“You shouldn’t wear stripes. It makes you look fat,” the lawyer said to my coworker as she was about to enter the courtroom.
It was a drug trial. My coworker – I’ll call her Jane – had developed and identified the defendant’s fingerprints on packaging in a felony case of drug possession with intent to distribute. The trial was taking place in Bisbee, Arizona. This story was relayed to me by both Jane and the court staff who were present.
The defense attorney was Robert J. “Bob” Hirsh, known for his unusual methods of defending clients. For a great story and insight into the methods of a winning defense attorney, read the book “Death of a Jewish American Princess” by Shirley Frondorf. This true-crime novel details how Bob Hirsh won a “Not Guilty” verdict for his client Steven Steinberg, who killed his wife by stabbing her 26 times. Mr. Hirsh’s techniques are, to say the least, unorthodox – but very effective. When Jane and I worked together in the @Arizona Department of Public Safety crime lab in Tucson, Hirsch seemed to specialize in defending two types of clients: drug kingpins, and men who killed their wives.
One of Hirsh’s techniques which all of us in the lab had heard about was to call for a recess immediately prior to the testimony of a potentially damaging witness. Hirsh would hurry to the area where the witness was waiting and say something in an off-handed manner intended to upset the witness. With Jane, Hirsh had said it nonchalantly as he passed her in the lobby outside the courtroom. He never even broke stride as he walked off down the hall.
It worked. Jane was already terrified of testifying. Being told she looked fat pushed her over the edge. She started crying and became hysterical. The court clerks rushed her into a witness room where it took an hour to calm her back down. Other witnesses had to be taken out of order while Jane struggled to regain composure.
Once on the witness stand, although she did not break down again, Jane was so intimidated by Hirsh’s presence and demeanor that she was nervous and unsure, tense and on edge, wanting only to escape the courtroom. I don’t know the final verdict for the defendant, only the mentally traumatizing effect Hirsh’s few words had on Jane.
After that experience, Jane would become physically ill and call in sick on days when she had subpoenas. The lab manager would ask me to cover for her. Other defense attorneys were usually willing to stipulate in situations where they could have demanded her as the LPE who had worked the case. But since I did verifications and tech reviews for Jane, I got in most of her evidence. She developed chronic fatigue syndrome a few years later and was granted a medical retirement.
In my experience, brash defense tactics like those used by Bob Hirsh are rare. But even the most subdued cross examination can be a terrifying experience for some people. Good public speaking skills and the self-confidence to withstand the occasional aggressively adversarial opposing attorney are necessary to be an effective forensic scientist.
The best laboratory scientists in the world would be poor forensic scientists if they could not maintain their composure and testify for hours or even days on end without losing their professional demeanor or worse, suffering an emotional breakdown.