In a typical case, one of the most difficult decisions a defense lawyer can face at a trial is whether to call your own client.

If your client can’t really add anything to the facts necessary to decide the case — and this case is based primarily on scientific evidence that Floyd can’t speak to personally — the lawyer has to weigh whatever his or her client may say helps his case, on the one hand, against the damage that can be done on cross-examination on the other. The lawyers in a public case like this one also have to factor in the arbitrators’ and the public’s strong desire to hear Floyd take the oath and say the words, “I didn’t do it.”

As a lover of the sport, I want to believe that Floyd raced and won clean, and I wanted — no, I needed — to hear him say those words. Well he did just that, and it will be up to the arbitrators to judge his credibility, which cannot be done until he is cross-examined.

Most any witness can get on the stand, take the oath and say what they want to say when they’re thrown softball questions by their own lawyer. The real test of credibility for Floyd and his testimony will be given when he has to answer USADA’s lawyers.

On the heels of Greg LeMond’s testimony, any thought that Floyd’s lawyers may have had about not calling him as a witness almost surely ended. LeMond’s testimony, if believed, was very damaging as it amounted to a virtual confession. And because there were only two people on that phone conversation, the only person on the planet in a position to refute LeMond’s tesimony is Floyd. He simply had to take the stand and refute the testimony.

The other interesting piece of testimony was that of USADA’s witness, Dr. Don Catlin, who recently retired as director of the UCLA Olympic lab, one of the leading WADA-accredited labs. Usually, when a lawyer calls a witness, he/she wants them as invulnerable as possible to giving helpful testimony for the other side. That didn’t seem to be the case with Catlin — at least so far.

He answered the easy questions by USADA that there was clear evidence of doping. But he was also forced to make some rather remarkable admissions. One was that under UCLA’s testing standards, the standard for finding the sample positive was not met.

Wow, if one lab can find you positive and another negative, doesn’t it make you wonder whether this “scientific” evidence is really so cut and dry? He also testified that some of the testing work done by the Paris lab was “mediocre,” or even “poor.”

We’re talking about taking away a man’s livelihood, not to mention stripping him of his Tour de France title. If that happens, I’d like to be pretty sure that this test was really positive and that the testing done to find it so was done properly.

We’re a long way from the end, and hopefully questions about the lab’s work and the true results of Landis’ test will emerge. But from where I sit, we’re not there yet.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 21st, 2007 at 9:27 am and is filed under ziamodabber. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.