Last day of the trial for this week because tomorrow they have the day off for the July 4th long weekend.
The first defense witness today was the HR recruiter from a company called Merical, where the defendant worked in 2010 and 2011. She was the woman who interviewed and hired him. This company is in California. Her time on the stand maybe lasted 20 minutes TOTAL. So the defense paid to fly this woman up to Colorado to testify for 20 minutes, and probably had to bring her up for a couple of days because they wouldn't be 100% certain when she'd be on the stand. And in my opinion, her testimony was pretty useless.
I think the defense had hoped to have her testify that she thought Holmes was autistic because her kids are autistic and he reminded her of them. But the prosecution objected to this line of questioning, as she's not an expert, and the objection was sustained. In the end all she could say was that she thought he was odd or different and that he reminded her of her kids who have learning disabilities.
The second defense witness today was a clinical neural psychologist. Mr. King, one of the defense attorneys, spent a heck of a long time going over this guy's qualifications. And his line of questioning was really ... unorganized. I was kind of surprised because I've heard both sides try to qualify someone as an expert witness, so this seemed very unusual. And it is the first time I've heard the prosecution ask to question a witness's expertise BEFORE an expert qualification was agreed to.
The D.A. is asking this guy questions now and it appears, to me, that what they're trying to show is that this guy is neither a psychiatrist nor a forensic psychologist - which I guess in their opinion is what's needed in this case - and therefore may not be able to provide valuable expert opinions in this case. And apparently this guy has never been appointed by a court in a criminal case, and has only ever testified for the defense in criminal cases.
There was one case where he testified for the prosecution, but it wasn't about their mental status, or against the defendant. The witness claims that for some reason only defense attorneys have hired him and he doesn't know why as he's willing to testify for both sides. But the prosecution pointed out that he has actually testified mostly for public defenders before, and has actually been hired by these specific defense attorneys before!
WOW - THAT TOOK HIM LONG ENOUGH!
King finally objected to Brachler's line of questioning and now they're having a side bar. Brachler (the D.A.) pointed out that one of the reasons the witness mostly testified for defense attorneys is because he actually has an important working relationship with a defense attorney organization. And that the majority of his presentations at conferences and such are for defense attorney organizations. Brachler then started to ask him about his profile from his university's website and that's where King objected - but it was overruled.
Brachler then went through a list of all the criminal trials this guy has testified at (as a defense witness) and determined that 10 of the 22 times were in cases related to domestic mass murder. And of the 12 that were not domestic, none were in anyway related to the current case. While Brachler didn't end up objecting to this person being an expert witness, he's obviously set the ground work to show this guy is extremely biased!
It's now almost 2pm and the second witness of the day is still on the stand. The defense (King) went through the results of every psychological test he conducted on the defendant. All they really showed was that Holmes is smart (high IQ), wasn't faking anything, and was able to think clearly. Some of his scores, like his IQ, decreased between the first and second time the tests were administered. The defense is trying to show that it's possible those declines could be due to a mental illness like schizophrenia, but they're being careful not to say that outright.
Brachler is now doing his cross-examination and is going through all the stuff about Holmes that this guy did NOT review before he wrote his report and made his conclusions. It turns out the defense didn't give him a whole slew of reports and transcripts, etc., to this guy. And he admitted that had he known they existed, he would have used them and included them in his analysis. (Although the defense did point out that in some cases the items referred to were not available at the time - i.e. hadn't yet been discovered, etc.)
The judge asked the jury to come back early from lunch today in the hopes that they'd get through some specific witnesses this afternoon. At the rate they're going, that might still be a while away!
No comments:
Post a Comment