Law Office of Steven R. Young

Feel overwhelmed with an upcoming trial? If you need help in trial, or need someone to try a case for you, I will be there for you. Juryattorney.com 714 673-6500 #GerrySpence #Juryattorney #trialattorney #thunderheadranch #thegunslinger #TLC #GSM #brainexpansion #personaldevelopment #lastminutetriallawyer

Watergate, Fifty Years Ago Today. Fifty years ago, I watch the sunrise to sunset coverage of the unfolding Watergate scandal. I am a college student and nothing seems more important to me than upheaval our country is facing in Washington. President Nixon is the focus of the investigation as Leon Juworski, the Watergate Special Prosecutor has indicted seven of Nixon’s closest confidants. The investigation takes an unexpected turn when a staffer reveals that all oval office conversations are recorded. Juworski moves quickly and issues subpoenas for audio recordings of the president’s Oval Office phone conversations. Nixon claims executive privilege protects him, and he refuses to release the tapes. The dispute lands in the Supreme Court. The case hinges on whether a president can withhold information from other government branches in the name of privacy. The stakes for then-President Richard M. Nixon are high. Nixon argues that unless a president can protect the privacy of the advice he gets, he cannot get the advice he needs. On July 24, 1972, the Supreme Court in an 8-to-0 decision finds Nixon’s argument inadequate. Speaking to a packed courtroom, Chief Justice Warren Burger orders Nixon to comply with the subpoena for the recordings. The court finds this is a special case because special prosecutor Leon Jaworski is tasked with representing the nation and has the authority to challenge any privilege the White House invokes. The Supreme Court’s ruling on the Nixon tapes comes mere hours before the House Judiciary Committee is scheduled to start debating whether to recommend impeachment for blocking the investigation of the Watergate break-in. Nixon says, “I am disappointed” in the Supreme Court’s decision but I will comply. Three days later, the House Judiciary Committee approves an article of impeachment against him and sends it to the full House. Nixon releases the tapes, including a recording many call the “smoking gun.” That tape reveals that on June 23, 1972, a few days after the Watergate break-in, the president spoke about getting the FBI to stand down on its investigation into the incident. In a statement accompanying the release of the tapes, Nixon urges people to consider the evidence and the events “in perspective.” “Whatever mistakes I made in the handling of Watergate, the basic truth remains that when all the facts were brought to my attention I insisted on a full investigation and prosecution of those guilty,” Nixon said. “I am firmly convinced that the record, in its entirety, does not justify the extreme step of impeachment and removal of a president.” On Aug. 8, 1974, Nixon acknowledges he has lost congressional support and resigns before the House could impeach him. If you need help in trial, or need someone to try a case for you, I will be there for you. Juryattorney.com 714 673-6500 #GerrySpence #Juryattorney #trialattorney #thunderheadranch #thegunslinger #TLC #GSM #brainexpansion #personaldevelopment #lastminutetriallawyer

My Father Throughout my father’s life, many underestimated him. He grew up in the coal fields of eastern Oklahoma. His father was a miner and the president of the coal miners’ local. I was shocked to learn that he did not graduate from high school. I was not surprised to learn that he won the Oklahoma state high school oratory competition. He was not a lawyer, but he is the greatest orator I ever heard. He died twenty-four years ago on December 31 at 11:50 p.m., but not before he taught me many lessons: For years, he drove a weathered 1954 Ford F-100 pickup truck. It was ugly, and he drove it everywhere including the dump where he knew the workers by their first name. This taught me it does not matter how something looks. What matters is that it works. He maintained that truck no matter the weather. He’d pull it up the curb, then crawl under it in the snow to change the oil. That taught me that you do what has to be done no matter what. He would eat steak three meals a day, if he could. At night, he ate popcorn and drank Coca-Cola. When I asked him why, he said, “You gotta do what makes you happy, or life is not worth living.” He began smoking when he was nine-years old. He’s steal tobacco from grandpa’s tobacco pouch. He also stole whiskey from the mason jars the moonshine was sold in. By the time I was born, he was a serious alcoholic and smoked three-packs of Pall Mall filterless cigarettes everyday. When I was three, he joined the Mormon church. He quit smoking and drinking the same day - and never went back. This taught me willpower and determination overcome everything. After joining the Mormon church, the church leaders asked him to help others with addiction issues. For the rest of his life, he visited those struggling to overcome, and continued to follow up after they overcame. I met many of them at his funeral. Perhaps the most important lesson he taught me is that caring for people is the price of taking up space on earth. Last year, I attended my high school reunion. I talked to a friend. He told me he loved that my dad called him “Son,” just as he called every boy on his team. My friend told me, “My mom and dad broke up, and I didn’t see my dad much. Your dad took me under his wing and when I needed it he told me, ‘Son, you gotta straighten up and fly right.’ Your dad started an American Legion baseball team I played on that got me on the high school team, and carried me into collegiate baseball. I’d have never gone to school without him.” I remember my dad telling me, “The kind things we say or do may be the only good thing that happens to someone that day.” I miss him everyday. I hope someday I can be half the man he was. Juryattorney.com 714 673-6500 #GerrySpence #Juryattorney #trialattorney #thunderheadranch #thegunslinger #TLC #GSM #brainexpansion #personaldevelopment #lastminutetriallawyer

The Lesson of the Flower The older I get, the more important flowers become. They represent the beauty of the world’s best gifts, then wrinkle and fade. I am in the wrinkle and fade phase of my life. Soon my petals will fade and fall. My leaves will shrivel and drop, and the gardener will clear the flower bed. Flowers remind me to enjoy all that life sends me for nothing lasts forever. If you need help in trial, or need someone to try a case for you, I will be there for you. Juryattorney.com 714 673-6500 #GerrySpence #Juryattorney #trialattorney #thunderheadranch #thegunslinger #TLC #GSM #brainexpansion #personaldevelopment #lastminutetriallawyer

Decoration Day As a youth, my mother calls the last Monday in May, "Decoration Day." That is the day my family travels two hours to where my mother's ancestors are buried. The five kids fill the bench seat in the back of my parents' Oldsmobile Dynamic 88. The car has neither seat belts nor air-conditioning. My younger sister always complains if my younger brother touches her. No matter how fast my dad drives, the trip is too long, too hot, too crowded. The cemetery is in Duchenne, Utah. It is a desert. One year a scorpion stings my younger brother. I do not know how he survived. No doctors in the town were in town on Decoration Day. Another year, I was wearing shorts (as always) and slide while turning a corner while running in sandals. My feet slide on gravel on the sidewalk and I end up sliding on my side across the cement. My side becomes a mass of bleeding abrasions. My mother the nurse, ignores my screams as she scrubs the dirt from my abrasions. She then sprays a liquid bandage with cloves in it. I really scream at that until the bandage dries. The headstones are simple flat markers with the names, a birthday and a death date. Mom and Dad pull weeds from the graves, then arrange small stones around the graves. Mom uses a brush to clean the head stones. To complete the task, she retrieves flowers from the car trunk and places them in small, permanent vases on the graves. When completed, she steps back, places her hands on her hips and surveys her work. More than once I see her wipe away tears. On the way home she shares stories of the men and women for whom she so lovingly cares. As an adult, I inherit a love for my ancestors. I do genealogy and research the stories my mother told me. Once, a lawsuit requires me to conduct depositions in Utah. When I finish, I decide I am going to that little cemetery. It is a long drive, but I have air conditioning. I find the cemetery and spend a long time searching for the grave markers. When I find them, the graves are grown over with weeds. I pull the weeds and clean up the graves as best I can. There are no smooth stones to ring the graves with. I do not have a brush to clean the headstones with so I use a shirt from my luggage - it seems the least I could for these that my mother loved so much. I step back to survey my work with my hands on my hips. Then it happens - the tears flow. It is then I learn why Decoration Day (Memorial Day now) matters. It is our means of remembering through small acts of service that keep memories of our departed ones alive. I wish you a joyous and meaningful day. If you need help in trial, or need someone to try a case for you, I will be there for you. Juryattorney.com 714 673-6500 #GerrySpence #Juryattorney #trialattorney #thunderheadranch #thegunslinger #TLC #GSM #brainexpansion #personaldevelopment #lastminutetriallawyer

A Rule for Happy Marriage. Never marry someone who you know will be a terror in divorce court. It’s not that you are planning on divorcing, it’s that the person who will be a terror if you divorce them, will be a terror throughout your marriage. If you need help in trial, or need someone to try a case for you, I will be there for you. Juryattorney.com 714 673-6500 #GerrySpence #Juryattorney #trialattorney #thunderheadranch #thegunslinger #TLC #GSM #brainexpansion #personaldevelopment #lastminutetriallawyer

Are You a Warrior? “You can only be a warrior if you love. If you don’t love someone or something, you will never be more than a conscript taking orders. That is the transformative magic of love.” (SYoung) If you need help in trial, or need someone to try a case for you, I will be there for you. Juryattorney.com 714 673-6500 #GerrySpence #Juryattorney #trialattorney #thunderheadranch #thegunslinger #TLC #GSM #brainexpansion #personaldevelopment #lastminutetriallawyer

I have run away to Mexico for my wife's birthday -- yes, she's here as well. I love the Montage and wouldn't have it any other way.

Learning From Bullies. In the movie, “Back to the Future,” Bif, embodies the features we feared when we were in school. He is a stylized bully who had Marty McFly (and all McFlys in his gun sights). Bif’s has a big problem with Marty because Marty does not cower in Bif’s presence. Marty demonstrates to everyone at his high school that they do not have to run and hide from Bif. The big “reveal” at the end of the movie is that Bif an underachieving loser. All bullies live lives of contradiction: while they insist that everyone pay them respect, no one wants to be with them. In our youth, we learned that our life is better if we can avoid bullies. A hallmark of maturity is the blessing of choosing whom we will spend time with. As adults, we consciously avoid aggressive people who are needlessly disagreeable and disagreeable. I do not mean disagreeing – which is everyone’s right. What I mean is that group of sour people who have bitterness etched deeply into their faces. The great lesson of bullies is what they really are - frail and weak. They become disagreeable so they do not have to acknowledge their weaknesses. They disagree for the sake of disagreeing rather than to advance a meaningful agenda. They insist that we respect them when they do not respect themselves. Pondering bullies will change the way you try cases. Remembering how you reacted to bullies is a gift. When you were busy avoiding a bully, could the bully persuade you of anything, except that you did not like the bully? When you were young, did you enjoy watching a bully terrorize a schoolmate? Of course not. This is the bully’s lesson. Your jurors will not enjoy watching an attorney bully and unfairly browbeat a witness, or intimidate a weak witness into making obviously unwarranted admissions. Just because the witness gives the answer the bully wants, does not mean the testimony will convince the jury. The personality of the bully will stand in the way of the jurors accepting anything from him because the memory of their youth is too distasteful. My advice: be kind, be fair, be honest. Anything less in trial and you risk becoming a bully. If you need help with a trial, or need someone to try a case for you, I will be there for you Juryattorney.com 714 673-6500 #GerrySpence #Juryattorney #trialattorney #thunderheadranch #thegunslinger #TLC #GSM #brainexpansion #personaldevelopment #lastminutetriallawyer

The Biggest Lie From our Childhood. When we were young, with tears streaming down our cheeks, running to see our mother, she comforted us with a great lie, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.” As a child we knew that words cut deeply. At school, the jeers of our schoolmates mortified us. Ask the young woman whose reputation was destroyed by a braggadocio’s false words that started rumors deriding her chastity with a lurid lie of a conquest that never happened. When a relationship fails, and words are spoken, we feel them for a long time. At work, words destroy reputations or careers. Words are the forerunners of fights and war. It is true that a lie can be half way around the world before the truth has a chance to put its shoes on. As trial lawyers, our words are the mechanism we use to reveal truth. We argue for justice. We plead for mercy. We frequently encounter witnesses who are not honest, or who will not respond to our questions. Some attorneys cannot let this affront pass and will strike out at the witness with insinuating tones or rude attacks. This is a serious mistake. The jury, the adults in the room, do not want to listen to a playground argument and will turn off. The reason they do is each of us has mirror neurons in our brain that give us the same experience we are observing, as if we are committing the act. Neuroscientists discovered mirror neurons when they wired laboratory monkeys’ brains. They observed that when a monkey was doing something in an experiment, the brains of the other monkeys in the laboratory fired in the same region as the monkeys experiencing the stimulation. At trial, words are a contest. If jurors must watch you belittle or insult a witness, they will experience the conflict as if you are saying it to them. They will recoil and resent you for making them feel that way. Do you think jurors will award you client just compensation if you have made them feel attacked? Words like sticks and stones will break your client’s case, for your words can be disastrous. If you need help with your words for a jury, or want help trying a case, I will be there for you. Juryattorney.com 714 673-6500 #GerrySpence #Juryattorney #trialattorney #thunderheadranch #thegunslinger #TLC #GSM #brainexpansion #personaldevelopment #lastmninutetriallawyer