Former County Judge Paints Picture of Dallas Corruption in John Wiley Price Trial
Hard to tell what the jurors get out of a particular witness, but I know what I got from watching former Dallas County Judge Jim Foster on the stand Monday in the federal bribery corruption trial of County Commissioner John Wiley Price. Affirmation.
Affirmation is good, but in the weird twisty way trials sometimes work, Foster’s testimony, which I thought was very damaging to the defendant, was sort of dragged out of him by Price’s own lawyer. Shirley Baccus-Lobel, lead attorney for Price, kept asking Foster questions to which Baccus-Lobel herself seemed not to know the answer.
I always thought that was a big courtroom no-no. Never ask the witness a question unless you know ahead of time what his answer will be. In this case Baccus-Lobel’s seemingly unstructured badgering elicited from Foster his most damaging narrative.
One major question in the trial is whether Commissioner Price, lifelong hero and champion of African-American southern Dallas, stabbed his own constituency in the back seven years ago by helping torpedo a huge economic development project called the Inland Port, a planned 5,000-acre complex of rail yards, truck terminals and gigantic high-tech warehouses purported to be worth 65,000 well-paid new jobs for the city’s southern racial reservation.
Read more: http://www.dallasobserver.com/news/former-dallas-county-judge-jim-foster-talks-inland-port-in-john-wiley-price-dallas-corruption-trial-9312346
