Here’s a free tip for trial lawyers out there: if you’re going to engage hired-gun experts witness to tell the court what you need it to hear, make sure you first tell the experts what you need the court to hear.
We’ve been covering the ongoing scandal in which class action law firm Milberg Weiss is accused of paying kickbacks to its clients in class action lawsuits (see, e.g. May 2006 and links from there). In addition to the firm, prosecutors have been going after the clients who accepted kickbacks (Feb. 2007, Jun. 2005). One of those clients, Seymour Lazar, has been trying to escape prosecution by claiming to be ill, trotting out doctors to testify to a “litany of ailments,” including “heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, and gout.” But there’s more: he also claimed to be suffering from a “mental condition [that] could make following significant events of the trial impossible,” as well as “major depression, memory loss, and fatigue.” And, he’s mentally incompetent.
That was two weeks ago… Now he’s all better. Turns out that if he were mentally incompetent, the prosecution could lock him up for up to four months to determine whether he would become competent in the future. Whoops! That wasn’t what defense attorneys wanted. So they had to repudiate their own expert’s testimony:
A psychologist who testified that a defendant was not competent to stand trial in a federal criminal case against a leading class action law firm now says that assertion was mistaken.
[…]
“I believe that I testified in error when I stated that he is not competent,” the psychologist retained by the defense, William Jones, wrote in a declaration filed Monday in federal court in Los Angeles.
Yes, or maybe, like the Monty Python peasant who claimed to have been turned into a newt, Lazar mysteriously “got better.”
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