As a defense attorney for a small stint, I don't resent that sentiment. I could never lie and make it sound genuine, although that never limited me from arguing zealously for my clients. In this instance, the attorneys are genuinely forcing the government to prove their case substantially enough that the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard can be met. While they mention the traffic stop, that is a matter of court procedures and admissible evidence. It makes prosecution harder, but not insurmountable.
I'm not an attorney but if I was representing Kraft, I would urge him to plead guilty, apologize to everyone, and move on. It's usually just a $100 fine and community service, isn't it? The longer this drags on, with evidence hearings and court appearances, the more it's going to snowball on him.
As a practicing civil attorney, I was merely making a joke at my profession's expense. Hence the smiley face.
If the attorneys can succeed in getting evidence pulled before a trial and generally make prosecuting the billionaire for the crime difficult, why plead guilty now without trying? It's as much a court proceeding as it is a public proceeding. The public, errantly at times, equates a non-conviction to a declaration of innocence. Where it is actually a failure in getting a finding of guilty. Notice a judge declares the defendant "not guilty" vice "innocent". Use that misunderstanding to your advantage.
Except that when a rich, white guy gets off, the public assumption is that people got paid. Frankly, negotiating a plea, making a public mea culpa, and launching an anti-trafficking initiative with a large grant might allow Kraft to turn this around.
Trafficked women are nameless, faceless, and don't blackmail you or talk to the press, unlike American sex workers. They're not a Stormy Daniels situation waiting to happen. It's a feature, not a bug. So "stupid" is not the derogatory adjective that I'd use.
Bingo The "why didn't the widowed billionaire arrange for some service to come to him in privacy?" crowd overlooks that.
But Kraft didn't have sex with women who were trafficked. He had sex with a couple of middle aged official residents of Florida.
And the PR considerations were set by a false narrative from law enforcement. Kraft has every right to not only defend himself in court but embarrass the folks who arrested him.
That doesn’t mean they weren’t trafficked. It is a common misconception that only foreign women are trafficked. It’s actually more common for American women to be trafficked in the US..
The women Kraft received services from were identified in the court filings. One seems to be a cooperating witness. One is in her 40s, the other her 50s. They have Chinese names and it's not clear what their citizenship status is. But they didn't live at the massage parlor, they have regular Florida addresses and ID. There is no allegation that Kraft interacted in any way with women who allegedly lived in the massage parlor and were forced to service a thousand men a year. Kraft if charged with soliciting prostitution. The co-operating witness will help there but without audio of what was said, it will be hard to prove. The fact that Kraft handed over money, then received sex isn't dispositive.
I wonder if he knew that. Wait a second here. You lost me. They arrested him because he committed a crime. There is video of the event. What did they do to warrant getting embarrassed?
Reportedly, they couldn't recognize him as Robert Kraft from their secret porn tapes without creating a pretextual, and therefore supposedly illegal, traffic stop to get him to flash his ID. That's embarrassing on multiple levels.
They used illegal tactics. If your read the NY Post piece linked above, Kraft was driven to the massage parlor by a friend in the friend's car. The friend waited outside while Kraft received his stimulation. Afterward, the police pulled the friend over on a pretextual traffic offense, then ordered the passenger to identify himself. That's how they knew it was Kraft since he paid cash. Get the traffic stop excluded, and the case against Kraft collapses.
Which wraps up the criminal trial, but does bupkis in the court of public opinion, and furthers the narrative that rich guys don't have to play by the rules (whether true or not).
This. If the cops screwed this up then Kraft should walk. That's how our legal system does and should work. But this isn't him claiming a mis-identification or that he wasn't ever there, he did what they claimed he did, he's just going to avoid any punishment because the cops are idiots.
For thirty years, Alan Dershowitz has been saying that justice is for sale, justice is for rent, and justice is for barter in the US. The American legal system has lots of procedural protections for defendants wealthy enough to exercise them.
Honestly, I am not understanding the issue of the traffic stop. If we are talking about a "fruit from the poisonous tree" situation, there would have to have been a "poisonous tree" gathered at the traffic stop. From what I understand, the evidence that was gathered was taken from surveillance cameras on the premises of this, ahem … "business." Or am I wrong about where the evidence was collected? The actual evidence of guilt of the underlying crime couldn't have been taken from Kraft's car at the traffic stop, since neither he nor the driver were aware that video was being taken, so they weren't in possession of it. Maybe I am just misunderstanding the sequence of events here because, quite frankly, I haven't paid any attention to anything other than titles of articles on this, and a bit of the banter on bigsoccer. Internally I just find myself chuckling, because as a POC myself, I have easily had more than 20 stops by cops who had absolutely no reason to believe I was involved with a crime (including a traffic violation), in which they stopped me for something that I wasn't doing (hell, I have been stopped for, in the cops words, "looking suspicious" while driving), and then used the stop to try to FIND such evidence. And it happens all the time to plenty of people, and no one sheds a tear when such people go to jail when something is actually found upon these bogus searches. That's the real travesty, not this situation. Justice for sale, indeed.