This thread takes me back to the good ole days of 2p2. Fairly sure I witnessed this argument (by a way higher % of posters than here) weekly.
Seems like she had bad lawyers but lol jury. And yah this is a grim precedent (not really legally but societally).
How much of experts and lawyers being better has to do with facts being better or worse? Partly because better facts intrinsically make lawyers and experts look better, and partly because an expert might not take a case with bad facts because they wonât be able or willing to bend the facts the way the client would need. Probably less true of lawyers but I donât know.
Do you have any idea what the Heard and Depp attorneys would have billed per hour? The cost for depp must have been astronomical. What did he spend, like five million bucks?
If you want, I can give more examples of stupid shit that Heardâs lawyers did that had nothing to do with the facts. Like a bit one - for closings they werenât watching the clock. They had 2 hours, including for their rebuttal. One lawyer went first and used around 75 minutes, the second lawyer realized she had less time and had to rush her portion. Even doing that they were shocked when the judge told them they only had 6 minutes for their rebuttal (they tried to argue for more but got shut down).
As for the experts, if you watch them, the Depp experts were just way more polished. Iâm pretty sure when they testified to their rates, they were also higher than Heardâs experts in the same areas (not that Heardâs experts or lawyers were cheap).
No clue on exact rates for lawyers - but not cheap. Iâd guess the Depp partners were around $1k an hour. Heard lawyers werenât as credentialed, but Iâd guess at least $600-800 an hour.
$5 million for a 6 week trial (plus all the prep) is likely way low for what Depp paid.
edit: here are there rates for some of Deppâs team (although reading it again, it just gives a minimum rate for each, not the actual rate). Bredehoft is Heardâs lawyer, so my guess for her team was right.
I think I read or heard something that said about double these amounts for both.
Itâs like a page from OâHenry imo.
Is the verdict different if they had each otherâs legal teams?
Should have given them both bigger awards.
This. The evidence sure seemed to establish that they were both terrible people who beat the shit out of each other. Confuzzled jury that found for both of them kind of seems to support that.
I think it absolutely would have been. I think with better lawyers, Heard wins. Big question I guess is whether better lawyers could have coached Heard to be a better witness.
do not allow this to become a media circus by airing every single moment on TV. Keep proceedings private, give legal briefings and descriptions of major events, move on. This shit was a spectacle and probably more than a little on purpose. I find the ad nauseum discussion of it and the jockeying for position to demonstrate who is the most pure whatever kind of idiotic, to be honest. This isnât really a black/white thing. Few things are. Especially domestic abuse.
On the topic of what goes down in the jury room a Pro Publica reporter got called for jury duty in a case where one of the actors on The Wire was shot by someone the actor knew
It did not take long after we ascended to start our deliberations, though, to discover that there was a whole different level of diversity when it came to a task like this. Baltimore is an overwhelmingly progressive Democratic city, a place that voted 87% for Joe Biden in 2020. But perspectives range widely when it comes to the local issue that most consumes public attention â public safety â and that range does not break down neatly along racial or class lines.
Soon after we got started, five jurors made clear that they had serious doubts about the prosecutionâs case. They didnât find Clanton credible. Several noted that he was, after all, an actor, while several others said that he wasnât being candid about whatever beef had fueled Whiteâs anger, or that they simply didnât like how he had come across. âHe was arrogant and braggadocious,â said one of three young white women on the jury. âI didnât buy his act.â
Above all, though, they wanted more evidence, and for this these jurors blamed the police. Why had the police been unable to recover a gun? Why had the detective not tried harder to find other witnesses? Heck, why had the police not tried harder to catch the shooter in the first place? âIf Iâm going to be involved in sending someone to jail for a long time, Iâm going to need hard evidence,â said the one Black woman who was inclined to acquit.
The skeptical jurors were not suggesting they did not trust what the police were saying. Rather, they were adopting the critique offered by the defense: They were criticizing the police for not having done their job better. It was a striking dynamic, given that this may have been one of the rare cases where the presence of cops likely saved a manâs life. But it fit with the dynamic described on âWe Own This Cityâ â a department succumbing to indifference and thus lackluster at doing its job, whether for reasons of self-pity or self-protection.
This was the local context for the jurorsâ reluctance to convict White. But it nonetheless startled several members of the jury who were convinced of his guilt, a group that included the two other Black women on the panel. Members of this group kept coming back to the main pieces of evidence: the victimâs testimony, which was seemingly corroborated by the responding officerâs account of the gunmanâs flight into the alley; the camera footage of White emerging from that alley; and the recorded jailhouse phone call. Wasnât that enough?
By dayâs end, it wasnât, and we headed home.
Has this trial made anyone change their minds about cameras in the Supreme Court?
Iâm kind of grunching here, but why were her attorneys so bad? She should have the means to afford representation comparable to Deppâs, right?
This is kind of a side note but people make a lot of hay out of this and to me itâs pretty irrelevant. Thatâs the kind of thing that reads very differently in a private correspondence where there is an understanding about how to interpret obviously deliberately over-the-top and outrageous language than it does when itâs dug out and put in front of a sober courtroom. Iâm not a big fan of the idea in general that well-spoken people are less likely to be abusers. Look at Cosby.
Way more likely to move the needle for me are violent and threatening talk directed AT the alleged victim, or casual misogyny in general, even when expressed in superficially civil terms. That email is more in the category of blowing off steam. Itâs distasteful and does indicate kind of an unstable, impulsive person, but to me its evidentiary value vis a vis him being an abuser is very nearly zero.
So. A couple of things.
You dont see the comment as âcasual misogynyâ on itâs own?
See below for some of the other texts.
These seem both violent and misogynist.
I hadnât seen them (I havenât followed the case much as I said earlier) and would agree they are both âcasual misogynyâ and worse than the one I quoted. Where that one is obviously some kind of joke/hyperbole the other two seem earnest.
I picked that specific one (and as noted there are lots of other examples directed both to her and others) because I think it demonstrates the huge difference in how social media treated Depp and Heard. If Heard had sent that to a friend and then explained it as a joke that was âdirectlyâ referencing Monty Python, the internet would have been up in arms of it being another example of heard being caught in a lie.
Unless there is another Monty Python witch sketch, that text is in no one a direct reference to the âHoly Grailâ scene. The central joke in that scene is the absurd method they use to determine if sheâs a witch. While they do say âburn herâ a few times, they discuss drowning her (the closest they come is when someone yells âthrow her in the pondâ to see if sheâs made of wood and floats). There is obviously also no reference to fucking the witch after sheâs dead. Maybe you think Iâm picking nits here, but these are the type of discrepancies that the internet tore into Heard in her testimony, but for something like this, people just hand wave away Depp making such crass comments about Heard as jokes and locker room talk.
Maybe Iâm just old-fashioned, but Iâd never joke about killing my wife - and definitely not about fucking her dead corpse, and if anyone sent me a text like that, Iâm not sure Iâd talk to them again.
Her lawyers werenât bad, just worse than Deppâs. They were still expensive, but not as expensive as Deppâs. Depp certainly has more money than Amber and seemed willing to spend whatever it took in this trial (itâs also possible he got funding from RWNJâs like Thiel and others to hurt metoo).
My gut take is that Heardâs lawyers were on more of a budget than Deppâs so were not able to spend as much time preparing. Deppâs team was bigger and more on top of the evidence (which a bigger team allows you to be as the junior associates review and compile all the evidence) and their witnesses seemed more rehearsed and better prepped. Heardâs team seemed to be winging it a bit more, and in my opinion led to lots of unforced errors.
