In anticipation of the Blago-jury verdict I cannot help but think that the entire concept of a re-trial is just absurd. In no other part of life do we get do-overs. If we get fired from a job, we can’t go back to our bosses and say, “hey, give me a do-over.” That just doesn’t work. Or,if we get a parking ticket, we can’t just tear it up and forget it ever happened as we "re-do" our park job somewhere else. If we don’t pay that first ticket, a lovely dreadful yellow boot may greet us at the car one day. I’m also not sure about you, but I could never re-take a test,say, if I had a bad day, nor could I re-write a thesis to get a higher grade. One could only retake a class if she failed it.

Is this what the government will be allowed to do with Blago? This is surely what happened at a state level with  Phil Spector; it's enough to have made the man go certifiably insane--if he wasn't there already. He got the pleasure of being tried and retried until the jury wasn't "hung" anymore. For anyone who's ever been even remotely involved with trials, you'll appreciate the fact that a trial drains the very fiber of life out of you. To do this to someone--several times--until you finally convince a jury that you're right is cruel and unusual punishment in and of itself.

So now, does the government get to re-try Blago because it failed? As I write this, no verdict has yet been entered but I'm going out on a whim and saying on at least some counts, the jury is hung and a retrial is looming. So, if that's the case, then it appears that the government has some super power that it can erase the months and months of hoopla from the first trial and it can “re-do” its attempt to get Blago locked up.  This is just entirely unfair. If the government can’t convince twelve people after a fully-prepared trial, then that’s it. There shouldn’t be another attempt to find twelve dunces to be swayed by the second-stab at getting a conviction. What’s more, Blago doesn’t get the ability to have a re-trial if he’s found guilty. Instead, he’s only able to launch an appeal. Those of us who know anything about appeals know that they’re not only long shots but are dreadfully costly.

As a final note, I wonder why no one cares about how much money these trials are costing the state. The legal fees to date already exceed $2.1million. Upon retrial and potentially now, we’ll also be stuck paying Blago’s defense bills! Silly me, but aren’t we spending more money on prosecuting (and defending) Blago for an attempted crime that would have netted him less than we’ve already exhausted on nailing him? Seriously, don’t we have other empty money pits to throw our money into?