Hey I'm liking this Judge Whittemore in Florida!!
Check out this "live post" from Tony O....
12:20 pm Judge James Whittemore has entered the courtroom, and he lets us all know right away that he is all business this morning.
“I have read everything you have submitted,” he says to both sides. “I don’t want a bunch of rhetoric. Keep your case succinct.”
At this point, before he starts to present the church’s case, Wally Pope asks to “invoke the rule” — in other words, ask potential witnesses to leave the room. A simple request, you’d think. But Whittemore challenges Pope on it. Which authority is he appealing to in order to remove witnesses.
Pope appears stunned. He indicates that he thought it was an assumed power.
Whittemore: “Well, we learn something everyday.”
Pope explains that he doesn’t want Mike Rinder and Robert Johnson — who have worked together on the Garcia team — to be in the room at the same time when they are testifying.
Yeah, me too.
One of the things I've Posted about before was my frustration that Scn El Ron and Scn Senior "Management" not only never understood US Westerner/Southern/Country Folks, they weren't about listen to anyone that was trying to bring them up to speed. One of my WTF's re: El Ron was that he was supposedly this Montana Cowboy in Hisself's youth and yet Hisself should not the slightest of
Whittemore is getting increasingly impatient. “What in the world do they not know about each other at this point,” he asks.
But Babbitt indicates that he has no injunction, and the judge relents, allowing the witnesses to leave.
But the Judge isn’t through setting a “tone,” as he calls it…
12:22 pm “Let me set a tone,” Whittemore says to both sides. “The burden on the defense is high,” he continues, and again says he wants no rhetoric. This isn’t a trial. There’s no jury to play to.
We’re only about five minutes into this thing and the situation seems pretty plain to us:
Whittemore thinks the church’s case for kicking out these attorneys is a joke, but he’s going through the motions of an evidentiary hearing in order to fend off an appeal. And he’s ready for this thing to be over before it’s already begun.
If I were Wally Pope, I’d be sweating bullets. And I’d not want to waste a second with the time the judge has allotted him — which is only an hour and a half.
So what does Pope do? Squander time like it’s going out of style.
