Joe Scarborough Can Save the GOP

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/archives/2009/06/barrett_2.php

Barrett: Morning Joe Finally Breaks His Silence About Defending Abortion-Doc Killer
By Wayne Barrett
Friday, Jun. 5 2009 @ 4:09PM

After nearly a week of silence -- 13 hours of television -- Joe Scarborough finally addressed the assassination of George Tiller on Morning Joe at 7 a.m. today. The Voice has blogged twice this week about Scarborough's sustained and awkward silence, a stark contrast to every other show on MSNBC, which has covered the killing extensively and movingly.

Not only did the pro-life Scarborough launch his political career by defeating a pro-choice Republican to win a Florida congressional seat in 1994, the then 29-year-old insurance attorney debuted in local newspapers in 1993 as the pro bono attorney for the Pensacola man convicted of the first murder of an abortion doctor killer, Michael Griffin. What prompted the first Voice blog post was that Rachel Maddow had led her show with a photo of Griffin, whose three fatal shots to the back of Dr. David Gunn led a copycat assassin a couple of months later to shoot Dr. Tiller the first time, wounding Tiller in both arms. That mention by Maddow of Griffin inspired us to return to the cover story we did on Scarborough in 2008.

"We've got to learn to sit down and talk," said Scarborough at the climax of this morning's several minute segment including co-host Mika Brzezinski and Pat Buchanan...

"People who are pro-life like myself can't call people who are pro-choice murderers, and people who are pro-choice can't call people who are pro-life -- can't claim they don't give a damn about women and want women to die in back alley abortions. That is the sort of angry, heated rhetoric over the past quarter century that's gotten us to where we are today."

For most viewers, however, the conversation prior to this clear and forceful statement must have been very hard to follow. Brzezinski was in such a rush to defend Scarborough that she offered a rationale for his representation of Griffin before anyone told the audience that Scarborough was a lawyer in the case. ("People like to read into when you are trying to make the legal process move along, but I don't think there's anything to that," said Brzezinski).
Odder still, Scarborough, fairly deep into this obscure conversation, said he didn't want to give Griffin's name, even though he'd already identified his client as "the first person that shot an abortion doctor" and noted that the client was "from Pensacola," Scarborough's hometown.

"The family wanted me then, and I'm sure now would appreciate me not talking about it that much, so I won't give his name," said Scarborough, who attributed his voluntary retention to connections between Griffin's family and his. When the Voice interviewed Scarborough about this case last year, he exhibited no similar reluctance to talk about Griffin by name, said his then father-in-law had asked him to get involved in the case, and said he hadn't talked to Griffin's father, Tom Griffin, a two-time donor to his congressional campaign, since 1993. He may have raised this cloak of confidentiality now -- despite all but naming Griffin -- as a way of suggesting a rationale for his weeklong end-run around the Tiller killing.

Scarborough portrayed his stint representing Griffin as simply a search for a real criminal lawyer to defend him, without noting that the judge had already appointed a criminal attorney before Scarborough entered the case or that he had stated, according to court transcripts, that he was prepared to take the case to trial. There's no doubt that Scarborough did -- as he described on air -- talk to other possible trial lawyers about taking the case (though Griffin contended in a handwritten letter to the Voice from prison that Scarborough wanted to remain as co-counsel at trial). Scarborough indicated this morning that he picked the lawyer, Robert Kerrigan, an experienced criminal defense attorney who Scarborough said "tried it very aggressively" and "fought for this young man."

But Kerrigan told the Voice that he was a member of the same church as the Griffins and that Tom Griffin asked him to get involved, not Scarborough, suggesting that Scarborough's withdrawal from the case was the family's decision, not Scarborough's. "I remember sitting in Tom's house and talking to him about it. I don't remember ever talking to Joe about this case," says Kerrigan. "Joe was an obscure little guy, not a rising star. Nobody knew anything about him. I can't figure out why he was screening any lawyers at all. Why was he running interference? Why would he have been involved in a process like that at all?"

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