Word: courtrooms
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...week ago, Leon County Circuit Court Judge N. Sanders Sauls was going about his business, hearing domestic-violence cases in nearby Wakulla County, when a computer randomly assigned him a colossal headache: the presidential-election contest that has since brought the eyes of the world into Sauls' courtroom. When reporters started scrambling to profile him, the judge didn't even have a ré sum é to give them. Instead, he handed out a list of friends who could vouch for him. Among his hunting buddies: Dexter Douglass, the courtly Floridian who is one of Gore's lead lawyers. Douglass...
Defendant and plaintiff have rarely been farther away from their own courtroom as they have been this weekend, but these two have the court of public opinion to worry about. And so, by the time the biggest mini-trial in electoral history slouched to a close Sunday night in Tallahassee (boiling down anew into a 14,000-vote legal tug-of-war between David Boies and Barry Richard), George W. Bush had sent his main man out of the bunker to turn up the heat. Al Gore, over in his bunker, acted like it tickled...
...while the first day of testimony in Al Gore's contest of the Florida election results didn't go quite as long as everyone expected - an increasingly cranky Judge Sanders Sauls adjourned his Leon County courtroom for the night at 6:15 p.m., citing staff hunger pangs - it went long enough to establish a decidedly discouraging trend for Gore's legal team...
...team - unfortunately for the vice president, the forthright Yale professor proved almost as valuable to the Bush effort. Under questioning by Gore attorney Stephen Zack, Hengartner, who qualified as an "expert" witness, painstakingly explicated a pile of placards bearing simplified bar graphs and carefully highlighted statistics, simultaneously charming the courtroom and making a solid case that the newly famous Votomatic voting machines (used in Palm Beach County) are more likely to fail or register incomplete voter choices than other voting methods...
...laymen will focus on who gets off the best zingers - our armchair analysis determined by our pre-existing beliefs - then let Rush or Chris Matthews spin it for us as usual. On the other hand, if anyone was grandstanding for the benefit of the Nielsen families here, as courtroom-camera critics maintain, they were doing a lousy job of it. (With the possible exception of Laurence Tribe, who sounded well-stocked with Gore camp sports metaphors, likening the deadline extension to checking a "photo-finish" rather than "changing the rules after the game.") No one rhymed, blustered or whipped...