Q: Officer, as I understand it, you were parked behind my client at the intersection of 19th and M Streets northwest? A: Yes. Q: And there were two reasons you decided to pull him over? A: Yes. Q: The first reason was that he didn’t pull forward immediately when the light turned green? A: Yes, I was concerned that – …
Q: Turning your attention now, Officer, to the one-leg stand. A: Okay. Q: Mr. Jones had you step into the well of the court and demonstrate how you delivered the instructions on the night in question. A: Yes, sir. Q: And, in fact, you were speaking so quickly that the stenographer had to interrupt you. She had to tell you …
BY DEFENSE ATTORNEY Q: Now, officer, turning to the HGN? A: Yes. Q: The horizontal gaze nystagmus? A: Yes. Q: It’s fair to say that you are not an opthamologist? A: That’s right. Q: Or an optometrist? A: No. Q: Or an optician? A: No. I am not. Q. But, according to the government, you are an expert in the …
Q: Officer, you testified on direct that when you first saw my client, he was driving southbound on 7th Street? A: Yes. Q: You were driving northbound? A: Actually I was parked. I was parked facing north. Q: When you first saw my client, he wasn’t speeding, right? A: Not that I’m aware, no. Q: He wasn’t swerving? A: No. …
BY MR. KEY: Q: When was the last time this particular machine, the one in Government’s Exhibit Number 4, was actually calibrated? A: You mean auto-cal’d? Are you talking recertified or auto-cal’d? Q: All of them. You tell me when is the last time you calibrated this machine? A: That machine I haven’t calibrated. Q: So, when was the last …
In 2010, Thomas Key and Bryan Brown almost single-handedly dismantled the Metropolitan Police Department’s DUI program through a series of remarkable revelations about the inadequacies of the program. In 2011, the two defense attorneys set their sights on the program run by U.S. Capitol Police. Here is Thomas Key cross-examining U.S. Capitol Police Officer William St. Ledger on a sign that …
Midway into my cross-examination of the police officer, the judge calls the prosecutor and me up to the bench so that she can talk to us outside the hearing of the jury. “That line of questioning is objectionable,” she tells me. We spend a few minutes debating this, and I ultimately convince her that the government opened the door to …
I wake up again at 3:00 am but, for the first time in over a week, there is nothing to do but clean up my study. After four days of trial, the jury took only a couple of hours to find my client guilty. There were positives from the trial: A government expert who could not perform basic calculations, and …
My investigator Wayne Marshall gets an A+ for his testimony yesterday at trial. Of course, I am biased. Marshall is everything you could want in a witness: He knows his stuff. He is well-spoken, direct, straight-forward. He answers the questions you ask of him and nothing more. He doesn’t try to anticipate what he thinks you want him to …
One of the first things they told us during training at the public defender’s office in Philadelphia was that, although they could help us develop many of the skills we needed to become successful trial lawyers, they could not help us with our trial personas. That was something we had to develop for ourselves. And there was no one-size-fits-all approach. …