From Frequent Citations:
I went down to watch one of our little local trials this afternoon. One of the government witnesses was being cross-examined. The lawyer doing the cross is one of the best defense lawyers in the country. He’s very high energy, and was pretty aggressive with the guy. Polite, but he kept hammering away at tiny little details.
A lot of times the prosecutor would object (a youngish guy and deceptively low-key — he wouldn’t even stand to object. He’d just very quietly say “objection” and sometimes why he was objecting, but never got excited about it) and W. (the defense lawyer) would rephrase the question a couple of times, and then move on.
Eventually there was a break for the jury while the lawyers argued about a few things in front of the judge, and then the jury came in for a little bit longer while the prosecutor talked to his witness again, clarifying some stuff that had come up in the cross.
Most of what they were talking about didn’t make much sense to me, because I’ve only caught little bits of the trial.
Like if you read every 25th page of a long novel.
Anyway.
Around 4:30 the jury was dismissed for the day and most people had left the courtroom when…
One of the other lawyers for the government (who looks like a movie star, a tall and slender blond) walked up to the stand in front of the judge and started talking to her, and suddenly everyone left in the room whipped their heads around, because he was talking about W.!
What followed was like a scene from the movies or a Grisham novel.
The attorney said W. was going Too Far, and running roughshod over the justice system and the judge, and blowing smoke at the jury (his exact words) and all sorts of exciting things like that.
The attorneys who wandered in to see how the trial was going suddenly sat down to watch, or moved to get better seats.
All the attorneys involved in the case were watching the two in the dispute.
W. came up and started demanding to know What, Exactly, He Had Done.
He talks in capitals a lot!! With lots of exclamation marks!!!!!!!!!!!
So he went on for quite a while, all excited and riled up, and demanding to see motions in writing so he could Answer Specific Allegations, Because He Would NEVER!! and so on.
Somebody should have been selling popcorn.
Then I think perhaps the lead prosecutor said a few words, still totally mild-mannered seeming (he’s the one who remained seated when he objected to questions).
By the way, the whole mild-mannered thing?
IS A COMPLETE FRAUD.
That man is very, very, very Eliot Ness.
The judge was about to start saying something, after W. had another go, when a voice piped up from the other side of the courtroom.
“Your Honor?”
We all looked over and it’s this old guy who’s the lawyer for the co-defendant.
And I say old, because he promptly said, “I have more experience than anyone else in this room…”
And then he started lecturing the room about how lawyers should never attack each other personally, et cetera, et cetera, and so forth. All true, of course.
The blond attorney (really, QUITE good looking, and I’m afraid I completely missed his name) went back to the podium and quietly insisted that he was not making a personal attack, he respected Webb quite a lot and thought he was the best lawyer in the room — I thought that was laying it on a bit TOO thick, but what have you — but he really thought there was a problem with how he was asking questions and would the judge please do something.
To which her honor said, file your motions. Thank you and goodnight.
As we left those of us in the audience sort of looked at each other as though to ask,
“Have you ever?”
It was AMAZING.
Although the dogs cannot tell the difference between real and pirated discs, they can detect if DVDs are hidden among shipments signed off as a consignment of something else.
Williams pleads, “A judge somewhere needs to pick the baby’s father soon because we’re running out of candidates.” Allegedly, since Anna Nicole Smith has shaken hands with so many men, there’s an almost unlimited number of possibilities. “Several of the seventeen men now in contention for DannielLynn’s fatherhood have laid claim to her paternity based on shaking hands with Anna Nicole,” said Joe Doaks, a spokesperson for Fathers Without Children, a non-profit group based in Utah. “After all, shaking hands is how women become pregnant,” Doaks observed.
