CLEVELAND — A 12-year-old boy with a pellet gun whom police shot in November died because of his own actions, lawyers for the city said in newly filed court papers.Attorney Madison is a hypocrite or an idiot.
Tamir Rice's injuries resulted from a failure "to exercise due care to avoid injury," one of 20 defenses filed Friday in Cleveland's response to a federal lawsuit filed on behalf of Tamir's family.
"It's incredible that they would take such a posture, such and insensitive position instead of just acknowledging bad behavior," lawyer Walter Madison, who represents Tamir's family, said Sunday. "I think the more healthy thing for them to do is to come together, acknowledge that they're wrong, work on solutions so that this never happens again and allow this family to properly heal instead of insult them."
One of the first things that every first-year law student is supposed to learn is that almost all possible defenses to a civil lawsuit have to be stated in the answer. If you don't do that, you waive them. So yes, if you get drunk, smash a car into someone else and you get sued, one of the defenses that your lawyer will raise is comparative/contributory negligence on the part of your victim. Not only is there nothing wrong with that, it'd be malpractice not to raise that defense.
Madison knows all that, which leads me to suspect that he's a shameless showboater who is trying his case in the press. When a lawyer tries his case before the press, it's often a sign that the lawyer knows that his case sucks. So he goes the PR route to try and force a settlement.
None of the reporters, and a shitload of bloggers, don't seem to know that, or care about it. Which is why they are morons.
4 comments:
Don't you remember the old adage from law school? "When the law is on your side, argue the law. When the law is not on your side, argue the facts. When the law and the facts are both against you, get flamboyant and try your case in the media before trial and pray for a settlement offer."
I remember a simpler one:
"When the law is on your side, pound on the law. When the facts are on your side, pound on the facts. When neither the law nor the facts are on your side, pound on the table."
But it would be nice if a couple of reporters from the courthouse beat had some understanding of the basic procedural rules and why this story isn't anything remotely resembling news.
Well I confess I didn't know that. But then again, I'm not a lawyer and furthermore I didn't shoot my mouth off.
He's attempting to try the case in the media because the simple fact is that getting a conviction against a cop for shooting a black boy is as rare as hens' teats. When a cop is the defendant and the victim is black, facts don't matter. Law doesn't matter. All that matters is that the victim was black and the shooter was a cop.
So yeah, Attorney Madison is a hypocrite. But he's not an idiot. He knows that winning his case is a huge long shot unless everything lines up exactly right, and he's doing his best to nudge the wheels of justice more towards, well, justice, rather than the way it usually goes in these cases (where the victim's family ends up accepting some fairly trivial amount as a settlement and nothing changes).
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