guilty

I am unable to say if the jury was correct in ruling against Timothy Boomer. The arguments made in the article try to appeal to opinions and emotions. Neither of those matter in this case. The fact is that a law does exist, whether the jury members agree with the law or not. It is the job of the legislative branch, not the judicial branch, to write laws. The article does not give us the wording of the law, nor do the prosecutor or defendant give us a clear idea of what events lead to the case appearing in court. We do not know the number of times that the defendant cursed, how many children were nearby, what their ages were, whether or not any of them heard him. The data that the article does give us is rather irrelevant to the case in question (I seriously doubt that the law contains clauses for people who have recently fallen from their watercraft). The simple truth is that without the facts, we can only trust that the judicial system acted as it was intended to.