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From: Jasper
Date: 26 Jun 2000
Time: 15:27:36
Prien,
I didn't think it was necessary every time to say that Marcia lied and encouraged others to lie by her slick phrasing and paraphrasing of questions. We all know that. I wanted to point out something with Sahapiro and Cocharan that wasn't necessarily as obvious (as in, what was Napoleon's first name?).
My grandson recently pulled the same stunt on his mother. He was doing something he shouldn't have been doing and she told him to sand in the corner with his back to the wall. He grinned, and did exactly what she said. Why did he grin? Because he knew she never punished him unless HER back was against the wall. He knew that she was picturing his back with his fact in the corner. He knew the mistake she made and how she made it.
Shapiro did that with DeBello. If you can show me where DeBello exhibited superior intellectual alacrity that day (which a carefully coordinated lie of the type you described would have required) I would agree with you. From everything I could see, the man just wasn't sharp that day. He certainly wasn't sharp enough to pull off a clever deception orchestrated by Marcia Clark. All things considered, the most reasonable explanation for what he said is that he anticipated the question and answered what the thought Shapiro wanted to know.
Shapirao knew what DeBello said to the Grand Jury. He was looking at the transcript. If he had wanted to know the truth, given DeBello's unresponsive answer he would have made sure that the witness understood the question. He could have asked, "Do you understand the question?" or he could have asked the question again with an emphasis on "did you personally witness that?" He didn't do anything of the kind. Instead, he went straight for an "impeachment." Marcia, of course, lied about Shapiro's question. That's what I picked up the first time though when I thought DeBello was lying.
I don't mind anyone pointing out the obvious as you did in your post because I might have missed it and you sometimes pick up on things that get past me. But please don't assume that I am incapable of seeing what you do when your interpretation is the one I started with. I think that any reasonable person would have started there. The difference is, I didn't stop there. Once I saw the corollaries to the proposition that DeBello lied (a slippery slope), I knew that it wasn't the trivial sure-he-lied-what's-new proposition it appeared to be on the surface. The corollaries cannot be reconciled without a conspiracy theory that includes half the civilized world (slight exaggeration).
If you are prepared to argue that he didn't make any mistakes, except incriminating ones, you may be able to make a case. Short of that I have to say that the only argument I can think of to support the idea that he lied is his Italian name and the ethnic stereotypes associated with restaurants and organized crime. I know you're not coming from there. Both Mezzalunas in California and the one in Colorado were drug fronts. The only one who had to know about it was Keith Zlomsowitch. But it doesn't hurt to have a couple of people with Italian names and impressive titles to take the heat if anything goes wrong. To create the image of an individual's character with the least amount of information you can't beat a stereotype. --Jasper