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From: Jasper
Date: Saturday, February 24, 2007
Time: 04:15:27 PM
Jean, … An error like this is contradictory to what most of us think we know about machines. That’s why a lawyer can use an incorrect date in an effective argument that something false is true. I can’t use my fax machine for an example. It did give the correct date but because it started spitting out other nonsense before it stopped working altogether. ……..Lawyers do know how important dates are on legal documents but sometimes they have to go with what they have and show why the discrepancy exists – if they notice it. That’s why Virgie’s lawyers made an issue out of the pre-death date on the will in court and in the media. http://www.thegossipfix.com/2007/02/21/more-dirt-on-scumbag-howard-k-stern/ http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,253770,00.html ……….Something similar to this happened to me in my civil case against Ford when my attorney gave Ford’s lawyers a copy of a letter I wrote to EEOC. The date on the body of the letter was two years after I said I wrote it. The credibility implications were huge and Ford’s lawyers tried to make the best of it in my arbitration hearing several years later. …………..The explanation was simple. My attorney could not find the Xerox copy that I gave him for my deposition so I made a copy of the one I had stored in my Tandy computer. This model of the computer had a “feature” that called up the date you last accessed a letter and automatically inserted THAT date into a field where the date on the original letter was suppose to go. My lawyer never heard of such a thing and could not figure out what happened. He recalled that I gave him the letter when I said I did by he could not prove it on the spot. Fortunately, the arbitrator once had the same Tandy model, which, of course, did the same thing when he accessed a letter he stored in it. So, the non-issue that Ford’s lawyers tried to make look like big one evaporated right there. …………Even if the arbitrary hadn’t had personal knowledge of that quirk in my computer the correct date could still be ascertained. The EEOC had a copy of the letter with the right date. The date corresponded to the start of my deposition. It was one of four letters I wrote on the same day in the same format to the same person for the same reason. The only way any of them made sense was if all of them were taken together. ………….Krista Barth, Stern’s attorney who told Greta that the date was a fax machine error, gave the judge the same story. In the article where Greta tells one of Virgie’s lawyers what Barth told her, she makes a reference to Barth being an “officer of the court.” That status calls into play a principle called “candor to the court,” which means her entire case can be thrown out if she knowingly makes a false representation to the judge. A safe lie would be to give an innocent explanation for sending the fax on the date that corresponds to it. Krista Barth had no reason to tell a damaging lie. --Jasper