Veteran reporter Ralph Cipriano at bigtrial.net reports on the federal trial of allegedly corrupt Philadelphia police narcotics officers.
A trio of veteran defense lawyers today took turns dismantling the government's case against a band of alleged rogue cops.
Jack McMahon got the party started by describing the government's star witness, former Police Officer Jeffrey Walker, as a "wicked, despicable liar." The rest of the government's stable of witnesses, McMahon said, are a bunch of lying drug dealers who amount to "nineteen bags of trash."
To cap the day, Jimmy Binns, batting third in a lineup of six defense lawyers, described the government's case as "nineteen mutts and a dirty cop."
In the longest opening argument of the day, Binns spent two hours delivering a lengthy, eye-popping recitation of the numerous witnesses in the case that the government supposedly never got around to interviewing. Those witnesses that Binns said would be testifying on behalf of the defendants include a bunch of supervisors in the police department who allegedly were eyewitnesses to many of the incidents in the case, and a couple of young female bartenders who supposedly overheard nightly confessions from a drunken and drooling Officer Walker, before he would pass out.
Most astonishingly, Binns said, the defense plans to call as their witnesses a trio of federal TFOs -- task force operators who work alongside the feds who investigated this case, on the same floor of the office building they share, but somehow were never interviewed by the government.
"This is not a proud day for the Department of Justice," Binns told the jury.
You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:
http://www.bigtrial.net/2015/03/nineteen-mutts-and-dirty-cop.html#more
You can also read Jeremy Roebuck's coverage of the trial at the Philadelphia Inquirer via the below link:
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20150331_At_trial_of_rogue_narcotics_officers__a_war_of_words.html?nlid=8337531
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