NYT = SCOTT SHANE: Prosecution by Logic Defeats a Defense in Shades of Gray

Legal Analysis
Prosecution by Logic Defeats a Defense in Shades of Gray

By SCOTT SHANE
Published: March 7, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/07/washington/07assess.html?em&ex=1173416400&en=dc749ffa14cdb47c&ei=5087%0A

WASHINGTON, March 6 — The trial of I. Lewis Libby Jr. played out as a left-brain, right-brain contest, posing the prosecution’s just-the-facts appeal to logic against the defense’s far more emotional argument about human frailty.

In the end, after a painstaking, 10-day dissection of the evidence, the 11 jurors found the case presented by the prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald inescapable: The well-documented misstatements of Mr. Libby were not those of an innocently forgetful man but of a calculating serial perjurer.

“It got to the point,” said Denis Collins, one of the jurors, where “opinion had very little to do with it. You just came to this conclusion that, ‘Wow, O.K., here it is right before us.’ ”

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“This verdict is a remarkable endorsement of the no-nonsense case the independent counsel presented,” said Lanny A. Breuer, a veteran Washington trial lawyer who represented President Bill Clinton during impeachment proceedings.

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