Three Defendants Will Walk

There are three high profile cases which have been in the national news during the past several weeks. The first to reach a conclusion was the federal case against former US senator and presidential aspirant John Edwards. Three days ago, Edwards was acquitted of one of the six counts brought against him for corruption, and due to a deadlocked jury, a mistrial was declared with respect to the other five counts. The other two cases to which I'm referring are the federal perjury case against former Boston Red Sox pitcher, Roger Clemens, and the widely watched second degree murder case against George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida.

You are going to have to trust me on this, when I state that I knew two weeks ago that Edwards was going to get his big win. Unfortunately, I was unable to document my bold prediction here on The Quentin Chronicle due to commitments involving my expiring two year term as the President (aka Glorified Bookkeeper) of the Broken Arrow Condominium Association in Hayward, Wisconsin. Before I run out of time (or excuses) regarding the Clemens and Zimmerman trials, I am going on record here and now by predicting that neither of those defendants will be found guilty of the felonies with which they are charged.

The Edwards case was not all that tough to predict, starting with the fact that the prosecution's theory of the case was poorly conceived. In order to prevail, the prosecution would have to convince a twelve person jury that they all had the ability, not to mention the legal right, to read Edwards' mind and then come to the conclusion that he orchestrated an outlandish coverup of contributions in an aggregate amount approaching $1 million. The prosecution must have believed that the jurors would not be able to get past the sordid scumminess of Edwards' personal life and would therefore reject Edwards' position that the controversial donations made in 2007 and 2008 were not meant for his campaign, but instead were used in an effort to hide his affair and resultant love child from his terminally ill wife. Ironically, it was that very scumminess that made Edwards' story more believable. In other words, the worse his personal situation was four or five years ago, the more money he needed to achieve his goal of hiding things from his wife.

The prosecution's star witness, former Edwards' aide Andrew Young, was absolutely skewered by the Edwards defense team. This did not go unnoticed by the jury. Once the jury learned that (i) Young wrote a tell-all book about his days working for Edwards (and thereby calling into question the character of Young), and (ii) most of the allegedly illegal contributions ended up in Young's - - not Edwards' - - bank account, the prosecution probably realized too late that they had placed their bet on the wrong horse. Young came off the witness stand looking almost (almost!) as much of a low life as the defendant.

John Edwards made his millions as a trial lawyer before he became a politician. You can be confident that the legal team he put together was the best money can buy. When the defense rested its case two weeks ago without even calling a single witness, there were some sharp legal beagles who made that collective decision, including Edwards himself. Even with Edwards' devoted daughter Cate available to be called to testify on behalf of her father, defense counsel did not need her as they correctly calculated that the prosecution had failed to prove the charges. That is when I knew that the fat lady had sung.

While it is true that the prosecution could still re-try Edwards on the five counts which ended in mistrial, that is very unlikely to happen, and as coincidence would have it, there are at least five reasons why. First, the campaign finance laws have changed, thanks to the US Supreme Court's recent ruling allowing PACs to make unlimited campaign contributions. Thus, the charges against Edwards for receiving illegal campaign contributions would be brought under obsolete statutory law. This would make it easier for defense counsel if a new trial took place. Under today's current law, a PAC could make the same amount of contributions that Edwards received from individuals in 2007 and 2008, and there would be no cry of foul play. Second, the judge ruled in favor of the prosecution in almost every motion brought before and during trial (including motions to allow salacious evidence which many judges would not have permitted on the grounds of irrelevancy), and still they did not get a single favorable verdict out of six counts. If there were a new trial, there would be a different judge and the prosecution might lose some of those same motions. Third, trials are expensive, and as noted above, many legal observers thought that the Feds should never have brought the recently concluded case to trial in the first place. Would a re-trial be good use of taxpayers' money? Fourth, the prosecution would still have to rely on Andrew Young, who has already proven to be a poor witness. And fifth, a post-trial poll of the twelve jurors found that no more than four of them were willing to find Edwards guilty on any single count. That data is likely predictive of how a future, albeit different, jury would rule.

In the near future I plan to post (more briefly) about the Clemens and Zimmerman cases. There are a few common threads linking them to the Edwards case, and it is my opinion that the respective prosecutors have a difficult row to hoe. As the Edwards case showed us, there is a difference between being a creep and being a felon.