Is Mark O’Mara Cutting His Losses and Heading for an Exit?

Thursday, January 31, 2013

Best wishes to all of you who live in the South and Midwest. A hellish storm peppered with tornadoes, thunderstorms, torrential rain and golf-ball sized hail passed through this large area as a cold front with temperatures below freezing danced with a dense area of warmer air from the gulf. I live in western Kentucky where the temperature now is 32 degrees. Tuesday afternoon and evening the temperature reached 70 degrees. Yesterday featured wild windstorms, rain, flooding and decreasing temperatures. That made for an interesting motorcycle ride to the store late yesterday afternoon. Fortunately, we are OK.

Seventy degree temperatures, large menacing black clouds punctuated with lightning, tornadoes and 40 degree temperature swings do not belong in January.

Or February.

I hope everyone is safe and in good spirits this morning.

Xena gets the credit for inspiring me to write this article about the $40 K that O’Mara spent to upgrade his office.

She said:

” The $40,000 of equipment and office space should be considered an asset to O’Mara’s firm. If I had a lawyer who charged me to expand and equip his office, I would first think that he isn’t prepared to take on my case. Also, if I had a lawyer who thought it was more important to thugify the person I’m charged with murdering rather than ALREADY getting experts lined up in ballistics and forensics, I would think he is not experienced in criminal defense.

IMO, what O’Mara and West are doing is trying to divert the murder 2 case into some other type of case that does not defend GZ at all but rather, makes excuses for him.”

This is my response:

When I worked on the Green River Killer case in Seattle (we had a team of 8 lawyers, 5 investigators, 20 experts and and numerous support staff), we hired a software firm to code over a million pages of discovery stored in an airplane hanger that the prosecution converted into electronic images using scanners. They also imaged over a million exhibits.

An electronic database filled with millions of images is worthless, unless you can search the database and find the information you need. In effect, you need to develop a cover sheet for each document or exhibit in the database and enter information on that cover sheet that tags the document or exhibit with search terms that you will subsequently use to find the cover sheet and its attached document. The process of tagging each document or exhibit is called coding the discovery.

The firm that we retained, hired a team of 36 lawyers who, for one reason or another were not practicing law. Retired, semi-retired and women on maternity leave made up the team. We provided the search terms and they tagged the documents and exhibits. The job took six months to complete.

The firm provided the software program we used to search that immense database. The whole case and the program to search it was stored on a server at their office. We accessed it through a secure internet-tunnel connection. They also provided a secure email program that we used to communicate with each other regarding the case.

My primary responsibilities were DNA and forensics. I also played a major role in developing our coding system.

Although our setup was likely substantially more sophisticated than whatever setup West, O’Mara and their 6 interns are using, I think they are doing something similar to what we did, but on a much smaller scale. The process is expensive, but necessary in big paper-intensive cases.

I question whether all of that high-tech stuff is really necessary in Trayvon’s case, but I understand why they would have decided to modernize the discovery-organization process by converting everything into an electronic searchable database of images. I would too, if I had the money.

O’Mara seems to be wasting an enormous amount of time running his mouth to the media and trying his case in the court of public opinion. He appears to be obsessively preoccupied with a racist right-wing-inspired snipe hunt for evidence of non-existing bad acts committed by Trayvon and his girlfriend, Dee Dee. Seems like almost everyday there is a new nonsensical rumor coming out of tree-house gang that winds him up tight and keeps him going and going like the Eveready Bunny.

I have no doubt that the snipe hunt is a waste of time and energy because the evidence he is searching for exists only in the fevered imaginations of creepy people like the client, the client’s family and their frantic supporters. They seem not to realize that each new phantasmagorical rumor is a distraction rather than an aid. Meanwhile, O’Mara seems oblivious to how stupid he looks when each new rumor fails to pan out.

He has had more than 6 months to find out if Trayvon Martin was an aggressive martial artist who liked to beat the crap out of other people for no apparent reason while uttering outdated ghetto slang from 20-year-old movies.

I keep asking myself when will he finally tire of playing the role of a subservient dog being wagged by its tail?

I am going to repeat something that I said in a comment yesterday:

“I think O’Mara is attempting to cut his losses and get out of this thing gracefully without screaming and running as fast as he can toward the exits with his hair on fire.

At this point, I think it would make more sense to close the account to prevent more people from basically being defrauded by having their money pay for unnecessary security and create fertilizer via the defendant’s alimentary canal instead of paying for needed defense services.

Yes, settle up with AIS, close the account, enter the IFP Order, let O’Mara and West out with an admonishment to run a few laps on the beads and go forth and sin no more, and appoint new counsel at public expense. Then set a new hearing in a week or two for confirmation of new counsel.

If the defendant demands security, send him to jail. He will be safe there. That should stop his complaining.

If he objects to the GPS device on the ground that he cannot afford it, revoke his bond and take him into custody. That should stop his complaining.”