wrote in message
...
On Tue, 3 Aug 2010 11:08:27 -0700, "nom=de=plume"
wrote:

That is the point of our legal system. You can get an attorney to
represent any opinion. You have taken one side. There are tens of
thousands of very qualified attorneys capable of taking the other
side.



You're not an attorney. If what an attorney says in court is nonsense,
expresses an opinion, or foists an opinion in the middle of a trial, which
is what you're proposing, the judge will silence her immediately. You
can't
express opinions in the middle of a trial (opening and closing only
typically).


Perhaps I should not have used the word opinion. The defense lawyer
would simply present facts.
The woman did admit she was once a racist. The words on the video were
hers. The part that was opinion was whether she was actually reformed.
She gave an example of something that supported that claim later in
the tape. The open question is whether you could find someone who had
evidence that she did other things that refuted that reformation.
As Carville said during the Clinton debacle, "Drag a hundred-dollar
bill through a trailer park, you never know what you'll find". If they
turn up a few disgruntled USDA employees who have bad things to say
about Sherrod this whole thing could blow up in her face.

We still have not established that simply pulling actual excerpts out
of a longer recording and representing it as the truth can be called
slander/libel. If so, virtually every news outlet is guilty. They all
edit their raw tape to get the clips that support the agenda they are
presenting with their story. In a lot of cases they make the people on
the tape look like deadbeats or criminals even when there is no
evidence to support it.

I think, when push comes to shove, the other networks would circle the
wagons. The would condemn what Breitbart said but they would defend
his right to say it.

"Sue the *******" is not the answer to everything, no matter what the
ambulance chasing bottom feeders try to tell us on TV. The part they
leave out is your whole life can be laid bare in that court room.

Well, you're not an attorney, so your "opinion" and/or your representation
of the facts needs to be taken with a big grain of salt.

The defense attorney is supposed to supply a rebuttal of the "facts"
actually, not necessarily facts of his own. Maybe. That depends on what's
out there. Her reformation wasn't on the clip I believe, so not particularly
relevant in and of themselves. They would show that what was on the clip was
taken out of context, deliberately, etc.

Perhaps you haven't "established" this or that. It really doesn't matter,
since you're not a party to the case. I even dispute that she admitted she
was a racist. She admitted that she had to struggle against that.

So, twist all you want, you're not an attorney and your opinion about her
being a racist isn't really isn't germane to whether or not Brietbard
defamed her.