Black Watch: Today’s Top Stories

There’s something spectacularly beside the point in Theresa Tedesco’s opus in this morning’s Post. Tedesco reports that criminal lawyer (and fellow blogger) Steven Skurka reveals in his upcoming book on the trial that Tom Bower spent every morning chatting with David Radler around the pool at the Peninsula Hotel before our favourite snitch trooped off to court to testify against his former partner. This stunning bit of news leads Tedesco to call up a bunch of lawyers in Chicago who, on cue, profess to being squeamish at learning that a witness would (gasp!) speak to a journalist while on the stand. Tedesco puts paid to most of her innuendo when she quotes Randall Samborn, the prosecution’s chief flack and bottle washer: “The suggestion that journalists may only talk to witnesses after they have completed their testimony is simply not a rule, and there is no prohibition in this case on reporters talking to witnesses.” And a good thing, too, since the prosecutors were themselves given to leaking the odd bit of news when the fit hit them. Rules restricting the press at American trials are like the Geneva Convention: a nice idea in theory, but in practice, not so much. The fact is that everybody at this trial—defence, prosecution, everyone save the judge and Randall Samborn, it seems—spent some portion of their time leaking, spinning and leaking and spinning. So while I expect this won’t be the last we’ll hear of this, in the end it will amount to so much sound and fury signifying nothing.

Radler met with author before testimony: Source [National Post]