subject matter jurisdiction?

procrastinating right now. have a practice exam writing assignment due on monday in my legal process class. i've got a good sense of what i'm going to write, and if i'm wrong, even better than being right, because this is a pass/fail assignment and better to screw this one up and to get the mistakes out of my system so that when it counts (my final) i'll know what i'm doing.

on friday i found myself telling one of my friends that i was misdiagnosed with a brain tumor earlier this year. i don't know why i said it--it just kind of blurted out. i haven't quite mastered the intricacies of privacy (my own). i just say things, almost unconsciously, out they come.

ugh. i just killed forty-five minutes looking at coats on jcrew.com. lame. so so lame. gotta get the lawyer's salary first, which means becoming a lawyer, which means doing this practice exam assignment.

but first, here's what i posted on the site where we have our criminal law virtual classroom. anderson (my prof) encouraged us to put up ideas for essay or multiple choice questions. the ones that she likes, she'll use for the final. my contribution is as follows, including the prefatory disclaimer:


***Attention all close readers of the USA PATRIOT Act, the views expressed in this hypothetical do not necessarily reflect the views of its author.***

Teresa Heinz Kerry is standing alone after midnight waiting for a bus. Per usual, she has a butterfly knife and a can of pepper spray in the right pocket of her coat. Laura Bush creeps out of the shadows and puts Teresa Heinz Kerry in a full nelson, demanding that Heinz Kerry hand over her wallet, specifically her ACLU membership and voter registration cards. Heinz Kerry struggles, but cannot free herself from Bush’s hold, so she reaches in her pocket for either the knife or the pepper spray, grabs at the first thing available, which happens to be the switchblade, drops her body weight to throw off Bush’s balance, and stabs her in the stomach. Seeing her friend with a bloodied gut, Lynne Cheney appears on the scene with a machete and runs at Teresa Heinz Kerry, screaming like a maniac. Right at this moment, the bus pulls up and Elizabeth Edwards jumps out, kicks the machete from Cheney’s hand, ninja-style, pulls out a sawed-off shotgun and shoots Cheney in the kneecaps.

On the way to the emergency room, the ambulance drives over a particularly perilous pothole, which jars the ambulance in such a manner that the back doors fly open and Bush and Cheney are hurled out into the street and die almost instantly from the impact.

Discuss:

...the justifications of self-defense and defense of others for all four parties.
...causation in the deaths of Bush and Cheney.