-Caveat Lector-
December 04, 2000
THE SCENE
For the Gore Team, a Moment of High Drama
By DAVID BARSTOW and DEXTER FILKINS
TALLAHASSEE, Fla., Dec. 3 — The Gore legal team, downcast after
a day and a half of rough sledding before Judge N. Sanders
Sauls, jubilantly called it the "Perry Mason moment" — that
delicious, inevitable turning point when Mr. Mason's faithful
secretary, Della Street, slips into the courtroom with newly
discovered evidence that lets him spring a coup de grâce that
reduces the witness to tears and confession.
As lawyers everywhere like to remind prospective jurors, such
moments are unheard of in real trials. But this morning, in the
middle of the legal Olympics that may decide the winner of the
White House, a junior Gore lawyer rushed into the courtroom with
freshly unearthed documents that Vice President Al Gore's lawyers
now proclaim as a gift from heaven.
The dramatic moment came during testimony by John Ahmann, an
expert produced by Gov. George W. Bush's lawyers to vouch for
the reliability of the Votomatic, the voting device used in
Miami-Dade and Palm Beach Counties. Mr. Ahmann calmly recited
his background as the man who helped develop the Votomatic for
IBM, along the way making dozens of improvements that earned him
11 patents.
With the help of computer graphics, Mr. Ahmann methodically set
about knocking down theories advanced by the Gore team to explain
how the Votomatic could have produced thousands of paper ballots
unreadable to counting machines.
Mr. Gore's lawyers have argued, for example, that the Votomatics
failed because they were choked by mounds of chads, the tiny
pieces of paper that are punched out of the ballots.
Nonsense, said Mr. Ahmann, noting that each Votomatic can hold
1.5 million chads and function fine.
It was then, however, that Stephen Zack, the Gore lawyer who was
preparing to cross-examine Mr. Ahmann, read the document that
had been rushed to him: a patent application Mr. Ahmann had
submitted two decades ago for an improved version of the
Votomatic.
The application listed an array of problems with the existing
Votomatic, many of them similar to the flaws being argued by the
Gore lawyers. Mr. Ahmann's application said the Votomatics
regularly experienced malfunctions that could trip up counting
machines.
"The surface of the punchboard has become so clogged with chips
as to prevent a clean punching operation," Mr. Ahmann wrote in
his application. "Incompletely punched cards can cause serious
errors to occur in data-processing operations utilizing such
cards."
Confronted with his old application, Mr. Ahmann before long was
agreeing that in close elections, a manual recount is not a bad
idea. The effect of his testimony was written plain in the
strained facial expressions of the Bush legal team and in what
Mr. Zack did when Mr. Ahmann left the stand.
He shook Mr. Ahmann's hand.
Doug Hattaway, Mr. Gore's principal spokesman here, rushed Mr.
Zack in front of reporters to gloat about their victory. Mr.
Zack, a Perry Mason fan, quickly paid homage to the spirit of Ms.
Street. Soon after, Mr. Gore's aides were distributing
transcripts of Mr. Ahmann's testimony under the headline "Ahmann
admits hand recount would be necessary."
"This was huge," said Kendall Coffey, a member of Mr. Gore's
legal team. "A witness called by the Republicans conceded that
in close races, ballots ought to be hand-counted. That's exactly
what we've been asking for."
Whether it produces a new count of ballots that will eliminate
Mr. Bush's 537-vote lead remains to be seen. Judge Sauls is
expected to rule on the question of recounts on Monday. But the
story of how the document made it into court today is itself
worthy of a good "Perry Mason" episode.
It began on Friday when Mr. Ahmann mentioned during a pretrial
deposition that he had applied for a patent on the stylus used to
puncture the ballot cards used in the Votomatic. Jennifer Altman,
a member of Mr. Gore's legal team in Miami Beach, had been
assigned to research the Votomatic, so she broadened her search
to patents. About 7 a.m. today, she found Mr. Ahmann's patent
application on the Web site for the United States Patents and
Trademark Office.
At first, Ms. Altman did not realize the importance of the
document, she said in an interview. But as she sat at home this
morning, watching Mr. Ahmann's testimony on television, she said
she began to believe that much of what he was saying was
contradicted by his patent application. With one eye on the
television set and the other on her computer screen, Ms. Altman
said she realized she was running out of time.
"Everything is moving so quickly," Ms. Altman said.
Getting it to the courthouse was no simple task. Ms Altman has
no fax machine, so she e-mailed the document to a fellow Gore
supporter, who printed it and faxed it to the Tallahassee offices
of Mitchell Berger, another Gore lawyer.
"I called the lawyers in Tallahassee and said, `Get this over to
the courthouse right away,' " she recalled.
A clerk scrawled "Urgent" across the top and handed it to an
office assistant, who ran it four blocks to the Leon County
Courthouse, where she was met in the lobby by a Gore lawyer,
Andrew Shapiro, who ran it up to the third-floor courtroom and
dropped it in front of Mr. Zack.
Mr. Zack, listening to Mr. Ahmann's testimony, had only minutes
left before he was to begin his cross- examination. "I usually
don't even read those messages," Mr. Zack said in an interview.
"I thought I better give this one a look."
The moment marked a high point in what had otherwise been a
difficult few days for the Gore lawyers, who have watched their
two expert witnesses take a beating on the stand.
David Boies may well be, as his fans in the legal world proclaim
and as Mr. Gore must fervently hope, the finest lawyer money can
buy. But on Saturday and again today there were signs aplenty
that his charms may have been lost on Mr. Sauls, the drawling,
balding judge from tiny Wakulla, Fla., whose good humor seems to
vanish each time Mr. Boies opens his mouth.
Mr. Boies has sat facing Judge Sauls in a small courtroom on the
third floor of the Leon County Circuit Courthouse. This is the
turf from which Mr. Boies is leading Mr. Gore's effort to
overturn the certified results of Florida's election. And while
Mr. Boies remains a favorite of reporters, who practically swarm
him each time he sets foot in the hallway, it appears that at
least for now he and Judge Sauls are just not clicking.
For his part, Mr. Boies registered his displeasure with the
judge early on by, in essence, asking the Florida Supreme Court
to make him hurry. Judge Sauls, a man said to be content to move
through the world at his own steady pace, has not said whether he
took any offense to this unusual maneuver. Even so, his
courtroom treatment of Mr. Boies could never be described as
fawning or deferential.
On Saturday, after Mr. Boies finished his testy
cross-examination of Judge Charles Burton, the chairman of the
Palm Beach County canvassing board, Judge Sauls praised Judge
Burton as "a great American."
Today, Mr. Boies ran into a chilly reception from Judge Sauls
during his cross-examination of Laurentius Marais, a
Stanford-educated statistician for the Bush team who delivered
withering expert conclusions — "The vice president was wrong
about that" — with the crisp finality of a guillotine.
Mr. Boies seemed hungry to shake Mr. Marais, but Judge Sauls
brusquely denied him the rhythm that is the hallmark of many
effective cross-examinations. Several times Judge Sauls
impatiently instructed Mr. Boies to rephrase his questions, as
if Mr. Boies were some fumbling rookie prosecutor trying his
first shoplifting case.
Mr. Boies wanted to ask Mr. Marais about his past expert
testimony against victims of lead paint poisoning. A Bush lawyer
quickly jumped up and accused Mr. Boies of grandstanding, and
Judge Sauls, as he has repeatedly done, quickly yanked Mr.
Boies away from his preferred line of questioning.
By contrast, Judge Sauls has given wide latitude to Phil Beck, a
Chicago lawyer for the Bush team who wanders the courtroom as if
it were his own living room and who somehow makes his every
mention of "the Gore legal team" sound as if he were referring to
the Washington, D.C., chapter of the Hells Angels.
But today, when Mr. Boies stubbornly persisted with questions
about the lead poisoning case, the judge shut him down. "I'm not
going to go off into other cases," he told Mr. Boies. And with
that, Mr. Boies retreated.
"I'll abandon that line of questioning," he said, just as Perry
Mason might have, moments before Della Street slipped him a note.
=================================================================
Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT
FROM THE DESK OF:
*Michael Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends
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