Ze'ev,
Depending on how much money you have to shell out for a good (-lying) lawyer, you can make almost anything disappear. Look at Michael Fagson and Robert Blake, who had far more stacked against them than the word of a single vice cop. The truth is that 99% of offenses of this nature would disappear if every schmo had the bucks to hire Alan Dershowitz or Gloria Allred. Think about it... some poor sap is busted for .08 or .09 alcohol (above the legal limit but not by much). A good attorney will rail against the calibration of the breathalyzer, the character of the highway patrolman who pulled the wino over, bring up racial bias (if the drunkard is a schvartze or cucaracha), etc. Of course none of these assertions will be true, but the trump card that the defense always has in any trial is that the average IQ of jurors is inevitably trumped by that of chimps and seals.
I mean this purely as a refutation and not as a personal affront, but the idea that a DA would (as you yourself said) put his career on the line and make a national case out of an offense that pretty much amounts to a glorified speeding ticket? Get outta here! It's really not difficult to attack and discredit district attorneys if you have good-enough counsel and are determined enough and have enough credibility in the community to be believed by a good chunk of the public. Look at the white lacrosse players who successfully went after that black tuchis-kissing Mark Nifong (or the Tawana Brawley monkeys who destroyed the life of that Greek D.A. in New York).
If DNA evidence is no longer likely to win convictions for crimes (much more serious than soliciting consensual sex), the testimony of people regarding the meanings of so-called gay hand gestures, even if they really do mean what the cop would say they did, is going to carry a WHOLE lot less weight. Without video, he has almost nothing to back him up; this trial would have boiled down to a he-said, she-said (the "she" being Larry Craig
, but I digress), and that alone is a very dangerous place to prosecute an offense. One officer versus one of the most esteemed leaders pn Capitol Hill--not a pleasant place for any DA. Any bigshot lawyer would be able to call upon countless "witnesses" and "experts" from the gay community that would dispute or offer contrary explanations over what the gay hand gestures meant and turn the vice cop's claims into Swiss cheese.
When this is said and done, a DA's office that insisted in continuing this prosecution with full force would itself be the subject of a certain degree of snickers and mockery. How was Kenneth Starr treated, who had infinitely more smoking guns to use against Clinton than the Minnesota airport police had against Craig?
After all this, is it really reasonable to expect that ALL twelve members of a typical jury would be sufficiently fired-up over an offense that is more comical than anything else, and so determined to see a senator fry over this, that they would sacrifice another three to five days of their jobs or free time in deliberations?
Larry Craig slit his own throat by giving up, pleading guilty, and thinking he could forget about this. He was stupid, period, and probably would still be in his exact position today if he made even a token effort to fight this.
Topic: Larry Craig (R-ID) Resigned Today (Read 7156 times)