Which story is better?
In most cases during trials the confrontation is with the witnesses, not with your opponent.
As a district attorney I was babysitting a death penalty murder case for a while. A high-powered guy–that’s a dangerous criminal brought in as a witness–came in to say some BS testimony. He’s in handcuffs.
When he got off the witness stand he goes, hauls off and slugs the baliff, cold-cocks him, knocks him about ten feet in the air, knocks his tooth out. This high-powered guy has no control.
The defendant is sitting at the other end of counsel table while this is all going on, saying to me, “I’m going to kill you.” That I took seriously. It was very cold, and left me fearful, in a state of disbelief. This guy is a cold-blooded killer.
The irony is he’s free and living with the attorneys in their house. They’re writing books together.
Two young Spanish guys were bothering him at the bar, calling him an old man, harassng the shit out of him. He turns around and shoots the two of them. Kills one right there in the bar. The guy drops. The other guy staggers out into the street. He follows that guy, puts one in his head right in the street, walks back in the bar, puts his gun on the bar.
He was drinking a bottle of Heinikein when the cops come. It was a ground ball murder for us.
We get an interpreter and sit down with him.
Here’s a guy who spent twenty five years in a Castro jail in Havana. What are we going to do to this guy?
He told us flat out, “Hey, they bothered me, so I killed them. Yeah, I’ll go to jail here. It’s better than being in a dungeon in Cuba.”