Here are the highlights from the defense team side:
From macleans.ca website:
Playing the game
Mark Steyn June 21, 2007 14:41:52
"This is a criminal case. This isn't a game," Michael Schachter, the dogged attorney for Hollinger veep Peter Atkinson, told the court, accusing the government of only wanting "to win, regardless of the facts."
To which the prosecutors' response would be: "And your point is...?" As I've been told by innumerable wise old Chicago birds since I got into town, the conviction rate in Patrick Fitzgerald's fiefdom is 95% - which means they surely win regardless of the facts at least some of the time. I can't see why that number is anything to be proud of, anymore than Saddam's triumphant 97% of the vote was back in his 2002 re-election. In both cases, it's a testament mainly to the amount of muscle the victors are able to apply. The words of another one-party statesman, Hosni Mubarak, would seem germane: after the Egyptian electoral commission carelessly ramped up his numbers to a positively Saddamite margin of victory, he told them sternly never to do that again as it made him look ridiculous to Washington, London et al. Next time just hold it down to an impressive but plausible 88%.
I think it's time Mr Fitzgerald's numbers were lowered to a more plausible range.
The guy under the table
Mark Steyn June 21, 2007 00:09:50
Mr Tuite had another arresting analogy with regard to Jonathan Rosenberg, the $800-an-hour lawyer for O'Melveny & Myers who's been living high off the Hollinger hog for four years now. Mr Rosenberg was presented by the government has some kind of benign disinterested paragon of impartiality as he went about his business investigating the ancien regime at Hollinger. But, in fact, he's very interested: he's representing the post-Black usurpers in a civil suit against Jack Boultbee & Co, and he's defending the usurpers against a suit by Boultbee for wrongful dismissal. So he has an extremely strong interest in getting Boultbee convicted in this criminal case and thereby improving his own position in the two civil ones.
Instead, he's introduced as falling somewhere between the Chief Justice and the Pope. Inordinate importance was attached to his records of interviews he conducted with Mr Boultbee - even though they're not "his records" in any meaningful sense. There was no video, no audio, no court reporter, no shorthand typist, just some guy (Davies Robertson or Robertson Davies, it was unclear which) who was Rosenberg's designated note-taker. Mr Robertson or Mr Davies (as the case may be) was not called by the government, but they were happy to rely on Rosenberg's recollection of Robertson/Davies' partial record.So why hadn't Rosenberg just bought a $15 tape recorder from Radio Shack?"
It was not in the company's interest at that time to have transcribed depositions of senior executives," explained Rosenberg, "because it could come back to bite the company in some other way."
As Mr Tuite asked the jury: "How can the truth come back to bite the company?" He compared the partial records of a man with a strong bias to the movie, Tom Horn, starring Steve McQueen as an old rifleman out west. When a man gets shot at long-range, Tom Horn gets pulled in to talk to the sherriff and there's a guy under the table transcribing the conversation. The transcriber changes one word in the record, and as a result Tom Horn gets hanged.
"Jonathan Rosenberg," pronounced Pat Tuite, "is the guy under the table."
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