Money Pulls the Legal Strings

The Boston Herald

We watched an old Bette Davis movie Saturday night, "The Letter," about a wealthy woman who shot and killed her lover, then convinced her lawyer to conceal a piece of evidence that would have made a jury convict her.

The movie was in black and white but that isn't what dated it. Watching a defense lawyer wrestle with his conscience did.

Conscience is clearly something that neither Kevin Reddington nor his very high-profile client Mo Vaughn wrestles with, "The inner sense of what is right or wrong in one's conduct or motives, impelling one toward right action."

Right action. It's a quaint concept that eludes Reddington the way the alphabet eluded his client in the wee hours of a rainy January morning.

I suppose the alphabet can be tricky, especially after a night of socializing at the Foxy Lady strip club in Providence, after burgers and eggs and a lot of something to wash them down, after crashing into an abandoned car and rolling over your own.

"A-B-D-C-H-L-M" is how Vaughn recited it, at the state trooper's request. Twenty-six letters and he got the first two right. But it was stress, don't you know, not alcohol, that got Mo Vaughn all confused because stress can knock the ABCs right out of you.

Strange that Vaughn was too traumatized to remember that D follows C, but was savvy enough to realize that the best way to beat a drunk-driving charge is to refuse a breathalyzer test.

"It was obvious he was very intoxicated," trooper Paul McCarthy testified Monday in Dedham District Court. McCarthy also testified that Vaughn smelled of alcohol, that his eyes were glassy, that his speech was slurred and that he couldn't walk without stumbling.

Vaughn got three tries at the alphabet and couldn't make it past "P." He got three chances to walk nine steps down a straight line and couldn't do it without stumbling. He got two tries at standing on one leg for 30 seconds. "He couldn't remain on one leg past the count of five," McCarthy said.

Vaughn himself told police he'd been drinking. But none of this matters.

It wouldn't matter if people had been in that disabled car that Vaughn totalled, if he'd wiped out an entire family.

For Mo Vaughn is a big important baseball player with money to buy his way out of trouble and Kevin Reddington is one more defense lawyer who can be bought.

It's the American way. If you have enough cash, you can hire the dissembler who can twist fact into fiction so fast you don't even see it coming.

According to Reddington, his client couldn't walk a straight line because he'd had knee surgery seven months before and his client couldn't stand on one foot because he was 50 pounds overweight and his client's speech was slurred and his eyes were glassy because of his sinus medicine.

And as for crashing into a disabled car? It was a rainy night and what was the car doing in the breakdown lane anyway? Perhaps, Reddington suggested, the police arrested Vaughn to cover up their "negligence" for failing to remove the car from where it had been for 13 hours.

And that's the point of the trial. Only Reddington sees the car as the hazard while the prosecution sees Vaughn as the hazard, an intoxicated man barreling down a road.

And what do we see?

We see one more guy with a lot of money pulling the strings, one more reason why kids long to be athletes and high-priced lawyers, not police or prosecutors.