By Reader Request -- "Deferred Adjudification"

Okay, so I'm nothing if not responsive to Reader Requests.

A friend of mine sent me an e-mail suggesting that I do a post on how many different ways people mispronounce "Deferred Adjudication" in court.  I've heard it mispronounced a couple of times over the years, with the most common way, obviously, being "Deferred Adjudification".

As a side note, if you want to mess with a seasoned prosecutor or defense attorney's head, wait until they just finished a bench conference with the judge, walk up to them, and say, "Um, I can't believe you just pronounced that deferred adjudification."  They will deny it, get very embarrassed, and then spend the next fifteen minutes wondering whether or not they really did that in front of a judge.

Trust me, I did it to Denise Nichols once when she was my Three in Judge Davies' court.

But I digress.

There are obviously numerous terms in our system that get blundered by (usually) Defendants, but also by police officers, witnesses, lawyers and judges.

My personal favorite was in a misdemeanor DWI trial, opposing counsel repeatedly spoke of the "Horizontal Glaze Nostalgius" test.  (For you non-lawyer folks, it's the Horizontal Gaze Nystagmus test and it is a staple of any DWI case.  Lawyer humor.)

So, fire away with your favorite mispronunciations here if you've got some.  They are usually pretty funny.

Since we are on the topic, though, I have to confess that it wasn't until 2008 (when I was a District Court chief) that David Cunningham was kind enough to point out to me that the phrase was "for all intents and purposes" and not "for all intensive purposes" as I had been saying for the previous 36 years of my life.