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Jeffrey Toobin: Unexpected fireworks in court
(CNN) -- Professional basketball player Kobe Bryant appeared in court Thursday at a scheduled preliminary hearing, where details about an alleged sexual assault on a 19-year-old girl were revealed. CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin talked with anchor Soledad O'Brien about strategies of each side in the case and what to expect. O'BRIEN: Well, boy, were predictions way off on this. Many people thought that the entire hearing would be waived, and they would just eventually go straight to trial because they would want to avoid the airing of the dirty laundry, so to speak, or the salacious details. The defense was very aggressive ... Give me a sense of the strategy and how you think it played out in the courtroom. TOOBIN: Well, you know, Soledad, I've spent a lot of time in courtrooms, and I don't know if I have seen a more dramatic day than I saw [Thursday]. There were so many revelations and powerful interchanges between the lawyers and the witnesses that there's a lot to sort out. The bottom line, I do think the defense made a mistake by going forward. There was a lot of incriminating evidence that came out. The images, even though it was only second-hand through the detectives, were vivid. The story was believable on the part of the woman. On the defense side, there were -- they did score some points, the most important of which Pamela Mackey, the attorney, brought out repeatedly in her cross-examination is: Where were the injuries? If she was held by the neck for all that time, why was her neck unbruised? And if she was, in fact, raped in this way, why weren't there more injuries to her genital area than there were? Those points were good points to raise, but I thought they could have waited for the trial. I predicted no hearing. I thought they would have been better off without one. O'BRIEN: A couple of things that we heard from Pamela Mackey. First, ... she asked a question about would those injuries be consistent with a woman having sex with three different guys in three days, sort of coming out of nowhere, which, of course, goes against any kind of law that bars the sexual history of the alleged victim in the case being heard; in addition to that, names the alleged victim's name six times -- not once, not twice, six times, to the point at which the judge said, "Maybe I should get a big muzzle for you." What do you think her strategy was there, and how unusual was this? TOOBIN: Well, Soledad, I mean, when she asked that question in the courtroom about the three men in three days, there was like a "whoosh" in the room. It was like, whoa, someone had just dropped a nuclear bomb in court. I thought it was borderline unethical what she did, because that was maybe in compliance with the rape shield law, but it was certainly on the knife's edge. And the ethical thing to do would have been to raise that privately with the judge and say, can I ask this question, instead of just lobbing this stink bomb in the middle of the courtroom, which is why the judge immediately took everyone out of court. And basically that was the last thing we heard. That's what shut down the hearing. As for naming the victim six times, again, it was really shocking, and Pamela Mackey kept saying, gosh, I keep making this mistake. I really apologize. You know, once, twice, maybe three times is a legitimate mistake. Six times, you really start to think that it was an act of intimidation ... O'BRIEN: Well, an act of intimation or -- ... Do you think that she's trying to convince the judge that, oops, I might slip later on, it might be smart to close this hearing and close this case to the public? TOOBIN: Well, I think that is certainly possible. I don't think you can close the trial. There's almost no way under the Constitution you can close a trial. But certainly, one of the issues outstanding is whether this hearing next Wednesday, the continuation of the hearing, will be in public. We simply don't know. Developments are happening in this case so fast and so unpredictably, I hesitate to make yet another incorrect prediction. O'BRIEN: All right, well, Jeffrey, a lot of people made that prediction yesterday. Thanks for your time. Appreciate it.
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