Vick's legal dream team
Posted: Thursday, July 26, 2007 6:22 PM
I still don’t think that Michael Vick is ever going to play football again, but even though the conviction rate is 95 percent in federal trials, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s one of the five defendants in a hundred who walks.
Justice may be blind, but it can still smell money. All you had to do was look at the crowd of suits lined up outside the Richmond, Va., courthouse after the arraignment. Five of them were stuffed with lawyers.
You’ve got to be pretty fortunate in this country to be able to afford even one top-flight lawyer. To have five of them, including a couple of the best criminal defense attorneys around, you’ve got to have a ton of money that you’re willing to exchange for your freedom.
Vick has shown that willingness, hiring Billy Martin, who managed to get a hung jury in Jayson Williams’ first trial for manslaughter (Williams is going to be re-tried.) and who is regarded as one of the top lawyers in Washington.
He’s also hired Daniel Meachum, an Atlanta attorney who claims to have won 122 of 126 major legal actions.
He’s got three other attorneys, including a sports attorney, also working for him. One assumes that a substantial portion of the millions Vick has made is going to his defense.
For that money, they’re thinking of everything, including not trusting the media to faithfully repeat their every word. So the statement read by lead lawyer Billy Martin was put on the vehicle that delivers corporate propaganda to newsrooms, the PRNewswire, which presents it in its brief entirety.
If you watched it, you were probably struck by the fact that not only did Vick not speak, he didn’t even show up. His mother was there to listen to Martin read about how her son apologizes for causing her so much pain. But Vick didn’t speak, his lawyer didn’t take questions and the entire entourage left the stage without comment.
Terence Moore, a sports columnist for The Atlanta Journal & Constitution, thought Vick blew it by not even bothering to show his face outside. But Moore also points out that Vick has never stood up and spoken for himself after any of his other public missteps.
Any time you have that much money to invest in that much legal help, your chances of acquittal improve appreciably. The problem is that while the lawyers may be able to figure out a way to confuse 12 average Americans enough to get a verdict of innocent, nothing they do is going to clear Vick in the public mind.
This could be O.J. Simpson all over again, only without the camera-struck judge and the overmatched prosecution. These are federal prosecutors in a federal courtroom with no cameras. Those interested will learn about the trial the old-fashioned way: they’ll read about it.
The indictment is pretty ugly, and the prosecutors have a lot more evidence than they presented to the grand jury. The defense doesn’t know what the feds have, and won’t know until shortly before the trial starts. And you know that some of the testimony is going to be brutal and that Vick is going to be connected to hideous events over and over again.
If he beats the rap, most people are going assume he just bought his way out, but that he’s guilty anyway. My guess is that, like O.J., he’ll never work again in his chosen field. He’ll be radioactive.
So even if he wins his freedom, he’s not going to win his career back. I doubt he’s thinking of that now. Most likely, all he’s thinking about is beating the rap. Later, he can add up how much – in money and reputation and his own future – it will have cost.
