There’s a metalhead in the jury box of the Aurora mass shooting trial and the news is on it!

Colorado’s News 9 reports that an alternate juror in the mass murder trial against James Holmes wore a Metallica Ride The Lightning t-shirt which may have been in violation of a court order banning display of clothing which may influence the jury.

Neither the judge nor lawyers appeared to notice the shirt worn by juror 983, which features bolts of lightning hitting an empty electric chair on the front and the skeletal remains of a prisoner being electrocuted on the back side.

Judge Carlos Samour has “strictly prohibited” from his courtroom the “display of insignias, symbols, pictures, clothing, or any other items that may influence the jury” in an order that appears on a laminated placard in front of every spectator seat in court.

Since the matter was never brought up on the record Thursday, we don’t know whether the judge would have found the attire in violation of his order.

On Thursday, the 12 deliberating jurors delivered a verdict on aggravating factors, the first of three possible phases in the death penalty sentencing hearing.

Juror 983, who has sported heavy-metal themed tees in court before, is not on the panel of 12, but could be called on to deliberate if a juror should be excused for any reason.

The Metallica track “Ride The Lightning” is written from the point of view of a prisoner awaiting death by electrocution. According to James Hetfield, the song “was not a criticism of capital punishment, which I’m actually a supporter of. Rather, it’s simply about a man who faces death in the electric chair for a crime he didn’t commit.”

We’re guessing Juror 983 didn’t put that much thought into it.

We’d like to see “justice for all” in this case.
 

 
Via: News 9

 
Jared Lee Loughner is identified as the man responsible for a shooting this morning, in Tuscon, Arizona, which left 10 people injured, 5 critically, and six confirmed dead, including a 9-year-old girl and Judge John Roll.

Amongst the injured is Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot at allegedly point blank range - the bullet going “through-and-through her head.”

Loughner is a 22-year-old native of Arizona, who allegedly has his own You Tube Channel “classitup10” that contains very strange and disturbing messages, including his Final Thoughts, in which he writes:

I’m a sleepwalker - who turns off the alarm clock.

Jared also writes about terrorism, grammar, the value of money and the Bible in a rather cryptic fashion, and attacks the US government for implying “mind control” and “brainwash”. In conclusion, Jared writes:

I can’t trust the current government because of the ratification: The government is implying mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar.

No! I won’t pay debt with a currency that’s not backed by gold and silver!

No! I won’t trust in God!

What’s government if words don’t have meaning?

Under interests, Jared writes in past tense:

My favorite interest was reading, and I studied grammar. Conscience dreams were a great study in college!

He lists as his favorite books, again in the past tense:

I had favorite books: Animal Farm, Brave New World, The Wizard Of OZ, Aesop Fables, The Odyssey, Alice Adventures Into Wonderland, Fahrenheit 451, Peter Pan, To Kill A Mockingbird, We The Living, Phantom Toll Booth, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Pulp,Through The Looking Glass, The Communist Manifesto, Siddhartha, The Old Man And The Sea, Gulliver’s Travels, Mein Kampf, The Republic, and Meno.

No doubt Mein Kampf and The Communist Manifesto will be highlighted for agenda-pushing. But there are also books by Ken Kesey, Charles Bukowski, Lewis Carroll, Harper Lee, Ernest Hemingway, Herman Hesse, Ray Bradbury, Plato, Homer, Norton Juster, Jonathan Swift, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell and J M Barrie. If anything is notable is the mix of children’s fantasy and parable.
 

 
With thanks to Aulde Holborne