According to the Florida Supreme Court, the answer is yes, for 3 years! Three years even though the lawyer was simply trying to test the witness’ ability to pick out the witness. The court explained that the lawyer’s subjective intent was irrelevant. Rumpole covers it here. And here is the order.
I can’t help to wonder what would have happened to a prosecutor who puts up false testimony at a hearing or trial.
3 comments:
Alzate!
He became the subject of these Bar proceedings based upon his use of two defense exhibits during a pretrial deposition conducted on February 13, 2015, while representing the defendant in the case of State v. Virgil Woodson, Circuit Case No. 13-2013-CF-012946-0001-XX (Miami-Dade County,
Florida). The exhibits at issue included two photocopied versions of black and white police photo lineups in which the victim had originally signed her name and identified the defendant by circling both the defendant’s photograph and the designation below it of subject number five. The exhibits also included the signature of the police officer who conducted the photo lineup. The disciplinary issue here centers on the fact that Schwartz altered the photo lineup by replacing his client’s image in one exhibit with the image of an alternate suspect whom witnesses other than the victim had identified as the perpetrator and by changing the client’s image in the other exhibit by imposing the alternate subject’s hairstyle on the client’s image. Although the images in the exhibits were altered in this manner, they nonetheless retained the circle around subject number five and the signatures of the victim and police officer below the photographs.
...
Our consideration of the defense-altered exhibits leads to the inevitable
conclusion that they are deceptive on their face. The referee, without elaboration, concluded that the exhibits “in and of themselves” were not “misleading, fraudulent, deceitful, or misrepresentations.” This conclusion is unsupported by the record and patently erroneous. The exhibits retained the witness’s circle identifying subject number five in the lineup as the perpetrator and the victim’s and detective’s signatures. By their very nature, they conveyed the false message that the substituted photograph was the photograph that had been previously identified by the victim.
https://efactssc-public.flcourts.org/casedocuments/2017/1391/2017-1391_disposition_147861_d32.pdf
Shady tactics, kudos to the court!
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