeremy lost it she said "your mom should have swallowed you." It is hard to think of a more classless display by a victor than that. She goes in there trying to ride a moral high horse only to say that and it would have made her look horrible had her attempt to provoke him not been so successful. I wrote previously about how she had been charged but not convicted of prostitution in 2006 according to a public records search (https://ift.tt/2OdQjOo). Does that comment not sound like something a person with a history of prostitution would say? According to her Facebook page she herself is a happy mother. I hope that she never finds herself in the position Jeremy's mother is in right now. Demetria should image how she should feel if her son were to go to prison for a crime he did not commit and the so called "victim" that set him up said that in court. Hopefully she raises that kid well enough that he too would flip out on whoever says that. Judge Albrect should at the very least admonish Demetria Hester for saying that, but judges have a habit around here of doing all they can to keep victims and witnesses from suffering any sort of adverse consequence for their testimony. I've covered this before as the systematic whitewashing of alleged crime victims (https://ift.tt/2v4pUfh). The idea that anyone that is named as a victim in a criminal case could not have done and cannot do wrong. This is on display here where people can say horribly inappropriate things, but it is alright if it is done in the form of a victim impact statement. Even though "your mother should have swallowed you" is not a victim impact. Her statement was so inappropriate that some media outlets will not even print it, but maybe that was one reason for saying it. Maybe she realized that if she said something so NSFW that the news would not want to print it for fear of angering their sponsors or the FCC that most people would not notice. If that was her reason then perhaps she is smarter than I've given her credit for so far. Maybe she should turn it into an instructional video titled something like "How to Keep Your Statements Out of the Press by Making Them Too Obscene to Print starring Demetria Hester."#jeremychristian #demetriahester #cherylalbrecht
source https://copblaster.com/blast/25803/demetria-hesters-nsfw-courtroom-comments-provoke-jeremy-christian
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