If the defense did not dig into ways to impeach the evidence, witnesses or prosecution motives, it’s not doing a complete job. Note that while Abbe Lowell hasn’t gotten into SC Weiss’ private life yet, he certainly has been thorough about challenging evidence, witnesses and motives and I don’t see any objection to that here on this board.

This is why I made the point above about the unforced error, because any competent defense will dig.

How much time have you spent with professional and ethical defense lawyers preparing their defense strategies and tactics in anticipation of a big criminal case?

Your various comments suggest a lack of familiarity with how ethical defense lawyers work, and thus a scant basis for determining what was and was not ethical lawyering in the recent skirmish, and what was or was not competent execution of legitimate legal tactics.

Seeking to exploit the regulations relating to appointment, scope of office conduct and removal of a prosecuting attorney, which might have the effect of derailing a prosecution is perfectly legitimate. Some conduct within the execution of the strategy may be not so much.

“When various judges recently admonished Alina Habba in their courtrooms for her rudeness and lack of decorum and lack of professionalism – i now understand those were misplaced admonishments.”

Oh dear… trying to fake pretty, witty or smart?

Very little that Habba has ever done has anything to do with legitimate legal tactics. And I have never implied the contrary.

Your imputation says more about your abilities to reason and/or argue in good faith or both.

*exploit, not explode

*counsel, not council

It also shouldn’t have been enough to disqualify Wade. And I don’t see any appearance of impropriety here anyway. Office romances are a common thing: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/workplace-romance-statistics/. Wade was the third person she approached for the job, and he got paid no more than either of the other two and not all that much at that. The “appearance of impropriety” was entirely manufactured smoke by the defense, and anyway, as you point out, the local law requires an actual conflict, not the appearance of one.

The idea that DAs etc. should be exemplars of conservative American-style Judeo-Christian values is a joke. So far as I can tell, the only reason most people care about this is that they are afraid of the predictable right-wing freakout over it, not because they really care about Willis’ love life.

What is missing in this entire sub-thread is an appreciation of the fact that
Wade has lied on oath to conceal the relationship.

McAfee has avoided making the explicit finding that the DA’s office in their defense to the investigation
•knew or ought to have known that Wade’s testimony was false in material particulars•
But this is •the suspicion of mendacity• to which McAfee refers as hanging over the case.

Wade was toast as soo as his lies to the divorce court emerged.

That the DA’s office put him on the stand to lie about those lies almost beggars belief

How is it unethical?

And more to the point, how did ANY of this prejudice the defendant’s defense?

Might be one reason Willis created the appearance of impropriety rather than an actual one. But jsrtheta already knows that.

Sure, but a) there’s no evidence of an abuse of organizational power here, b) it’s not McAfee’s job to adjudicate that anyway, and c) what the F does this have to do with prejudicing the defendant’s defense, as jsrtheta has observed?

The idea that people won’t have workplace relationships because the employer might suffer if they fall apart in a bad way is one of those “great idea, wrong species” things that has afflicted humankind for millennia. See, for example, “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.”

There’s nothing glib about my assertion, boyo, and no “might be correct” either. It’s a well-documented fact: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/workplace-romance-statistics/.

I don’t live my life with the goal of making things as easy as I can for my employer in every respect, nor should you, and nor, apparently, do most people. I say good for them!

It’s also Welsh (I didn’t know it was Irish until I looked it up after reading your comment,) and I am indeed part Welsh.

“boyo /boi′ō/
noun
1) A boy or man. Used especially as a form of address.
2) A boy or lad.
3) A stereotypically Welsh form of address for a man (usually younger than the speaker).
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition”

Jack Welch could get away with whatever Jack Welch wanted – except when it hit him in divorce court. But it’s not representative of anyone else’s experience.

Earl, I don’t think we disagree as much as you may think we disagree on the core issue I was trying to address, which is (I get to state it because I am writing this comment) whether or not Wade should be de facto disqualified. We agree, I think, that there was not an actual conflict of interest, and, for me, that’s enough to come to my conclusion.

Secondarily, I am well aware that some of my comments are of the “in a better world…” type. On those, we are talking past each other; you are referring to the way things are, and I am referring to the way they ought, IMO, to be.

As an aside: In the great war between management’s desire to have all their employees be emotionless drones wholly committed to a) making the manager’s life easier and b) increasing the profitability of the organization, or appropriate equivalent thereto, and workers’ desires to have some fun, some romance, and, generally speaking, have a life, I am firmly on the side of the workers. Having worked in Silicon Valley for over 40 years, a good chunk of that in management, it continually amazes me how much of management’s position on these matters has been assimilated by the workers.

Edit: On rereading this, it occurred to me you might take the aside as a personal reference. Let me assure you, before the edit time runs out, it absolutely is not. It’s an all-too-brief statement of my philosophy on these (sorts of) matters.

Ya think I wrote that CLE outline for practicing litigators – who could have entertainingly said it in half the words – or for commenters who think CLE is an airport in Ohio?

The defense investigated, found something and then made several misrepresentations/logical jumps about what the evidence revealed.

Decent people would have filed that in their memories as ‘things better off not knowing.’

Bmaz is a defense lawyer. He had better hope all his clients get a fairer shake than Willis (who seems to take target practice on her on feet).

Ah yes, clearly no bias in that comment!

I gave arguments and then a prescription and all I get is abuse. It’s like arguing with people who think light bulbs are magic and I didn’t go to magic school. Maybe there’s something to what you’re saying. You turn it on over here and it goes on over there. I get it!

Well then, I guess Chronicals of Boethius would have been more on point, which I doubt bmaz has read either. If he knew the Great Wheel, he would agree with me about Fanni Willis and would play a stronger role in the Crusade for Moorish Dignity.

I never read Consolations of Philosophy. It’s just a Confederacy of Dunces joke. I’m just tired. My wife is mad I’m up late. But I’ve been called out by earlofhuntington and John Paul Jones. This is new to write about Giambattista Vico and the law. I hope Rayne will let a longish comment through, though I’ll try to be spare in my prose. I brought Vico up as a joke, but not really. I’m tired of arguing with bmaz after one go around these days, but New Science is one of a half dozen books I have been thinking about my whole life.

Vico’s New Science is a factual kind of philological, historical approach to history of law in cultural, anthropological history and the history of Latin and Greek. the anthropological origins of Roman law through heroic, religious and poetic language in the history of Western Civilization through phases of the meanings of words through their metaphoric, heroic or Homeric and prosaic speech forms from the very earliest human institutions of marriage, religion and burial as far as Vico could understand from his perch in the Age of Enlightenment. He was very interested in what had been learned about social organization and rituals around the world then. He references Biblical history only sometimes, but writes mostly on Roman and Greek philology back to the Homeric age and then the origins of practices of Roman law through early and late history. I think Vico conveys a modern anthropological sense which is uncanny for his time. The book is strange though.

Vico was trying to ground institutions in socially constructed qualia interpreted in language structures and cultural practices in opposition to Cartesian idealism. In Vico, though, there is an important difference between the spirit of the law and the letter. For the letter to go against the spirit, prosaic history comes ungrounded and society loses the sense of truth. Vico is sometimes called “conservative” because decadence is a kind of breakdown of democracy and history is not necessarily “progressive”, but civilizations rise and fall with the spirit of the law.

Justification of violence, the police monopoly on violence and in capital punishment, the law can murder, there are auspices in how it is not murder as deep as the auspices of marriage or burial. The public prosecutor is a position of dignity and responsibility, in other words, but it’s not a priestly function as it was when the facts were in the organs of animals. A prosecutor is all-to-human in a secular democracy. They are equal. Willis and Wade don’t deserve this. It is not relevant to their secular role. Who cares who they are sleeping with unless it’s the judge, I think, or the defense counsel. They are not elevated, but a powerful defendant has transformed the prosecutor and elevated them as a form of effigy, but it is “normal” because it’s in the letter of the law to turn the people into a crowd and make the prosecutor its victim. It’s analogous to a mutilated auspice in a Greek tragedy because when the law breaks down so does human reason and there is disintegration and ruin. People say Trump is attacking the rule of law but sometimes I think people don’t really grasp the implications for our society.

Trump’s greatest threat lies in his vampiric co-optation of words and phrases, which he systematically drains of meaning in both denotative sense and emotional impact.

“You’re the puppet!” Throwing this label back at Hillary Clinton, he showed the method. Now, when we insist that he remains a puppet of Putin, it fails to stick because its battery has been drained. The idea barely cranks.

“Hostages.” “Fascists.” “Persecution.” These words are dying around us. The more Trump and his enablers repeat them, the less they mean…the less meaning itself means.

Yes, exactly. Note the adjacent post about how the federal prosecutors in SDNY have (likely for partisan reasons) messed with NY State’s attempt to try Trump on the hush money payments.

I clearly wasn’t asking you.

While I share your derision, Bmaz, for the Georgia’s RICO statute empowerment of prosecutorial overreach, and displeasure for this poorly-sourced sideshow to have been given any oxygen,* my first read of McAfee’s order here brought immediately to mind the balance and thoroughness of J. Steven’s Liljeberg (1988) majority opinion or J. Kennedy’s Caperton (2009).

And, despite my disdain for the circus McAfee created by granting subpoena power to at least one defendant with a demonstrated penchant for slandering females who dare attempt to hold him accountable, I think McAfee’s order appears well-anchored to Georgia law and precedent, fair in finding of facts**, tempered in its reprimand of potentially-dubious behavior, and balanced in its remedy.

No? (Pls correct me on what I am missing or overlooking — only 9 posts are above as I type this, none yet (?) from legal voices)

Or perhaps last night’s all-nighter has blinded me, and a full night’s sleep might persuade me differently upon a re-read….after all, the double-starred (“**”) word above was previously typed by me with this spelling: “faxed,” so I’m not firing on all cylinders at the moment, for sure.

——-
*As I’ve stated before, for all but the 5 – 8 charges in the entire indictment (agst 3 to 5 of the defendants) that could have alone been brought under standard felony-crime or criminal conspiracy grounds which would certainly withstand a Fed. R. Crim. P. 12(b)(3)(B) motion, were this my criminal defense client, I’d focus my prelim 12(b) motions on McBoyle/Lanier-type/”notice” grounds and never have engaged in an affadavit-less 47(d) inquisition like this slop became.

And the election is in a month and a half