I was wondering whether the Cirrus lawyers just did good homework or have been getting a bit of an assist....
Well, good homework wouldn't be much of a problem...do a search on Campbell, and the Zoomland site usually comes up fairly high on the results.
The question I have is how much homework *Campbell's* attorney did.
I expect most of an attorney's research time is spent on the opponent. Yet Campbell had been sloughed off by three previous attorneys. You'd think it would have made the guy a bit curious...and cautious.
Yet... when you look on his web page, you see the guy is a pilot. Likely he's familiar with ANN; he may have had no reason to be skeptical about Campbell before and thought this would be a straightforward case of defending journalistic freedom. Surely the faxes he sent to Cirrus' attorney (included on his *first* motion for a restraining order) eerily echoes Campbell. I posted that motion a while back.
The excerpt from the deposition transcript can be deceptive; they're intended to put Cirrus' attorney in the worst possible light, and one shouldn't draw too strong of conclusions regarding what happened. But Page 15 of the PDF for the second motion for protection order seems to show what happened when Cirrus brought up the NTSB case. Campbell's attorney immediately objected, just at the mention of the case.
To me, this indicates that the attorney was aware of it, and that either it could be damaging or Campbell wasn't going to be willing to talk about it (or both, of course).
But what happens when Cirrus' attorney asks about his attempted World Trade Center jump?
"(Pause in the proceedings)"
Why a pause? Did Campbell go into full Donald Duck mode? You'd think the transcript would have captured at least part of it.
Or...did Campbell's attorney pull him outside and ask him what the heck that was about?
If so, it implies that Campbell's attorney *wasn't* familiar with major facts of the NTSB case. The judge's findings one mention it, as well as the more in-depth discussion in the course of the transcript. Seems that reading that your client tried to base-jump off the WTC would have been remembered.
It makes you wonder about his degree of preparation. One possibility is that he knew *only as much as Campbell had told him.* That he hadn't researched it himself, and just accepted his client's assurance that it was 30-year-old medical information protected by privacy acts.
So, we get to see the judge's opinion on this. If the harassing voice mail messages Cirrus' attorney refers to *were* to the judge's staff, it could get really interesting (Remember, Campbell was without attorney for almost three months...he might well have been calling the judge's office).
The interesting question here: If the judge allows questioning about the NTSB case...will Campbell answer the questions?
Ron Wanttaja