Word: baileys
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...trial of Captain Ernest L. Medina, Defense Attorney F. Lee Bailey worried that public pressure would force the Army to impose some kind of punishment on his client. As it turned out, he had nothing to fear. After deliberating 68 minutes, the five-man military jury reached a verdict of not guilty on all counts of murder, manslaughter and assault...
...aging civilian counsel, George W. Latimer. Medina's chief prosecutor was Major William G. Eckhardt, who went into the trial with the record of having unsuccessfully prosecuted two previous Viet Nam atrocity cases. The captain's lawyer, moreover, was the flamboyant Boston attorney F. Lee Bailey, with his vast repertory of legal tricks...
Favorable Testimony. In a typical maneuver, Bailey last week managed to draw testimony from a key prosecution witness that was overwhelmingly favorable to the defense. The witness was Gene Oliver, a cocky former private in Charlie Company, who came forward to state that it was he, and not Medina, who had shot and killed a small boy on the day of the massacre. Medina had been formally accused of killing the boy and an older woman, in addition to being responsible for at least 100 civilians slain near the hamlet...
Oliver was a witness tailor-made for Bailey's dramatic methods. On the stand, he startled the prosecution by declaring: "This whole proceeding is completely unfair. [The prosecution] knows he is innocent as well as I do." Bailey introduced as testimony part of a lie-detector test, which indicated that Oliver had told the truth about the boy's killing. When Eckhardt showed that the same test also indicated that Oliver harbored feelings of "tremendous hostility" toward the prosecution, a violent shouting match ensued between Eckhardt and Bailey in which Eckhardt accused Oliver of deliberately trying to obstruct...
Army Argot. Medina aided his own cause when Bailey finally put him on the witness stand on the 16th day of the trial. Confident and jaunty, talking in Army argot ("40 mike mikies," "four deuces," "BMNT") for the benefit of the five battle-tested jurors, Medina denied that he had been on the scene of the massacre. He also denied that he had told his men, as Galley had claimed during his own court-martial, to kill everything, including women and children; he said he had merely told them to "use common sense." Medina admitted to killing the woman...