Today’s spotlight American product are Funyuns. Coming in a cool little curvy plastic tube with a lid that doubles up as a bowl, they’re a corn-based hoop-shaped snack food rather like Monster Munch but without the punch (a straight onion flavour instead of pickled onion). Oh, and they’re fun. Hence the name.

We had a drug possession case today which reminded me how much I inherently dislike those laws. My personal views on drugs aside, I fail to see what business the law has in dictating such things. Regulation in the same way as alcohol is one thing, but the law is really there to protect you from your neighbour and vice versa. Drug laws seem to be an attempt to protect you from yourself which is not, in my opinion, the jurisdiction of the law. Naturally drug-related crimes should be prosecuted, and perhaps even more harshly, but drug-taking is largely a personal affair provided it does not pose problems for others to deal with.

CASE OF THE DAY:
One case that was clearly going to get confusing involved a backyard brawl between a few families (American chavs!) and our various witnesses all seemed to have a very different idea of what was going on. It seemed fairly clear to us that our client was basically helping out his sister (or possibly neice or cousin, I forget) but got involved in a fight with the father of the family whose house it was. At any rate, the key witness for the prosecution was this father and in cross-examination he let slip the comment, “while I was chasing her around the truck.” Now it’d be fairly hard to claim chasing round a truck in self defence so we decided to play on this: “So who were you chasing around the truck?” He points out one of the black women in the first bench…who happens to be Rosa, our assistant investigator who was nowhere near the scene! Dismissed.