During holiday break a few years ago I took my nephew to watch arraignments at the state courthouse. I was looking forward to him seeing the guys in orange jumpsuits and manacles. Alas, it is almost all by video these days. He's a good kid, but I like to do my part to keep him on the "not going to jail" path.

*I have one friend who is a court clerk and another is a court recorder. After the excursion with the nephew I asked both of them about the video arraigments, and they told me all about it. More than I wanted to know. They really like it.

For a moment I had this vision of people being turned into Peter Parker mutants, what with the French word for spider being araignée...

What contact do the lawyers have with the prisoner before the hearing?

Remember, some of the people who were tried for Abu Graibh were professional prison guards: they didn't just call into question the reputation of the US Army.

This has to be done right, and the checks have to be visible.

The defendant should have contact with lawyers immediately from the moment of his arrest, as in "I want to call my lawyer."

This is not smart, and I don't quite see how it works out to be the driver's fault. (Running, of course, was wrong, wrong, wrong.)

From my IANAL reading of the article, it sounds like he wouldn't have been charged with anything had he stopped and at least waited for the authorities (in some states he'd be required to render assistance to the extent possible, but I don't know about NH).

and

(Running, of course, was wrong, wrong, wrong.)

But I don't think the driver being a sleaze precludes the pedestrian from being an idiot, which is what I was commenting on.

I'll get you photos of the site after the snow melts.

It's fairly open terrain. No streetlights. No nearby houses.

It sounds like he was walking down the middle of the lane, an impression bolstered by the wording 'walking south in the northbound lane'. I don't think the writer would have phrased it that way if the victim had been in a reasonable position with respect to traffic.

The building to the east on the U-shaped driveway is an ice-cream-and-hot-dog stand that's open for the tourists in the summer.

That's around five miles.

Working over a video link risks throwing away those safeguards.

The article notes that the victim is "a resident in the care of Granite State Guardianship" - an organization that cares for the mentally ill.

Or watering-can, or whatever. I don't know why and it shouldn't be my obligation to guess. The obligation is on the process to ensure openness. Video closes it off.

>>The arraignment is when the judge reads the defendant the charges against him and tells him when the trial date is.

It's not just there to be a bureaucratic hassle for the judge. One principle of habeas corpus is that the accused is presented in court and is shown not to have been "disappeared".

>>The defendant should have contact with lawyers immediately from the moment of his arrest, as in "I want to call my lawyer."

All sorts of things "should" happen. Usually they do. But your argument, taken ad absurdum, would imply that the criminal justice system be abolished because there are redundancies in it. Few safeguards are effective by themselves; a stream of executions in Texas should be enough to shake your confidence in sober and competent lawyers.

"Is," not "was." Severe head injuries. Ain't none of us invulnerable.

Of course, that includes those without severe apparent head injuries.

That's around five miles.

This raises a question in my mind: if I were to inadvertently hit a pedestrian, would I be risking charges if I left the scene to go get help? It seems like that would be a silly way to run things, but then again, the law can be counterintuitive.

It very much depends on the road. While all paved roads where I grew up had clearly designated pedestrian areas (either a sidewalk or an actual separate pedestrian / bicycle road), once you left the paved areas for the joys of gravel roads, you were looking at roads with no visible markings and a ditch right off the side. Some places there were even signs warning about UXB (yah, grew up not too far from what used to be a target range for artillery regiments, I believe it's now all cleared), so you stayed on the road, if you valued your life.

Of course, most drivers on those roads knew that they were likely to have pedestrians on the road and I believe there were on average tens, maybe hundreds of pedestrians for each car.