In Part 2 of his look at a high-profile civil rights case, host Keith Fuicelli interviews the young trial team that secured $20 million. These “main brains” behind the verdict – Ciara Anderson, Omeed Azmoudeh, and Crist Whitney – reveal how they divided duties to represent six bystanders who were injured when a former Denver police officer shot into a crowd. Tune in for their insights about voir dire (“we went in with the strategy of finding liberal gun owners”), themes in opening (“you do not shoot into a crowd”) and witness preparation (“for our client, I wanted to get his emotional story out to the jury.”). Learn more about the case in Part 1.
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Episode Snapshot
- Ciara's opening focused on establishing credibility while withholding powerful evidence like the defendant’s criminal conviction.
- In voir dire, Crist’s strategy was to find “liberal gun owners” who understood gun safety principles and would recognize the recklessness of firing into a crowd.
- The team distilled their case theme to a simple rule: "You do not shoot into a crowd.”
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to the ColoradoTrial Lawyer Connection,
where Colorado trial lawyers shareinsights from their latest cases. Join me,
Keith Fuicelli, as we uncoverthe stories, strategies,
and lessons from recent Colorado trialsto help you and your clients achieve
justice in the courtroom. Thepursuit of justice starts now.
(00:21):
Howdy everyone,
and welcome back to part two of atwo-part episode on the Colorado
Trial Lawyer Connection Podcast,
where we're going to talk withthe main trial team on the case
involving Officer Ramos. Andthis, of course, as a recap,
is the case in which Officer Ramosfired multiple shots at an individual.
(00:45):
I think maybe he hit the individual,
but he hit lots of people thatwere behind the individual,
resulted in a spectacularverdict in Denver County.
And we are fortunate today tohave who by all accounts are the
main workhorse, the main trial team,
the main brains behind thisamazing result. So with that,
(01:07):
I would love to welcome CristWhitney, Ciara Anderson,
and Omeed Azmoudeh, hope I got thatright, to the podcast. Welcome everyone.
Thanks for having us. Hi.
Thanks for having us.
So Crist, why don't we start with you.
Tell us a little bit about yourselfand how it is that you became a trial
lawyer.
Well, I'm originally from NewJersey. I came to Colorado,
(01:31):
I want to say around 2001. I wasa music artist for a long time.
Wow. And then I startedwriting. I wrote a couple books.
I went back to school becauseI wanted to be a better writer.
And while I was there, Istarted studying history,
polysci.
And then I met a professor whosuggested after writing a brief
(01:55):
about the water rights or the StandingRock Tribe suggested I go to law school.
Wow.
So then I applied andfortunately I got in.
I always wanted to do civil rights law,
considering a lot of policebrutality that the black
community sees on a regular basis.
So that's something that inspiredme and pushed me through law school.
(02:18):
Once I got out of law school,
I met with the heads of the firm hereat Rathod Muhammad Bay and luckily was
asked to join the team.And now I'm here now.
What a great firm youlanded with. Great story.
I agree.
So I want to go back to the music piecebecause I was in a band for 20 years.
What'd you play?
(02:39):
I actually was a hip hop artist.
Okay.
So I was an MC.
All right. That's fantastic.
I've recorded over maybea hundred or so songs.
Wow. And I sometimes wonder if,this is just me thinking out loud.
There's the Lady Gaga song.It's all about the applause.
And I wonder if people that are in bands,
(03:00):
like we want to be praised onthis like subconscious level.
We want to be on stage. Wewant the crowd to applaud.
And so we find ourselves in the courtroomwhere I guess the next best thing,
but I digress. So that's fascinatingstory. Ciara, what about you?
Did you always know youwanted to do trial work?
If you had asked me 10 years ago even,
(03:23):
I wouldn't have even knownthat I wanted to be a lawyer.
I had always had a plan to be apsychologist and a substance abuse
and work with people whostruggled with addiction.
And then after undergraduate,
I didn't get into the graduate programthat I had wanted and I didn't want to
move back to Nashville. I'moriginally from Tennessee.
(03:44):
So I moved to Colorado with no money,
no plan and no idea what the worldhad in store. And it worked out,
thank goodness.
I got a job at a law firm and wasgoing back and forth between Teach for
America or the LSAT.
And I did a little bit better on theLSAT than I did for the Teach for America
application. Shortly aftergetting into law school,
(04:07):
I did the DU civil rights clinic for acouple of years and that's my first year
doing that. I worked on an excessiveforce case for a little girl
and was able to resolve that and thenmoved on and was able to work on a case
involving solitary confinementfor a man. And so that really,
I grew up knowing what it's liketo not have your voice heard in a
(04:28):
courtroom.
And so really getting totake that client-centered approach and advocate for our
clients is really what makes mewant to be a trial lawyer and
really fuels my.
Being a trial lawyer.
And it sounds like dealing withthe solitary confinement case,
did that have a profoundimpact on your sort of
(04:50):
core being on how you representfolks that your firm represents?
Yeah, absolutely. Working on that case,
I have a tattoo that says human becauseI think so frequently we forget that we
as attorneys are human, butalso our clients are very human.
And so just rememberingthat very human aspect.
And I have that tattoo in largepart because of this client and that
(05:14):
experience, but it's a veryrewarding clientele. I mean,
we get to see people on theirworst days and hopefully bring
the better side or bringjustice to those worst days.
So definitely that early clientis somebody who continues to inspire me still to.
Do that. Yeah. And I findmyself wanting to ask,
(05:36):
but hesitating about the currentpolitical environment and what we are
seeing with these ICE raids.I just can't imagine ...
I know how it makes me feel and I don'tspecialize in the type of work that you
all do and I can only imagine seeing this.
So I guess I'll ask all of you,
(05:58):
what does it mean to you personally to
be on the front lines ofensuring and protecting our
civil rights and what exactly doesthat mean? We have civil rights.
So Crist, maybe I'll just throwthis at you. What do you think?
What are our civil rights and why isit important to protect and fight for
(06:20):
those?
Well, civil rights ispretty much all we have.
That's what protects usagainst the government.
And you see like rightnow with these ICE raids,
a complete disregard for humanity,
like just what we saw theother day, a lady scared,
driving away and canjust be shot like that.
And then what's going tohappen to these ICE officers?
(06:42):
It's like they're pretty much,
everyone's going to throwtheir hands up and like, "Okay,
this was fine shoot." And then you seethe power behind it just to be able to
call her a terrorist and to be able tocall her all kinds of things as opposed
to a human and as opposed to a mother. And
there's a big power structure againstus as people and it's like people
(07:04):
like Ciara and Omeed andme, the force between that.
And so it does,
it feels empowering. It alsofeels frustrating because a lot of the times things
don't change fast enough, at least for me,
change does come slow and incrementallyand you kind of want things to
change a lot quicker. Andespecially in this situation,
(07:26):
like how do we stop ICEfrom violating people's,
not just civil rights,but also human rights.
So that can be very frustrating as well.
Yeah. Again, I digress. I won'tspend too much time on it.
Maybe at the end we can talk about quoteabsolute immunity that the government
is professing that these ICE agentshold and the absurdity of that.
(07:49):
It's outrageous.
Yeah.
It's outrageous. But one of thethings, Crist, that you just said,
it brings me back. Thelast trial that I did,
I was starting my opening by quoting,
"We hold these truths to be self-evident."And it goes right to what you were
saying about humanrights and civil rights,
(08:10):
but our forefounders enshrinedin our constitution had the
wisdom, these inalienablerights. I just found it profound.
So kudos to you and your teamprotecting human rights and civil
rights. And I like thatquote. And it's so good.
That we hold these truths to beself-evident. And I believe it starts off,
(08:32):
we the people. Yeah. And a lotof the times we forget that,
especially in a society whereit's always the I before the we.
So we do forget that we area country, a collective,
and there's a lot of individualism thatwe hear and people not wanting to go
out on the limb for others.
Yeah. I love the endowed bytheir creator with certain
(08:56):
inalienable rights among them, life,liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
And it's so profoundfor me as a civil lawyer
that those rights were ...
The government is prohibitedfrom infringing on those rights.
And so when those rights aretaken in the civil context,
it just makes it profound forthe jury to now say, "Okay,
(09:20):
these rights have been taken and nowit's time to right a wrong." So I do love
that quote and I feel like Iuse it nine times out of 10.
Omeed, sorry for the delay.
Tell us a little bit about yourself andhow it is that you came to be a trial
lawyer.
For some reason or another, Ialways wanted to be a lawyer.
(09:41):
So I grew up pretty early knowingI wanted to do it. Maybe it was TV,
maybe it was a book thatI read, I'm not sure,
but I pursued the path kind ofstraight out of the gate and I
went to see you at the time thinkingthat I wanted to be an environmental
lawyer, something like theSierra Club or Earth Justice,
NCU as a great environmentalprogram. And pretty quickly,
(10:06):
and maybe this was just a presumptionthat I acted on and it wasn't right,
but what I thought was, "Boy,
these folks are working for 10years to get one river flowing at
five drops extra than the last 10 years."And I don't know if I can dedicate my
life to that. And so I, out of law school,
I went to a big firm to just pay offsome debt and get some good training
(10:29):
actually,
a big firm here in Denverbefore stumbling upon really
the civil rights path and Sadartha andQ who owned this firm and realizing
that what a path it was. And I relatedto it in so many ways growing up
as a brown boy in a nine elevenera, realizing, "Holy smokes,
(10:50):
these are those rights thatwere so imperative to me and so important to my own
life.
And here's an opportunitywith the skillset that I have to be able to help other
people experiencing the similarthings, not the same thing,
but I landed here and I don't know thatI would practice law any other way at
this point." I mean, I love it.
I feel the same way.
(11:11):
I don't think I could be doingany other type of legal work.
And I also went to see you thinking Iwas going to be an environmental lawyer,
but then pretty quicklyrealized, wait a minute,
and like you grew up watching law andorder in the practice. And I was like,
"Wait a minute.
So these people are getting paid to dothat because it just seemed like it was
so much fun." And then from there,I was sold hook, line and sinker.
(11:34):
So all right,
let's get into this casebecause both Sedartha and
John all agreed that youall were the team that
really the workhorse on this. So I'lltry to point questions to individuals,
but how did you guysdecide the division of
work in the case? Was there someonethat was sort of the lead on the case?
(11:58):
I don't think anybody was the lead,
but we actually had a really honestconversation amongst ourselves and with
ourselves right before trial about whatour strengths were, not weaknesses,
just what are our strengths.
And it became pretty clear that Cristis the most personable person on the
planet. So we wanted him to handle jurors,
(12:19):
difficult witnesses like experts,
just so that very quickly where thereneeded to be a rapport established,
what was the dog that we were going tosend out to establish that rapport that
was going to be Crist?And on the flip side,
we realized that Ciara is the mostorganized person and who can tell the
clearest story from scratch.And so she did our opening.
(12:41):
And I suppose the thinking was thatI can think quickly on my feet and
potentially nail and hammer things homeat the end. So I landed on closing,
but it was the choice I think that wemade. And I'll let the others chime in
kind of how they rememberthat conversation, but that was my memory of it.
(13:01):
Yeah. I would echo what Omeed said.
We definitely had to have that honestconversation about what our strengths
were. And I think at the outset,
it had been very much tossedup in a very different way,
but how it played out afterhaving that conversation,
I think it did play on all ofour strengths. Omeed in closing,
(13:21):
he also did the cross of Officer Ramos.
And so having a person who played a very
consistent role throughoutthe trial, then close it,
and he did a phenomenal job. Andthen Crist, Sam as Omeed said,
he's very personableand immediately likable.
And so he connects really wellwith people and did a great job
(13:46):
with the jury selection.
So Ciara, since we sort of haveyou on the stage, if you will,
talk to us a little bit about what yourthoughts were on the opening and not
just sort of what you wantedto accomplish in the opening,
but for maybe some of ouryounger listeners, newer lawyers,
what did you do to prepare? Did yourehearse? How did you actually go about,
(14:08):
once you knew you're doing theopening and highly publicized,
big trial, you're going tobe asking for lots of money,
sounds very intimidatingto a lot of people.
What'd you do to prepareyourself for that?
Well, long before the trial,
I had participated in atrial advocacy training.
And so through that, I was ableto learn how to do openings.
(14:32):
This was my first jurytrial, my first opening.
And so wanted to do a goodjob. I think as a team,
we all came together and talked aboutwhat our themes and our theories and what
we wanted to really highlightthroughout the trial.
And so weaving that in throughthe opening was very important.
And then obviously we wantedto establish credibility.
(14:53):
So we wanted to have the evidence thatwe knew was going to get in without
showing too much of our hand becausewe had a few things up our sleeves.
So really preparing and practicing,
I unfortunately lost myvoice the week before trial.
So I spent the whole weeknot really talking much,
(15:14):
but the two weeks or thefew days before the trial,
we met several times as a team. And sowent through the mock opening and got
feedback, revised, andthen washed runs for.
Repeat.
And what I would say about that is theway that it was laid out that opening,
organization behind itand all of the beats,
(15:36):
it just felt like perfect andit was so accessible for a jury.
They can consume that easily.
It was just broken downso plain and clearly,
and I just think it was just so effective.
Well, how much time did you havefor your opening? Were you limited?
I think we had 40 minutes,40 minutes per side,
(15:59):
and I didn't use the whole 40 minutes.So yeah, we had a lot of time.
The one real advantage I sensefrom this case is the story
is so compelling from the getgo just factually. You sit down,
you tell jurors like, "Let me tellyou what happened in this case.
This isn't a rear end car crash case.
This is a fascinatingon the edge of your seat
(16:21):
story." And Ciara, I want to ask you,
because I think I heard you saythat strategically you withheld
some really good facts from youropening with the thought being,
and I'm projecting here,
with the thought being that your casegets better in trial than the opening
(16:42):
statement, is that accurate andwas that strategic on your part?
Well, there were just some thingsthat we couldn't bring up in trial.
For example, Officer Ramospled guilty to a crime. Well,
that's impeachment evidence,
so we couldn't really bringthat in through the opening.
What we could do is say that ourclients were victims of a crime.
So we had talked about that. That hadcome up a little bit in voir dire too,
(17:05):
just because the story hadbeen pretty publicized.
So several jurors knewabout what had happened.
And then I think I heard onthe first part of the podcast,
the flashlight story,
we weren't highlighting thatin the opening by any means,
but it's certainly something that Omeedwas able to bring up in the closing.
(17:26):
And then just things like that. Thecase and the story is so relatable.
Anybody could be an innocent personcoming out of the bar early in their
20s. And so really justwithout saying it highlighted,
this happened to six people.
It could have been anyone in Denverand it could have been a lot worse.
Crist, talk to us a little bitabout your thoughts in voir dire.
(17:50):
Did you find that the panelwas really on your side?
What were your fears and what did youencounter when you actually did voir dire
here?
So we went in there with the strategyof finding liberal gun owners.
So basically that wasthe strategy going in.
And so what I was trying to do is toget information from the jury about what
(18:11):
they knew about guns, whatthey knew about gun safety.
And we did find a few thatdid know about gun safety and
just with the idea that if they'regoing to know about gun safety,
they're going to realize howincredibly reckless this officer was.
And so that was very important tohave them on there in that regard.
(18:33):
And then also, saying liberal,
we don't want anyone that islike completely pro- police,
but I don't think this was ananti-police case because I think this was
more about holding someone accountable.
So it wasn't necessarily I was lookingfor someone that is anti-police,
(18:53):
but anyone can be, like Ciarawas just saying a second ago,
anyone can be in that position comingout of the club and then you have a
reckless officer shooting into a crowd.So that was kind of the
analysis that I was going off of.
And maybe this is aquestion for you, Omeed.
Was this a lack of trainingissue or how did it
(19:15):
come to be?
So sort of assuming thatreputable use of force experts
say, don't fire into a crowd, don'tfire, know what's behind you, et cetera.
So was this a lack of training?Was this a rogue officer?
What was the theme as it relatesto those concepts at trial?
Throughout trial and in closing, we triedto point to every bucket of evidence.
(19:40):
And so training was one component.
We said it was hard to say thathe wasn't trained on this topic.
Basically what we focusedon was policies. I mean,
training aside what was most clearthat the policy said don't do this.
And I don't even have to get into thenitty gritty of what you discussed in the
academy or in field training abouthow these policies apply, et cetera.
(20:01):
Anybody can read this andunderstand that this isn't allowed.
But really we zoomed out and I thinkthis is maybe what was most persuasive to
the jurors was that this is commonsense, folks. Guns are dangerous.
And if you're going to wield a gun andwe're going to give you the power of a
badge and a gun to police our streets,
you need to use your common sense.And that's at the baseline.
(20:22):
We don't even need to look at policiesor training to figure that out.
And so I think a common themethroughout the case was just jurors,
we want you to assess,
is this the type of policing thatyou want just based on what you know?
Bring your own experiences intothis courtroom and ask yourself,
is this the kind ofdecisions that you want made?
And that ultimately proved to be apretty useful way of doing it because we
(20:42):
didn't have to get into detailedsubjects about what happened during the
simulations.
We could just ask jurors to use theirown everyday understanding of what to do.
So I have a question factually,
because my understanding isthat the video from the various
body cam and other video,
that it looked like thesuspect was trying to throw his
(21:06):
firearm away when he was shot or not.So I'm just kind of curious factually,
could someone explain,
was that clear what was going on or wasthere an argument to be made that that
suspect was going forhis gun and therefore
use of deadly force would bejustified irrespective of who's
(21:28):
behind the suspect?
Yeah. This became a topic in the casethat we kind of had to pivot as the case
went on. As a very basicfactual matter, it does appear,
if you watch the video in slow motionthat this person is taking a gun out of
their waistband and throwing it away,
not taking it out of theirwaistband to threaten the officers,
(21:49):
shoot at the officers or shoot into acrowd, but then became the question of,
okay,
assume that that's difficult to see orto comprehend in the moment. What now?
And we sort of attacked that bigissue in a couple different ways.
The first was that apparently the jurorsagreed with this evidence was that
this particular officer,Officer Ramos, shot very, very,
(22:12):
very late in the sequence. He shotafter this person had drawn a gun,
thrown it away,
and was in fact already falling on theground. And so that's problem number one,
is that we're not really even askingthis officer whether he thought he was
brandishing a weapon in the momentthat he pulled it out of his pocket,
because that's not when theofficer shot. The second one,
(22:34):
this was the big pivot.The second one was, okay,
let's assume a world where you thinka person is actually drawing a gun,
but there's a crowd behind him.What do we want our officers to do?
And we conceded to the jury that theremight be the difficult case someday
down the line where a person isactively shooting into a crowd or
(22:57):
at police officers and an officer needsto stop the threat and the officer needs
to accept the fact that theirbullets might hit the target,
really an active shooter, and alsomight hit the people in the background.
That might be a case out there,but that wasn't this case. Really,
in closing,
(23:18):
we said something to the effect ofthis is not columbine because their
expert tried to make it like columbine.
He even used the word"Columbine." We said,
"This is not Columbine." Yeah,
and we even said something to the effectthat an officer can't be the first
person to shoot into a crowd.
(23:39):
There needs to be some other strategies,
some other tactics deployed before anofficer is the first person to shoot into
a crowd and say, "Ah, itwas okay for me to do that.
That can't be the resultthat we're okay with.
" So this case was not the mostdifficult case on the planet,
which at some point will present itselfand some other brilliant litigators I'm
(24:01):
sure will figure out how to deal with it.
So, and again, factually,because you reminded me,
was there another policeofficer that had a more ...
Didn't have an angle where there was noone behind the suspect who had fired at
the suspect first and then OfficerRamos then with a different
unsafe angle fired after that officer.
(24:23):
Is that factually what happened?
Yes. There were two other officers whofired with the brick back wall as their
backdrop and then Officer Ramos whofired with the crowd of people in his
backdrop.
See, to me, that's such a complicated ...
Because that sort of answered my otherquestion of you can't really argue that
the police officers shouldn't have ...
(24:44):
That the fact that the suspect wasthrowing the gun away meant no one should
have fired because you've got twoofficers that had a clear line of
sight that did fire.
And I'm assuming you weren't criticalof those officers firing at the
suspect. It was Officer Ramos'firing with the backdrop.
Do I have that factually correct?
(25:07):
Our lawsuit was mostly against OfficerRamos because only his bullets could have
injured the six people in the background,
and so it didn't make sense for usto be critical of the officers who
shot Mr. Waddy.
Certainly there are some critiques thatjust wasn't the focus of our client's
case.
(25:28):
Yeah. And it felt like more of a sideissue to even involve the other officers.
And the defense actually tried.
They were trying to pin it on the otherofficers and it seemed a bit ridiculous
when they were saying one of the officersthat was dead in front of him could
have somehow fired all theway to the right of them.
(25:49):
And I think one of the best lines camefrom Omeed when they were trying to pin
it on his wife.
And Omeed asked thedefendant, he was like,
"Does your wife know you're out heresaying all this about her about me?
" And I think that was one of thebest lines of the trial. So yeah,
he was trying to pin it oneveryone, including his wife.
(26:12):
I'm not following. Wait, soRamos' wife was ... I got lost.
Yeah, I'll give you some background.
So Ramos was at thetime partnered with his
fiance,
then his fiance was also a policeofficer and on the scene that night
and a shooting officer.And so during the trial,
(26:34):
Officer Ramos' testimony was that one ofthe bullets or two of the bullets that
hit the bystanders couldhave come from his partner,
his fiance at the time.
He didn't call her to thestand to testify to that point.
She was not called at all at trial.
And so the question duringthe cross of Ramos was,
(26:57):
"Does your wife know that you're herepointing the finger at her saying that she
shot these people?
" And it did garner achuckle out of a few jurors
and some co-counsel.
Well, what was his answer to that?And did you know that that was ...
Was that a planned question ordid it just spur the moment?
(27:18):
That was not a planned question.And his answer, I believe,
was that him and his wife had actuallynot ever talked about anything related to
this case or his criminalconviction. So no, she didn't know.
It is such a fascinatingfactual scenario because
(27:38):
it strikes me that how youframed your case is so critically
important to the successthat you received.
And just to remind our listeners,this was what, 20 million.
I mean,
and I do want to ask you questionsabout your ask and the punitive damage
component of it, but the overallverdict was like $20 million plus,
(27:59):
is that right?
It was 19.75 million.
So how did you, Crist,no focus groups here,
but was it obvious that giventhe facts that I've heard
displayed here, thatthe rule, if you will,
the rule you never violate is youdon't fire when there's people
(28:21):
behind. And was it intentional,A, did I get that rule right?
And B,
was the intent to create the simplestrule that was violated here to make it
as simple as you could for the jury?
Yeah, agreed.
And that is a basic rule that you don'tfire when there's people behind target.
You're supposed to know yourtarget, and that is a basic rule.
(28:42):
And I think that was very easyfor the jury to understand.
And when they're going back to deliberate,
that's just a basic rulethat they can follow.
And the case pretty muchboiled down to that.
It didn't matter like what theywere trying to throw into the pop.
It's the basic sense that you have toknow your target and know what's behind
your target.
(29:05):
Who crossed their use of force? Omeed,
was that you crossing theperson who referenced Columbine,
their use of force expert?
No, it was Ciara and ourco-counsel, Tony Biorst,
who represented two of the six victims.
So Ciara, what the defendant'suse of force expert,
did they concede the rule that you don'tfire when there are people behind or
(29:28):
did they try to tap dance around that?
They tap danced around it quite a bit.
This is the expert that triedto liken the case to Columbine,
which for a Coloradocase and Colorado jurors,
I think that that was veryalarming to the jurors and lost
some credibility. Thefacts weren't the same.
(29:51):
And so the expert tried to likenit to a Columbine situation,
which it just wasn't,
but he wouldn't concede the officeOfficer Ramos did anything wrong.
And I think that that's where theexperts really came into play.
We had our own policing expert,
but we also had an expert that didthe ballistics and really did a great
(30:12):
job of explaining the ballistics.
So while their use of force expertwouldn't acknowledge that you can't shoot
into a crowd,
the common sense really came intoplay and the jurors used that
common sense. And thepolice testimony also was,
even though not designatedas expert testimony,
(30:34):
the other officers who were therewho testified that you wouldn't shoot
into a crowd or you have to know yourbackdrop really played a critical role and
I think really hurt the credibilityof the expert who simply would not
acknowledge that this was a bad shoot.
So what I'm hearing you say,which sounds really important,
is that your theme was youdon't shoot into a crowd,
(30:58):
essentially, know your backdrop. Andthrough every witness that testified,
you were able to get support for thattheme and raise it every single time.
Basically every witness in thecase testified. Is that right?
Absolutely.
The first nine words out of my mouthin opening is you do not shoot into a
crowd. You do not shoot intoa crowd. It's common sense.
(31:19):
It's basic police practices.
And we expect our trainedpolice officers to know this.
We expect any person whoowns and uses a gun to know
this and to not shoot into a crowd.
Did one of you all cross-examineOfficer Ramos at trial?
That's Omeed. I did, yeah.
So Omeed,
(31:40):
what did Officer Ramos say whenconfronted with that rule, if you will?
Is it to say, "Well, yeah, that's a rule,
but there's always exceptions,"something like that?
He did. Yeah.
The testimony to synthesize it wasthat that rule doesn't always apply
to police officers.
And that's one of those answers thatyou get and you just let it sit.
(32:03):
You don't dig into it and try to eattoo much off of it. You just let it sit.
It didn't match up with what virtuallyevery other witness was saying.
That type of testimony tosort of deny the obvious was a
common theme in his testimony.
And I was often facedwith the challenge of,
(32:24):
do I get one more question inright now and sort of bite at this?
And I tried to exercise restraint andjust let the outrageous statements float
because there were several.
I think another one of the questionsthat you all covered on the last podcast,
which was really a highlightfor me was asking him,
"What's the worst backdrop than acrowd of people? " And he said, "Well,
there could be senators, presidents,and very important people.
(32:47):
" And in closing, I getto say, according to him,
these six people seated behindme are not senators, presidents,
are very important people.
And there were a lot of opportunitieslike that where you got this sort of,
he really just will not admitthe easy answer and that's okay.
The jury will see right through it.
(33:08):
There was a temptation often totry to really hammer things home,
but it was just, I mean, he kindof made the case for us at times.
And I think an important part was thejury. None of them are presidents,
senators, and so- called important people.
So that means they can get shot too.
And Omit,
I'm putting myself in your shoesand imagining the restraint
(33:31):
and imagining what would be going throughmy mind when you're given an answer
like that.
And was it obvious to youwhen that answer was given
that it would have been worse if therewere presidents or what have you behind
it? Did you ask any follow upor did you just let it sit?
(33:52):
Talk to us a little bit aboutwhat was going through your brain.
At that very moment,
when you get this gift of an answerthat you could not have contemplated,
that that was going to be the response.What was your thought process?
Yeah, I had read a book. I hadn'tattended a conference like Ciara. Ciara,
that was Anita conference or?
Yeah, I attended Anita.
(34:13):
Would you recommend thatresource to everyone out there?
Yeah, it was great. I learned a lot.
I got to learn from a lot ofreally skilled trial attorneys.
I did the one that was here inDenver and it was there for a week,
pick up on a lot of things thatyou can improve on and then
really you put those skills intopractice. So I would highly recommend it,
(34:36):
particularly for peoplewho are a little bit ...
I'm a little bit more reservedand shy in my personal life.
So it did really wonders for myconfidence going into a trial setting.
And if conferences aren't your jam,
I had read a book calledWinning It Cross by Shane Reed.
And I'm also sort of a nerd when itcomes to trials that are out there in the
(34:58):
world.
I try to watch a lot of media like thispodcast to sort of stay up to date on
who's doing some great lawyering out thereand what can we learn and that it's a
skill. It's something that you haveto develop. And in that moment,
what was coming to my mind was, "Yeah,this is an outrageous statement.
This is what Shane Reidcalls an outrageous statement and you need to let this
(35:18):
one fly." And so I think a lot oftimes some of the stuff you learn isn't
intuitive. And I think people justassume that good trial lawyers,
like the two who are with me todayjust become good trial lawyers because
they're born with it,
but a lot of the stuff is skills thatyou have to learn and master. And I
think in that moment itwas a good test. Okay,
(35:40):
here's an opportunity tomake the wrong choice,
the tactically wrongchoice or the right one.
And I was lucky enough to makethe right one in that moment.
And I know we didn't askany follow up. In fact,
I think I moved to the next chapter,
which was about like where hegrew up or something like that.
Yeah. Kudos to you. I canthink back to my younger self.
(36:01):
I can still remember one of the firsttrials I did as a civil trial lawyer was
after I was a prosecutor for five yearsand then did a civil trial and it was a
med mal trial.
And I just beat up this defense expertso much that I'm confident we lost the
case because of it.
And so you come back to yoursituation where you're given this
(36:21):
gift and just the wisdomto recognize that gift in
the moment and not try to win becauseI feel like our natural instincts,
whenever we're even arguing withour spouse or whatever, it's like,
I need to win this argument,
but to let jurors reach their ownconclusion without shoving it down their
(36:41):
throats,
I feel like is the biggest piece of wisdomthat I've come to in recent years as
a trial lawyer is nobody wants to be toldwhat to think. And so you have to let
them reach that own conclusion and youget a gift like that and you just let it
sit and you move on to your nextchapter of cross shows much,
much, much wisdom. So kudos to you.
(37:03):
Talk to us a little bit about how youwent about structuring your cross.
You mentioned chapters.
Did you have various chapters thatyou could sort of pivot on the fly
depending on how various answers went?Just talk to our younger listeners,
if you will, about how you went aboutpreparing your cross-examinations.
(37:24):
Yeah. The advice that I got,which was very good advice,
was that each chapterneeds to have a point.
And that point shouldbe as basic as possible.
And really as I was preparing the cross,
I would have a point that Ineeded to make. For instance,
training requires knowingyour backdrop and beyond.
Then as I was going throughpreparing the cross,
(37:46):
the points became actually narrower andnarrower and would separate often into
their own chapters.
And so a chapter on know your targetand beyond turned actually into two
chapters. One was about know your target,
and the second one was aboutknow it's beyond. And so really,
I think as I was preparing the cross,
the big takeaway that I had wasthat it can take 25 minutes,
(38:09):
if it needs to, to justestablish a really basic point.
You're not going to win the case in onechapter of your cross. You're going to
establish one piece. And really thatwas the goal, was to take this witness,
this defendant, and ateach stage of his cross,
just prove one thing that's helpfulto our case or destroys his.
And so we tried to be pretty methodicalas we were going through the process.
(38:33):
And I think that was really whatour entire trial team did. I mean,
we were scheduled to go for two weeksand I think the trial was done in like
nine or 10 days because all of us
pretty effectively managed to justboil this thing down to what we needed.
Let's not start quibbling with thesewitnesses in a way that's going to make us
lose credibility.
Let's just get right down to itand then ask the jury to decide.
(38:56):
So that was our strategy.
I love that.
And I love what you saidthat every chapter has to have a point and that as you
were preparing, those pointsbecame narrower and narrower.
Did you as a team engagein any role playing
where you would practice your cross andothers would sort of assume the role?
(39:17):
Just really wonderingfor younger listeners,
what sort of practicaltrial prep advice for what
you all did in this trial?
And I'll throw this out to the group andmaybe I'll ask each one of you as far
from a trial preparation standpoint,
what really worked that youlearned in this case? And Crist,
(39:38):
I'll start with you.
What was the one thing as far astrial prep that you found was very
effective here?
So as far as preparing for our client,
what I wanted to do was to get hisemotional story out to the jury.
I wanted the jury to see himas a person before they saw
(39:59):
him as a victim. So Iwalked him through his life,
what he was doing.
And there was a funny story about likewhat happened to him right before he was
shot, where he's walking up on a girland then he's about to talk to her,
he sees her, he gets scared.
And if he didn't get scaredand started talking to her,
(40:20):
he probably wouldn't have gotten,wouldn't have been in the line of fire.
But we had to bring that out becauseagain, that's a very human emotion.
Walking up on a girl, you see her andyou get fearful and you walk away.
So that's very humid.
So I wanted to bring that part outand then also show his injuries
and what was going on before and afterhe was shot. And then that was like the
(40:42):
same with the doctor. So Ialso had to cross the doctor.
I didn't want him to startspouting any kind of medical
information as to show how smart he was.
I just wanted to keep it very simple justto show this is not my client's doctor
and that the doctor was paid by defendantRamos. So again, to keep it simple,
(41:04):
and I didn't want to ask him too manythings that I didn't know the answer to
because he starts talkingabout medical information.
I'm not going to know anything about that.
And then I'm looking at the jury like,
and then this guy is seeminglike a remarkable person.
And the doctor was very, verynice. He was a very good person,
so I didn't want to like pokehim too much. So I was like,
(41:26):
"I have to temper myself to come acrosslike that. " So those are some of the
things that I picked up. Yeah.
And that was something youhad contemplated in advance.
So you sort of knew when you'recross examining the defense doctor,
"I don't want to poke this bear.I know what I want to accomplish.
I want to get in, get out.
" And you had prepared that in advanceand that's something that you found to be
(41:46):
effective.
Yeah.
And I didn't know how appealing he wasgoing to be because he came across as
someone that I would listento and that I would like.
So I didn't want to be annoyingand the jury may like him,
so I don't want to interrupt that.
So just wanted to keep it basic and civil.
Civil that you mentioned civil,
(42:08):
how important is it in thisprofession to in front of the
jury be civil that you've seen, Crist?
I think it's important because I thinkagain, presentation is very important.
Character and personality is important.And again, that goes back to like,
we were talking about politics earlier.
(42:29):
Presentation and personalityis very important.
So if you're going to come across likea jerk to someone that people like,
again,
that's a reflection on you and it's areflection on you not reading the room.
So that's what I was lookingat him and I was like, "Okay,
this is a very nice guy and if I comeacross like a bulldog coming at him,
(42:50):
then it's going to make me look foolish.
It's going to make him look great andthen it's going to hurt our clients as.
Well." Wow. Ciara,
what's the one thing in your trialprep in this trial did you think really
worked well?
I think collaboration. This isthe first time Omeed, Crist,
and I have gone to trial withSiddhartha and John and the
(43:11):
attorneys on the case.
And so the collaboration and the trialexperience with one another was really
great. We worked well together,but we worked differently.
And so really getting to figure outdifferent people's styles and how to make
it work together.
There were several times in the weeksleading up that Omeed would come in and
work out part of his cross.
(43:32):
And I was Officer Ramos more than I wasCiara in those weeks leading up to the
trial. The story's easy totell. They're very great people
and a terrible thing happened to them.
They were people out celebratingan anniversary, a birthday.
One of our clients who got shotwas very endearing and going up
(43:54):
to a girl and then getting scared.
Another person who gotshot was calling his
sister to make sure that she took hismom to church the next day because that's
something that he did every Sunday.These are real people with real families.
And so telling that story was very easy.
So it didn't take as much preparationbecause when you're doing a direct,
(44:18):
you're not the star, the personyou're doing the direct is the star.
And so it was really easy toimplement that. But I think overall,
I think the collaboration is what I tookaway from it and just being there to
bounce ideas off of each other.
We're at the office until 3:00AM working out the closing and
(44:40):
starting it. "Okay, oh, I don'treally quite like that piece of it.
Let's revise it here. Okay,
now let's put this into reallyperspective for the jury and I don't
mean then delivered it excellently.
"So it was a really funtrial You get a taste of it,
you want to keep doing it, butit was great for our clients too,
(45:01):
obviously with the outcome.
Yeah. Omeed,
what was the one piece of the trialpreparation piece that you think
was highly effective here?
I think giving yourself enough time andif you have the privilege of being at a
fantastic law firm, whenit's trial prep time,
people tend to take other thingsoff your plate so you can focus.
(45:25):
And that became critical both withrespect to the facts and the law.
I can think of dozens of times duringthe case when a factual piece would come
up that they thought was important. Andas our entire team, we knew, no, no, no,
we knew how to deal with that. And theonly way, and the same with the law.
In fact,
I can think of a particular disputeabout a effective date of a particular
(45:49):
statute that they thought they hadus on and we said," No, no, no.
We've looked into this. It appliesand it applies to this case.
"And the only way that thoselittle tidbits which become so
important during a trial come to yourmind is that you've given yourself enough
time. It's like preparing for adepo. If you start the night before,
(46:10):
you just don't have enough time tolet it sink in and to develop more
complex thoughts about it and tosort of shift your own understanding.
So I think one thing we did really wellwas everybody was just sitting with
it, listening to it, feeling it,sort of trying to figure out,
what am I missing? What are myblind spots? How can I pivot?
(46:31):
And I think we did anexcellent job of that. So time,
you just got to set it aside andjust got to do it. There's no ...
I think Abraham Lincoln as a quote,
you can't ignore the drudgeriesof the law is something like it.
You got to sit with it. There'snothing else you can do,
but just sit with it for a longtime and it'll come to you.
What you're saying really lands becausethere's just periods of this job that
(46:53):
are a grind.
And when you look at a trial like youall did and someone comes in and looks at
how seamless it was, how the outcome,
how much fun it lookedlike being in trial,
they see the top of the mountain andthey don't see the climb that it took to
get there and get ready.
So that's really lands with me because Ifeel like there's just times in the ...
(47:15):
It's almost like you have toembrace the suck at times,
whatever it is and it's setaside time and do the grind.
So I really appreciateyour perspective on that,
of setting aside time,
making sure that things comeup legally and factually
you're able to hit those things head on.
(47:37):
Talk to me a little bit in our ...
We got about a few minutes left here.I'm curious about the punitive damage
component of this. So, and Omi,
did you do both closings or did you dofirst closing and then one of the other
lawyers did the rebuttal close?
I did closing and rebuttal.
Okay. How did you approach ...
(47:57):
Because I'm assuming that the punitivedamage component consumed a lot of your
thought about how to present thatand how to argue that with the jury.
What did you come up with andwhat was your strategy with that?
Yeah, the strategy was actuallyfairly straightforward.
There had been this criminal convictionthat was percolating throughout the
entire case and wouldcome up at various times.
(48:18):
And one tact that they tookto minimize the meaning
of that criminal conviction wasthat it didn't come with jail time.
It wasn't a felony. Itwas a sweetheart deal.
He had to take that dealbasically because it was so good.
That's why he pled guilty, not becausehe was actually guilty of the crime.
That was their approach.
(48:39):
And so we flipped that on its head forpunitive damages. We said," Look folks,
if you're as enraged as we are,here's what you should note.
This guy has never been punished forthis conduct. He told you outright,
I got a sweetheart dealwhen it came to the crime.
"So we said," Now's your opportunity.
You're the only people who have theopportunity as of today to punish this
(49:00):
defendant for that conduct.And unfortunately,
the way you do it in thissetting is through money.
"And so really all we said was takewhatever compensatory damages you award
and just double it.
Just add another double on top topunish him in a way that he's never been
punished. So our strategywasn't that complicated.
And I think actually the work toget punitive damages comes long
(49:24):
before the request itself.
It's got to sit on a goodfoundation of these jurors are angry
maybe. This is beyond just liability.
This is they are frustrated withboth the defendant and his conduct.
And so I think all of the pieces thatwe had set up throughout the trial,
including those outrageousstatements that we talked about,
(49:47):
sort of led into that final request. Andthat's the only way that it's credible.
If you've got a jury that's thinking thisis a fifty fifty case and I'm up there
saying," Punish him, we've lost.It's not going to happen.
"So I think the work to get therewas long before the actual ask.
Can you talk to us just for a littlebit about your preparation for your
(50:08):
closings since you did bothclosings, did you think,
did you plan out ahead what you expectedto do in your rebuttal close and what
did you do to prepare andplan for your first close?
Yeah, this was with the help of our team.
I guess the first thingwas throughout the trial,
I was drafting an outline as bigpieces of evidence would come in and
(50:31):
testimony would come in, theoutline was already started.
And then I'd say about two days beforewhen it became clear that we were going
to close on X day,
the outline started to turn intosomething a little more clear.
And then really the night beforewe were to deliver closings,
we spent from the end of trial thatday until 3:00 AM with the entire
(50:52):
team preparing a presentationand also just until
my eyes were about to fall asleepand I was about to just pass out
on the concrete floor of our office,
just saying things over and over andover until they came out to the picture
that we were trying to capture. And evenI drove home that night and there's a
(51:14):
light right before my house thatsometimes doesn't turn green.
And I sat at that light not realizingthat I was sitting at that light at red
light that was never going to turngreen for 15 minutes saying part of
the closing out loud before realizing, oh,
I have to run this to get home or elseI'm going to be here until trial the next
(51:36):
day. And then in terms of organizing it,
we just followed thejury instructions.That's ultimately the decision that
jurors need to make. And if you'representing it in any other way,
I think we would all posit that you'redoing it wrong because they need a
roadmap.
And so we just roadmapped them andhighlighted the evidence for each of the
elements that they needed to decide andgot them there and tried to stay awake
(51:59):
during the process.
And that was amazing because it wastill like three in the morning and then
eight in the morning he's giving thatclosing and it was an amazing closing.
So the judge had to admonish someone inthe back because they made noise after
it. What? That was great because someonewas like, woo, in the background-.
(52:20):
Wait, wait. I got to hear this story.I've never heard of such a thing.
So tell us the story. The judge hadto admonish a juror for making noise?
Yeah. So someone had made a noise inthe background as soon as it was done.
It felt like a mic drop situation.And so there was someone in the crowd,
it was like, woo. And then thejudge got upset and was like,
(52:42):
"We will not have that in the courtroom."Wow. It was truly a great closing.
It reminded me of, I don't know, haveyou seen the movie JFK? Of course. Yeah.
So that closing that Kevin Costnergave, it was kind of like that,
not as emotional and weactually did win unlike
him. It was very well put together.
(53:03):
Though.
Am I stating the obvious that it suresounds like you all had an immense amount
of fun trying this case?
Yeah, it was challenging. The injuriesin this case were really, it was awful.
Some of the evidence thatcame in was horrible,
but obviously those aren't our injuries.We can do our best to sympathize,
but we can't really empathize becausenone of us have been there and we did have
(53:28):
fun doing the prep work, butit did feel very weighty.
It did feel, I don't know howyou all felt after the trial,
but it certainly felt like, "Holy smokes,
what did I just go through?" Thatwas a lot. It was a lot. Yeah.
I think as a lawyer, wecan see that it's fun,
but we also take on theweight of our clients.
(53:51):
We are advocating and telling avery personal story for these people
who have suffered immensely andtheir lives are forever changed.
They can no longer go to thebars or to the grocery store,
couldn't leave their housefor a period of time.
And so recognizing this veryreal and personal harm and
taking and telling a jurythis story, it was fun,
(54:14):
but it was a lot and it feltlike a real responsibility.
But I think that we set aside thetime and we put in the time to
really make sure that we were doingeverything that we could to tell it in the
best way. And I think that thatworked out to our client's benefit.
And I think this trial was like a greatexample of like why we became civil
(54:36):
rights lawyers.
It definitely felt like we were able tolike restore our clients like dignity.
Wow.
And it did feel like theywere relieved in a sense.
And to me, that made a lotof the hard work worth it.
Yeah. I probably used the wrongword fun. It's maybe rewarding.
(54:56):
In the hindsight, you putin all of this effort,
you get a great resultfor truly just clients
that have gone throughsomething that, like you said,
none of us can imaginethe sense of satisfaction
must just be immense.
And kudos to you all forsuch an amazing result.
(55:19):
And I want to thank you all for takingtime out of your very busy lives and
professional careers to talkwith us. So Crist, Ciara, Omeed,
thank you so much for appearing on thisprogram and congratulations to you and
your clients for a trulyjust result. Thank you.
Thank you so much for having us.
(55:39):
And good to finally meet you.Yeah, it's great to meet you too.
To our listeners, thankyou for listening in again.
We'll be back next time with anotherepisode of the Colorado Trial Lawyer
Connection podcast where we love to talkwith trial lawyers about what they do,
what worked, what didn't work,
and bring some of those real lifeColorado trial lawyer stories to life.
(55:59):
So we'll see you all, hear you allnext time. Thanks for listening.
Thank you for joining us.
We hope you've gained valuable insightsand inspiration from today's courtroom
warriors, and thank youfor being in the arena.
Make sure to subscribe and join us nexttime as we continue to dissect real
cases and learn fromColorado's top trial lawyers.
Our mission is to empowerour legal community,
(56:21):
helping us to become better trial lawyersto effectively represent our clients.
Keep your connection to Colorado'sbest trial lawyers alive at
www.thectlc.com.
Welcome to the ColoradoTrial Lawyer Connection,
where Colorado trial lawyers shareinsights from their latest cases. Join me,
Keith Fuicelli, as we uncoverthe stories, strategies,
and lessons from recent Colorado trialsto help you and your clients achieve
justice in the courtroom. Thepursuit of justice starts now.
(00:21):
Howdy everyone,
and welcome back to part two of atwo-part episode on the Colorado
Trial Lawyer Connection Podcast,
where we're going to talk withthe main trial team on the case
involving Officer Ramos. Andthis, of course, as a recap,
is the case in which Officer Ramosfired multiple shots at an individual.
(00:45):
I think maybe he hit the individual,
but he hit lots of people thatwere behind the individual,
resulted in a spectacularverdict in Denver County.
And we are fortunate today tohave who by all accounts are the
main workhorse, the main trial team,
the main brains behind thisamazing result. So with that,
(01:07):
I would love to welcome CristWhitney, Ciara Anderson,
and Omeed Azmoudeh, hope I got thatright, to the podcast. Welcome everyone.
Thanks for having us. Hi.
Thanks for having us.
So Crist, why don't we start with you.
Tell us a little bit about yourselfand how it is that you became a trial
lawyer.
Well, I'm originally from NewJersey. I came to Colorado,
(01:31):
I want to say around 2001. I wasa music artist for a long time.
Wow. And then I startedwriting. I wrote a couple books.
I went back to school becauseI wanted to be a better writer.
And while I was there, Istarted studying history,
polysci.
And then I met a professor whosuggested after writing a brief
(01:55):
about the water rights or the StandingRock Tribe suggested I go to law school.
Wow.
So then I applied andfortunately I got in.
I always wanted to do civil rights law,
considering a lot of policebrutality that the black
community sees on a regular basis.
So that's something that inspiredme and pushed me through law school.
(02:18):
Once I got out of law school,
I met with the heads of the firm hereat Rathod Muhammad Bay and luckily was
asked to join the team.And now I'm here now.
What a great firm youlanded with. Great story.
I agree.
So I want to go back to the music piecebecause I was in a band for 20 years.
What'd you play?
(02:39):
I actually was a hip hop artist.
Okay.
So I was an MC.
All right. That's fantastic.
I've recorded over maybea hundred or so songs.
Wow. And I sometimes wonder if,this is just me thinking out loud.
There's the Lady Gaga song.It's all about the applause.
And I wonder if people that are in bands,
(03:00):
like we want to be praised onthis like subconscious level.
We want to be on stage. Wewant the crowd to applaud.
And so we find ourselves in the courtroomwhere I guess the next best thing,
but I digress. So that's fascinatingstory. Ciara, what about you?
Did you always know youwanted to do trial work?
If you had asked me 10 years ago even,
(03:23):
I wouldn't have even knownthat I wanted to be a lawyer.
I had always had a plan to be apsychologist and a substance abuse
and work with people whostruggled with addiction.
And then after undergraduate,
I didn't get into the graduate programthat I had wanted and I didn't want to
move back to Nashville. I'moriginally from Tennessee.
(03:44):
So I moved to Colorado with no money,
no plan and no idea what the worldhad in store. And it worked out,
thank goodness.
I got a job at a law firm and wasgoing back and forth between Teach for
America or the LSAT.
And I did a little bit better on theLSAT than I did for the Teach for America
application. Shortly aftergetting into law school,
(04:07):
I did the DU civil rights clinic for acouple of years and that's my first year
doing that. I worked on an excessiveforce case for a little girl
and was able to resolve that and thenmoved on and was able to work on a case
involving solitary confinementfor a man. And so that really,
I grew up knowing what it's liketo not have your voice heard in a
(04:28):
courtroom.
And so really getting totake that client-centered approach and advocate for our
clients is really what makes mewant to be a trial lawyer and
really fuels my.
Being a trial lawyer.
And it sounds like dealing withthe solitary confinement case,
did that have a profoundimpact on your sort of
(04:50):
core being on how you representfolks that your firm represents?
Yeah, absolutely. Working on that case,
I have a tattoo that says human becauseI think so frequently we forget that we
as attorneys are human, butalso our clients are very human.
And so just rememberingthat very human aspect.
And I have that tattoo in largepart because of this client and that
(05:14):
experience, but it's a veryrewarding clientele. I mean,
we get to see people on theirworst days and hopefully bring
the better side or bringjustice to those worst days.
So definitely that early clientis somebody who continues to inspire me still to.
Do that. Yeah. And I findmyself wanting to ask,
(05:36):
but hesitating about the currentpolitical environment and what we are
seeing with these ICE raids.I just can't imagine ...
I know how it makes me feel and I don'tspecialize in the type of work that you
all do and I can only imagine seeing this.
So I guess I'll ask all of you,
(05:58):
what does it mean to you personally to
be on the front lines ofensuring and protecting our
civil rights and what exactly doesthat mean? We have civil rights.
So Crist, maybe I'll just throwthis at you. What do you think?
What are our civil rights and why isit important to protect and fight for
(06:20):
those?
Well, civil rights ispretty much all we have.
That's what protects usagainst the government.
And you see like rightnow with these ICE raids,
a complete disregard for humanity,
like just what we saw theother day, a lady scared,
driving away and canjust be shot like that.
And then what's going tohappen to these ICE officers?
(06:42):
It's like they're pretty much,
everyone's going to throwtheir hands up and like, "Okay,
this was fine shoot." And then you seethe power behind it just to be able to
call her a terrorist and to be able tocall her all kinds of things as opposed
to a human and as opposed to a mother. And
there's a big power structure againstus as people and it's like people
(07:04):
like Ciara and Omeed andme, the force between that.
And so it does,
it feels empowering. It alsofeels frustrating because a lot of the times things
don't change fast enough, at least for me,
change does come slow and incrementallyand you kind of want things to
change a lot quicker. Andespecially in this situation,
(07:26):
like how do we stop ICEfrom violating people's,
not just civil rights,but also human rights.
So that can be very frustrating as well.
Yeah. Again, I digress. I won'tspend too much time on it.
Maybe at the end we can talk about quoteabsolute immunity that the government
is professing that these ICE agentshold and the absurdity of that.
(07:49):
It's outrageous.
Yeah.
It's outrageous. But one of thethings, Crist, that you just said,
it brings me back. Thelast trial that I did,
I was starting my opening by quoting,
"We hold these truths to be self-evident."And it goes right to what you were
saying about humanrights and civil rights,
(08:10):
but our forefounders enshrinedin our constitution had the
wisdom, these inalienablerights. I just found it profound.
So kudos to you and your teamprotecting human rights and civil
rights. And I like thatquote. And it's so good.
That we hold these truths to beself-evident. And I believe it starts off,
(08:32):
we the people. Yeah. And a lotof the times we forget that,
especially in a society whereit's always the I before the we.
So we do forget that we area country, a collective,
and there's a lot of individualism thatwe hear and people not wanting to go
out on the limb for others.
Yeah. I love the endowed bytheir creator with certain
(08:56):
inalienable rights among them, life,liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
And it's so profoundfor me as a civil lawyer
that those rights were ...
The government is prohibitedfrom infringing on those rights.
And so when those rights aretaken in the civil context,
it just makes it profound forthe jury to now say, "Okay,
(09:20):
these rights have been taken and nowit's time to right a wrong." So I do love
that quote and I feel like Iuse it nine times out of 10.
Omeed, sorry for the delay.
Tell us a little bit about yourself andhow it is that you came to be a trial
lawyer.
For some reason or another, Ialways wanted to be a lawyer.
(09:41):
So I grew up pretty early knowingI wanted to do it. Maybe it was TV,
maybe it was a book thatI read, I'm not sure,
but I pursued the path kind ofstraight out of the gate and I
went to see you at the time thinkingthat I wanted to be an environmental
lawyer, something like theSierra Club or Earth Justice,
NCU as a great environmentalprogram. And pretty quickly,
(10:06):
and maybe this was just a presumptionthat I acted on and it wasn't right,
but what I thought was, "Boy,
these folks are working for 10years to get one river flowing at
five drops extra than the last 10 years."And I don't know if I can dedicate my
life to that. And so I, out of law school,
I went to a big firm to just pay offsome debt and get some good training
(10:29):
actually,
a big firm here in Denverbefore stumbling upon really
the civil rights path and Sadartha andQ who owned this firm and realizing
that what a path it was. And I relatedto it in so many ways growing up
as a brown boy in a nine elevenera, realizing, "Holy smokes,
(10:50):
these are those rights thatwere so imperative to me and so important to my own
life.
And here's an opportunitywith the skillset that I have to be able to help other
people experiencing the similarthings, not the same thing,
but I landed here and I don't know thatI would practice law any other way at
this point." I mean, I love it.
I feel the same way.
(11:11):
I don't think I could be doingany other type of legal work.
And I also went to see you thinking Iwas going to be an environmental lawyer,
but then pretty quicklyrealized, wait a minute,
and like you grew up watching law andorder in the practice. And I was like,
"Wait a minute.
So these people are getting paid to dothat because it just seemed like it was
so much fun." And then from there,I was sold hook, line and sinker.
(11:34):
So all right,
let's get into this casebecause both Sedartha and
John all agreed that youall were the team that
really the workhorse on this. So I'lltry to point questions to individuals,
but how did you guysdecide the division of
work in the case? Was there someonethat was sort of the lead on the case?
(11:58):
I don't think anybody was the lead,
but we actually had a really honestconversation amongst ourselves and with
ourselves right before trial about whatour strengths were, not weaknesses,
just what are our strengths.
And it became pretty clear that Cristis the most personable person on the
planet. So we wanted him to handle jurors,
(12:19):
difficult witnesses like experts,
just so that very quickly where thereneeded to be a rapport established,
what was the dog that we were going tosend out to establish that rapport that
was going to be Crist?And on the flip side,
we realized that Ciara is the mostorganized person and who can tell the
clearest story from scratch.And so she did our opening.
(12:41):
And I suppose the thinking was thatI can think quickly on my feet and
potentially nail and hammer things homeat the end. So I landed on closing,
but it was the choice I think that wemade. And I'll let the others chime in
kind of how they rememberthat conversation, but that was my memory of it.
(13:01):
Yeah. I would echo what Omeed said.
We definitely had to have that honestconversation about what our strengths
were. And I think at the outset,
it had been very much tossedup in a very different way,
but how it played out afterhaving that conversation,
I think it did play on all ofour strengths. Omeed in closing,
(13:21):
he also did the cross of Officer Ramos.
And so having a person who played a very
consistent role throughoutthe trial, then close it,
and he did a phenomenal job. Andthen Crist, Sam as Omeed said,
he's very personableand immediately likable.
And so he connects really wellwith people and did a great job
(13:46):
with the jury selection.
So Ciara, since we sort of haveyou on the stage, if you will,
talk to us a little bit about what yourthoughts were on the opening and not
just sort of what you wantedto accomplish in the opening,
but for maybe some of ouryounger listeners, newer lawyers,
what did you do to prepare? Did yourehearse? How did you actually go about,
(14:08):
once you knew you're doing theopening and highly publicized,
big trial, you're going tobe asking for lots of money,
sounds very intimidatingto a lot of people.
What'd you do to prepareyourself for that?
Well, long before the trial,
I had participated in atrial advocacy training.
And so through that, I was ableto learn how to do openings.
(14:32):
This was my first jurytrial, my first opening.
And so wanted to do a goodjob. I think as a team,
we all came together and talked aboutwhat our themes and our theories and what
we wanted to really highlightthroughout the trial.
And so weaving that in throughthe opening was very important.
And then obviously we wantedto establish credibility.
(14:53):
So we wanted to have the evidence thatwe knew was going to get in without
showing too much of our hand becausewe had a few things up our sleeves.
So really preparing and practicing,
I unfortunately lost myvoice the week before trial.
So I spent the whole weeknot really talking much,
(15:14):
but the two weeks or thefew days before the trial,
we met several times as a team. And sowent through the mock opening and got
feedback, revised, andthen washed runs for.
Repeat.
And what I would say about that is theway that it was laid out that opening,
organization behind itand all of the beats,
(15:36):
it just felt like perfect andit was so accessible for a jury.
They can consume that easily.
It was just broken downso plain and clearly,
and I just think it was just so effective.
Well, how much time did you havefor your opening? Were you limited?
I think we had 40 minutes,40 minutes per side,
(15:59):
and I didn't use the whole 40 minutes.So yeah, we had a lot of time.
The one real advantage I sensefrom this case is the story
is so compelling from the getgo just factually. You sit down,
you tell jurors like, "Let me tellyou what happened in this case.
This isn't a rear end car crash case.
This is a fascinatingon the edge of your seat
(16:21):
story." And Ciara, I want to ask you,
because I think I heard you saythat strategically you withheld
some really good facts from youropening with the thought being,
and I'm projecting here,
with the thought being that your casegets better in trial than the opening
(16:42):
statement, is that accurate andwas that strategic on your part?
Well, there were just some thingsthat we couldn't bring up in trial.
For example, Officer Ramospled guilty to a crime. Well,
that's impeachment evidence,
so we couldn't really bringthat in through the opening.
What we could do is say that ourclients were victims of a crime.
So we had talked about that. That hadcome up a little bit in voir dire too,
(17:05):
just because the story hadbeen pretty publicized.
So several jurors knewabout what had happened.
And then I think I heard onthe first part of the podcast,
the flashlight story,
we weren't highlighting thatin the opening by any means,
but it's certainly something that Omeedwas able to bring up in the closing.
(17:26):
And then just things like that. Thecase and the story is so relatable.
Anybody could be an innocent personcoming out of the bar early in their
20s. And so really justwithout saying it highlighted,
this happened to six people.
It could have been anyone in Denverand it could have been a lot worse.
Crist, talk to us a little bitabout your thoughts in voir dire.
(17:50):
Did you find that the panelwas really on your side?
What were your fears and what did youencounter when you actually did voir dire
here?
So we went in there with the strategyof finding liberal gun owners.
So basically that wasthe strategy going in.
And so what I was trying to do is toget information from the jury about what
(18:11):
they knew about guns, whatthey knew about gun safety.
And we did find a few thatdid know about gun safety and
just with the idea that if they'regoing to know about gun safety,
they're going to realize howincredibly reckless this officer was.
And so that was very important tohave them on there in that regard.
(18:33):
And then also, saying liberal,
we don't want anyone that islike completely pro- police,
but I don't think this was ananti-police case because I think this was
more about holding someone accountable.
So it wasn't necessarily I was lookingfor someone that is anti-police,
(18:53):
but anyone can be, like Ciarawas just saying a second ago,
anyone can be in that position comingout of the club and then you have a
reckless officer shooting into a crowd.So that was kind of the
analysis that I was going off of.
And maybe this is aquestion for you, Omeed.
Was this a lack of trainingissue or how did it
(19:15):
come to be?
So sort of assuming thatreputable use of force experts
say, don't fire into a crowd, don'tfire, know what's behind you, et cetera.
So was this a lack of training?Was this a rogue officer?
What was the theme as it relatesto those concepts at trial?
Throughout trial and in closing, we triedto point to every bucket of evidence.
(19:40):
And so training was one component.
We said it was hard to say thathe wasn't trained on this topic.
Basically what we focusedon was policies. I mean,
training aside what was most clearthat the policy said don't do this.
And I don't even have to get into thenitty gritty of what you discussed in the
academy or in field training abouthow these policies apply, et cetera.
(20:01):
Anybody can read this andunderstand that this isn't allowed.
But really we zoomed out and I thinkthis is maybe what was most persuasive to
the jurors was that this is commonsense, folks. Guns are dangerous.
And if you're going to wield a gun andwe're going to give you the power of a
badge and a gun to police our streets,
you need to use your common sense.And that's at the baseline.
(20:22):
We don't even need to look at policiesor training to figure that out.
And so I think a common themethroughout the case was just jurors,
we want you to assess,
is this the type of policing thatyou want just based on what you know?
Bring your own experiences intothis courtroom and ask yourself,
is this the kind ofdecisions that you want made?
And that ultimately proved to be apretty useful way of doing it because we
(20:42):
didn't have to get into detailedsubjects about what happened during the
simulations.
We could just ask jurors to use theirown everyday understanding of what to do.
So I have a question factually,
because my understanding isthat the video from the various
body cam and other video,
that it looked like thesuspect was trying to throw his
(21:06):
firearm away when he was shot or not.So I'm just kind of curious factually,
could someone explain,
was that clear what was going on or wasthere an argument to be made that that
suspect was going forhis gun and therefore
use of deadly force would bejustified irrespective of who's
(21:28):
behind the suspect?
Yeah. This became a topic in the casethat we kind of had to pivot as the case
went on. As a very basicfactual matter, it does appear,
if you watch the video in slow motionthat this person is taking a gun out of
their waistband and throwing it away,
not taking it out of theirwaistband to threaten the officers,
(21:49):
shoot at the officers or shoot into acrowd, but then became the question of,
okay,
assume that that's difficult to see orto comprehend in the moment. What now?
And we sort of attacked that bigissue in a couple different ways.
The first was that apparently the jurorsagreed with this evidence was that
this particular officer,Officer Ramos, shot very, very,
(22:12):
very late in the sequence. He shotafter this person had drawn a gun,
thrown it away,
and was in fact already falling on theground. And so that's problem number one,
is that we're not really even askingthis officer whether he thought he was
brandishing a weapon in the momentthat he pulled it out of his pocket,
because that's not when theofficer shot. The second one,
(22:34):
this was the big pivot.The second one was, okay,
let's assume a world where you thinka person is actually drawing a gun,
but there's a crowd behind him.What do we want our officers to do?
And we conceded to the jury that theremight be the difficult case someday
down the line where a person isactively shooting into a crowd or
(22:57):
at police officers and an officer needsto stop the threat and the officer needs
to accept the fact that theirbullets might hit the target,
really an active shooter, and alsomight hit the people in the background.
That might be a case out there,but that wasn't this case. Really,
in closing,
(23:18):
we said something to the effect ofthis is not columbine because their
expert tried to make it like columbine.
He even used the word"Columbine." We said,
"This is not Columbine." Yeah,
and we even said something to the effectthat an officer can't be the first
person to shoot into a crowd.
(23:39):
There needs to be some other strategies,
some other tactics deployed before anofficer is the first person to shoot into
a crowd and say, "Ah, itwas okay for me to do that.
That can't be the resultthat we're okay with.
" So this case was not the mostdifficult case on the planet,
which at some point will present itselfand some other brilliant litigators I'm
(24:01):
sure will figure out how to deal with it.
So, and again, factually,because you reminded me,
was there another policeofficer that had a more ...
Didn't have an angle where there was noone behind the suspect who had fired at
the suspect first and then OfficerRamos then with a different
unsafe angle fired after that officer.
(24:23):
Is that factually what happened?
Yes. There were two other officers whofired with the brick back wall as their
backdrop and then Officer Ramos whofired with the crowd of people in his
backdrop.
See, to me, that's such a complicated ...
Because that sort of answered my otherquestion of you can't really argue that
the police officers shouldn't have ...
(24:44):
That the fact that the suspect wasthrowing the gun away meant no one should
have fired because you've got twoofficers that had a clear line of
sight that did fire.
And I'm assuming you weren't criticalof those officers firing at the
suspect. It was Officer Ramos'firing with the backdrop.
Do I have that factually correct?
(25:07):
Our lawsuit was mostly against OfficerRamos because only his bullets could have
injured the six people in the background,
and so it didn't make sense for usto be critical of the officers who
shot Mr. Waddy.
Certainly there are some critiques thatjust wasn't the focus of our client's
case.
(25:28):
Yeah. And it felt like more of a sideissue to even involve the other officers.
And the defense actually tried.
They were trying to pin it on the otherofficers and it seemed a bit ridiculous
when they were saying one of the officersthat was dead in front of him could
have somehow fired all theway to the right of them.
(25:49):
And I think one of the best lines camefrom Omeed when they were trying to pin
it on his wife.
And Omeed asked thedefendant, he was like,
"Does your wife know you're out heresaying all this about her about me?
" And I think that was one of thebest lines of the trial. So yeah,
he was trying to pin it oneveryone, including his wife.
(26:12):
I'm not following. Wait, soRamos' wife was ... I got lost.
Yeah, I'll give you some background.
So Ramos was at thetime partnered with his
fiance,
then his fiance was also a policeofficer and on the scene that night
and a shooting officer.And so during the trial,
(26:34):
Officer Ramos' testimony was that one ofthe bullets or two of the bullets that
hit the bystanders couldhave come from his partner,
his fiance at the time.
He didn't call her to thestand to testify to that point.
She was not called at all at trial.
And so the question duringthe cross of Ramos was,
(26:57):
"Does your wife know that you're herepointing the finger at her saying that she
shot these people?
" And it did garner achuckle out of a few jurors
and some co-counsel.
Well, what was his answer to that?And did you know that that was ...
Was that a planned question ordid it just spur the moment?
(27:18):
That was not a planned question.And his answer, I believe,
was that him and his wife had actuallynot ever talked about anything related to
this case or his criminalconviction. So no, she didn't know.
It is such a fascinatingfactual scenario because
(27:38):
it strikes me that how youframed your case is so critically
important to the successthat you received.
And just to remind our listeners,this was what, 20 million.
I mean,
and I do want to ask you questionsabout your ask and the punitive damage
component of it, but the overallverdict was like $20 million plus,
(27:59):
is that right?
It was 19.75 million.
So how did you, Crist,no focus groups here,
but was it obvious that giventhe facts that I've heard
displayed here, thatthe rule, if you will,
the rule you never violate is youdon't fire when there's people
(28:21):
behind. And was it intentional,A, did I get that rule right?
And B,
was the intent to create the simplestrule that was violated here to make it
as simple as you could for the jury?
Yeah, agreed.
And that is a basic rule that you don'tfire when there's people behind target.
You're supposed to know yourtarget, and that is a basic rule.
(28:42):
And I think that was very easyfor the jury to understand.
And when they're going back to deliberate,
that's just a basic rulethat they can follow.
And the case pretty muchboiled down to that.
It didn't matter like what theywere trying to throw into the pop.
It's the basic sense that you have toknow your target and know what's behind
your target.
(29:05):
Who crossed their use of force? Omeed,
was that you crossing theperson who referenced Columbine,
their use of force expert?
No, it was Ciara and ourco-counsel, Tony Biorst,
who represented two of the six victims.
So Ciara, what the defendant'suse of force expert,
did they concede the rule that you don'tfire when there are people behind or
(29:28):
did they try to tap dance around that?
They tap danced around it quite a bit.
This is the expert that triedto liken the case to Columbine,
which for a Coloradocase and Colorado jurors,
I think that that was veryalarming to the jurors and lost
some credibility. Thefacts weren't the same.
(29:51):
And so the expert tried to likenit to a Columbine situation,
which it just wasn't,
but he wouldn't concede the officeOfficer Ramos did anything wrong.
And I think that that's where theexperts really came into play.
We had our own policing expert,
but we also had an expert that didthe ballistics and really did a great
(30:12):
job of explaining the ballistics.
So while their use of force expertwouldn't acknowledge that you can't shoot
into a crowd,
the common sense really came intoplay and the jurors used that
common sense. And thepolice testimony also was,
even though not designatedas expert testimony,
(30:34):
the other officers who were therewho testified that you wouldn't shoot
into a crowd or you have to know yourbackdrop really played a critical role and
I think really hurt the credibilityof the expert who simply would not
acknowledge that this was a bad shoot.
So what I'm hearing you say,which sounds really important,
is that your theme was youdon't shoot into a crowd,
(30:58):
essentially, know your backdrop. Andthrough every witness that testified,
you were able to get support for thattheme and raise it every single time.
Basically every witness in thecase testified. Is that right?
Absolutely.
The first nine words out of my mouthin opening is you do not shoot into a
crowd. You do not shoot intoa crowd. It's common sense.
(31:19):
It's basic police practices.
And we expect our trainedpolice officers to know this.
We expect any person whoowns and uses a gun to know
this and to not shoot into a crowd.
Did one of you all cross-examineOfficer Ramos at trial?
That's Omeed. I did, yeah.
So Omeed,
(31:40):
what did Officer Ramos say whenconfronted with that rule, if you will?
Is it to say, "Well, yeah, that's a rule,
but there's always exceptions,"something like that?
He did. Yeah.
The testimony to synthesize it wasthat that rule doesn't always apply
to police officers.
And that's one of those answers thatyou get and you just let it sit.
(32:03):
You don't dig into it and try to eattoo much off of it. You just let it sit.
It didn't match up with what virtuallyevery other witness was saying.
That type of testimony tosort of deny the obvious was a
common theme in his testimony.
And I was often facedwith the challenge of,
(32:24):
do I get one more question inright now and sort of bite at this?
And I tried to exercise restraint andjust let the outrageous statements float
because there were several.
I think another one of the questionsthat you all covered on the last podcast,
which was really a highlightfor me was asking him,
"What's the worst backdrop than acrowd of people? " And he said, "Well,
there could be senators, presidents,and very important people.
(32:47):
" And in closing, I getto say, according to him,
these six people seated behindme are not senators, presidents,
are very important people.
And there were a lot of opportunitieslike that where you got this sort of,
he really just will not admitthe easy answer and that's okay.
The jury will see right through it.
(33:08):
There was a temptation often totry to really hammer things home,
but it was just, I mean, he kindof made the case for us at times.
And I think an important part was thejury. None of them are presidents,
senators, and so- called important people.
So that means they can get shot too.
And Omit,
I'm putting myself in your shoesand imagining the restraint
(33:31):
and imagining what would be going throughmy mind when you're given an answer
like that.
And was it obvious to youwhen that answer was given
that it would have been worse if therewere presidents or what have you behind
it? Did you ask any follow upor did you just let it sit?
(33:52):
Talk to us a little bit aboutwhat was going through your brain.
At that very moment,
when you get this gift of an answerthat you could not have contemplated,
that that was going to be the response.What was your thought process?
Yeah, I had read a book. I hadn'tattended a conference like Ciara. Ciara,
that was Anita conference or?
Yeah, I attended Anita.
(34:13):
Would you recommend thatresource to everyone out there?
Yeah, it was great. I learned a lot.
I got to learn from a lot ofreally skilled trial attorneys.
I did the one that was here inDenver and it was there for a week,
pick up on a lot of things thatyou can improve on and then
really you put those skills intopractice. So I would highly recommend it,
(34:36):
particularly for peoplewho are a little bit ...
I'm a little bit more reservedand shy in my personal life.
So it did really wonders for myconfidence going into a trial setting.
And if conferences aren't your jam,
I had read a book calledWinning It Cross by Shane Reed.
And I'm also sort of a nerd when itcomes to trials that are out there in the
(34:58):
world.
I try to watch a lot of media like thispodcast to sort of stay up to date on
who's doing some great lawyering out thereand what can we learn and that it's a
skill. It's something that you haveto develop. And in that moment,
what was coming to my mind was, "Yeah,this is an outrageous statement.
This is what Shane Reidcalls an outrageous statement and you need to let this
(35:18):
one fly." And so I think a lot oftimes some of the stuff you learn isn't
intuitive. And I think people justassume that good trial lawyers,
like the two who are with me todayjust become good trial lawyers because
they're born with it,
but a lot of the stuff is skills thatyou have to learn and master. And I
think in that moment itwas a good test. Okay,
(35:40):
here's an opportunity tomake the wrong choice,
the tactically wrongchoice or the right one.
And I was lucky enough to makethe right one in that moment.
And I know we didn't askany follow up. In fact,
I think I moved to the next chapter,
which was about like where hegrew up or something like that.
Yeah. Kudos to you. I canthink back to my younger self.
(36:01):
I can still remember one of the firsttrials I did as a civil trial lawyer was
after I was a prosecutor for five yearsand then did a civil trial and it was a
med mal trial.
And I just beat up this defense expertso much that I'm confident we lost the
case because of it.
And so you come back to yoursituation where you're given this
(36:21):
gift and just the wisdomto recognize that gift in
the moment and not try to win becauseI feel like our natural instincts,
whenever we're even arguing withour spouse or whatever, it's like,
I need to win this argument,
but to let jurors reach their ownconclusion without shoving it down their
(36:41):
throats,
I feel like is the biggest piece of wisdomthat I've come to in recent years as
a trial lawyer is nobody wants to be toldwhat to think. And so you have to let
them reach that own conclusion and youget a gift like that and you just let it
sit and you move on to your nextchapter of cross shows much,
much, much wisdom. So kudos to you.
(37:03):
Talk to us a little bit about how youwent about structuring your cross.
You mentioned chapters.
Did you have various chapters thatyou could sort of pivot on the fly
depending on how various answers went?Just talk to our younger listeners,
if you will, about how you went aboutpreparing your cross-examinations.
(37:24):
Yeah. The advice that I got,which was very good advice,
was that each chapterneeds to have a point.
And that point shouldbe as basic as possible.
And really as I was preparing the cross,
I would have a point that Ineeded to make. For instance,
training requires knowingyour backdrop and beyond.
Then as I was going throughpreparing the cross,
(37:46):
the points became actually narrower andnarrower and would separate often into
their own chapters.
And so a chapter on know your targetand beyond turned actually into two
chapters. One was about know your target,
and the second one was aboutknow it's beyond. And so really,
I think as I was preparing the cross,
the big takeaway that I had wasthat it can take 25 minutes,
(38:09):
if it needs to, to justestablish a really basic point.
You're not going to win the case in onechapter of your cross. You're going to
establish one piece. And really thatwas the goal, was to take this witness,
this defendant, and ateach stage of his cross,
just prove one thing that's helpfulto our case or destroys his.
And so we tried to be pretty methodicalas we were going through the process.
(38:33):
And I think that was really whatour entire trial team did. I mean,
we were scheduled to go for two weeksand I think the trial was done in like
nine or 10 days because all of us
pretty effectively managed to justboil this thing down to what we needed.
Let's not start quibbling with thesewitnesses in a way that's going to make us
lose credibility.
Let's just get right down to itand then ask the jury to decide.
(38:56):
So that was our strategy.
I love that.
And I love what you saidthat every chapter has to have a point and that as you
were preparing, those pointsbecame narrower and narrower.
Did you as a team engagein any role playing
where you would practice your cross andothers would sort of assume the role?
(39:17):
Just really wonderingfor younger listeners,
what sort of practicaltrial prep advice for what
you all did in this trial?
And I'll throw this out to the group andmaybe I'll ask each one of you as far
from a trial preparation standpoint,
what really worked that youlearned in this case? And Crist,
(39:38):
I'll start with you.
What was the one thing as far astrial prep that you found was very
effective here?
So as far as preparing for our client,
what I wanted to do was to get hisemotional story out to the jury.
I wanted the jury to see himas a person before they saw
(39:59):
him as a victim. So Iwalked him through his life,
what he was doing.
And there was a funny story about likewhat happened to him right before he was
shot, where he's walking up on a girland then he's about to talk to her,
he sees her, he gets scared.
And if he didn't get scaredand started talking to her,
(40:20):
he probably wouldn't have gotten,wouldn't have been in the line of fire.
But we had to bring that out becauseagain, that's a very human emotion.
Walking up on a girl, you see her andyou get fearful and you walk away.
So that's very humid.
So I wanted to bring that part outand then also show his injuries
and what was going on before and afterhe was shot. And then that was like the
(40:42):
same with the doctor. So Ialso had to cross the doctor.
I didn't want him to startspouting any kind of medical
information as to show how smart he was.
I just wanted to keep it very simple justto show this is not my client's doctor
and that the doctor was paid by defendantRamos. So again, to keep it simple,
(41:04):
and I didn't want to ask him too manythings that I didn't know the answer to
because he starts talkingabout medical information.
I'm not going to know anything about that.
And then I'm looking at the jury like,
and then this guy is seeminglike a remarkable person.
And the doctor was very, verynice. He was a very good person,
so I didn't want to like pokehim too much. So I was like,
(41:26):
"I have to temper myself to come acrosslike that. " So those are some of the
things that I picked up. Yeah.
And that was something youhad contemplated in advance.
So you sort of knew when you'recross examining the defense doctor,
"I don't want to poke this bear.I know what I want to accomplish.
I want to get in, get out.
" And you had prepared that in advanceand that's something that you found to be
(41:46):
effective.
Yeah.
And I didn't know how appealing he wasgoing to be because he came across as
someone that I would listento and that I would like.
So I didn't want to be annoyingand the jury may like him,
so I don't want to interrupt that.
So just wanted to keep it basic and civil.
Civil that you mentioned civil,
(42:08):
how important is it in thisprofession to in front of the
jury be civil that you've seen, Crist?
I think it's important because I thinkagain, presentation is very important.
Character and personality is important.And again, that goes back to like,
we were talking about politics earlier.
(42:29):
Presentation and personalityis very important.
So if you're going to come across likea jerk to someone that people like,
again,
that's a reflection on you and it's areflection on you not reading the room.
So that's what I was lookingat him and I was like, "Okay,
this is a very nice guy and if I comeacross like a bulldog coming at him,
(42:50):
then it's going to make me look foolish.
It's going to make him look great andthen it's going to hurt our clients as.
Well." Wow. Ciara,
what's the one thing in your trialprep in this trial did you think really
worked well?
I think collaboration. This isthe first time Omeed, Crist,
and I have gone to trial withSiddhartha and John and the
(43:11):
attorneys on the case.
And so the collaboration and the trialexperience with one another was really
great. We worked well together,but we worked differently.
And so really getting to figure outdifferent people's styles and how to make
it work together.
There were several times in the weeksleading up that Omeed would come in and
work out part of his cross.
(43:32):
And I was Officer Ramos more than I wasCiara in those weeks leading up to the
trial. The story's easy totell. They're very great people
and a terrible thing happened to them.
They were people out celebratingan anniversary, a birthday.
One of our clients who got shotwas very endearing and going up
(43:54):
to a girl and then getting scared.
Another person who gotshot was calling his
sister to make sure that she took hismom to church the next day because that's
something that he did every Sunday.These are real people with real families.
And so telling that story was very easy.
So it didn't take as much preparationbecause when you're doing a direct,
(44:18):
you're not the star, the personyou're doing the direct is the star.
And so it was really easy toimplement that. But I think overall,
I think the collaboration is what I tookaway from it and just being there to
bounce ideas off of each other.
We're at the office until 3:00AM working out the closing and
(44:40):
starting it. "Okay, oh, I don'treally quite like that piece of it.
Let's revise it here. Okay,
now let's put this into reallyperspective for the jury and I don't
mean then delivered it excellently.
"So it was a really funtrial You get a taste of it,
you want to keep doing it, butit was great for our clients too,
(45:01):
obviously with the outcome.
Yeah. Omeed,
what was the one piece of the trialpreparation piece that you think
was highly effective here?
I think giving yourself enough time andif you have the privilege of being at a
fantastic law firm, whenit's trial prep time,
people tend to take other thingsoff your plate so you can focus.
(45:25):
And that became critical both withrespect to the facts and the law.
I can think of dozens of times duringthe case when a factual piece would come
up that they thought was important. Andas our entire team, we knew, no, no, no,
we knew how to deal with that. And theonly way, and the same with the law.
In fact,
I can think of a particular disputeabout a effective date of a particular
(45:49):
statute that they thought they hadus on and we said," No, no, no.
We've looked into this. It appliesand it applies to this case.
"And the only way that thoselittle tidbits which become so
important during a trial come to yourmind is that you've given yourself enough
time. It's like preparing for adepo. If you start the night before,
(46:10):
you just don't have enough time tolet it sink in and to develop more
complex thoughts about it and tosort of shift your own understanding.
So I think one thing we did really wellwas everybody was just sitting with
it, listening to it, feeling it,sort of trying to figure out,
what am I missing? What are myblind spots? How can I pivot?
(46:31):
And I think we did anexcellent job of that. So time,
you just got to set it aside andjust got to do it. There's no ...
I think Abraham Lincoln as a quote,
you can't ignore the drudgeriesof the law is something like it.
You got to sit with it. There'snothing else you can do,
but just sit with it for a longtime and it'll come to you.
What you're saying really lands becausethere's just periods of this job that
(46:53):
are a grind.
And when you look at a trial like youall did and someone comes in and looks at
how seamless it was, how the outcome,
how much fun it lookedlike being in trial,
they see the top of the mountain andthey don't see the climb that it took to
get there and get ready.
So that's really lands with me because Ifeel like there's just times in the ...
(47:15):
It's almost like you have toembrace the suck at times,
whatever it is and it's setaside time and do the grind.
So I really appreciateyour perspective on that,
of setting aside time,
making sure that things comeup legally and factually
you're able to hit those things head on.
(47:37):
Talk to me a little bit in our ...
We got about a few minutes left here.I'm curious about the punitive damage
component of this. So, and Omi,
did you do both closings or did you dofirst closing and then one of the other
lawyers did the rebuttal close?
I did closing and rebuttal.
Okay. How did you approach ...
(47:57):
Because I'm assuming that the punitivedamage component consumed a lot of your
thought about how to present thatand how to argue that with the jury.
What did you come up with andwhat was your strategy with that?
Yeah, the strategy was actuallyfairly straightforward.
There had been this criminal convictionthat was percolating throughout the
entire case and wouldcome up at various times.
(48:18):
And one tact that they tookto minimize the meaning
of that criminal conviction wasthat it didn't come with jail time.
It wasn't a felony. Itwas a sweetheart deal.
He had to take that dealbasically because it was so good.
That's why he pled guilty, not becausehe was actually guilty of the crime.
That was their approach.
(48:39):
And so we flipped that on its head forpunitive damages. We said," Look folks,
if you're as enraged as we are,here's what you should note.
This guy has never been punished forthis conduct. He told you outright,
I got a sweetheart dealwhen it came to the crime.
"So we said," Now's your opportunity.
You're the only people who have theopportunity as of today to punish this
(49:00):
defendant for that conduct.And unfortunately,
the way you do it in thissetting is through money.
"And so really all we said was takewhatever compensatory damages you award
and just double it.
Just add another double on top topunish him in a way that he's never been
punished. So our strategywasn't that complicated.
And I think actually the work toget punitive damages comes long
(49:24):
before the request itself.
It's got to sit on a goodfoundation of these jurors are angry
maybe. This is beyond just liability.
This is they are frustrated withboth the defendant and his conduct.
And so I think all of the pieces thatwe had set up throughout the trial,
including those outrageousstatements that we talked about,
(49:47):
sort of led into that final request. Andthat's the only way that it's credible.
If you've got a jury that's thinking thisis a fifty fifty case and I'm up there
saying," Punish him, we've lost.It's not going to happen.
"So I think the work to get therewas long before the actual ask.
Can you talk to us just for a littlebit about your preparation for your
(50:08):
closings since you did bothclosings, did you think,
did you plan out ahead what you expectedto do in your rebuttal close and what
did you do to prepare andplan for your first close?
Yeah, this was with the help of our team.
I guess the first thingwas throughout the trial,
I was drafting an outline as bigpieces of evidence would come in and
(50:31):
testimony would come in, theoutline was already started.
And then I'd say about two days beforewhen it became clear that we were going
to close on X day,
the outline started to turn intosomething a little more clear.
And then really the night beforewe were to deliver closings,
we spent from the end of trial thatday until 3:00 AM with the entire
(50:52):
team preparing a presentationand also just until
my eyes were about to fall asleepand I was about to just pass out
on the concrete floor of our office,
just saying things over and over andover until they came out to the picture
that we were trying to capture. And evenI drove home that night and there's a
(51:14):
light right before my house thatsometimes doesn't turn green.
And I sat at that light not realizingthat I was sitting at that light at red
light that was never going to turngreen for 15 minutes saying part of
the closing out loud before realizing, oh,
I have to run this to get home or elseI'm going to be here until trial the next
(51:36):
day. And then in terms of organizing it,
we just followed thejury instructions.That's ultimately the decision that
jurors need to make. And if you'representing it in any other way,
I think we would all posit that you'redoing it wrong because they need a
roadmap.
And so we just roadmapped them andhighlighted the evidence for each of the
elements that they needed to decide andgot them there and tried to stay awake
(51:59):
during the process.
And that was amazing because it wastill like three in the morning and then
eight in the morning he's giving thatclosing and it was an amazing closing.
So the judge had to admonish someone inthe back because they made noise after
it. What? That was great because someonewas like, woo, in the background-.
(52:20):
Wait, wait. I got to hear this story.I've never heard of such a thing.
So tell us the story. The judge hadto admonish a juror for making noise?
Yeah. So someone had made a noise inthe background as soon as it was done.
It felt like a mic drop situation.And so there was someone in the crowd,
it was like, woo. And then thejudge got upset and was like,
(52:42):
"We will not have that in the courtroom."Wow. It was truly a great closing.
It reminded me of, I don't know, haveyou seen the movie JFK? Of course. Yeah.
So that closing that Kevin Costnergave, it was kind of like that,
not as emotional and weactually did win unlike
him. It was very well put together.
(53:03):
Though.
Am I stating the obvious that it suresounds like you all had an immense amount
of fun trying this case?
Yeah, it was challenging. The injuriesin this case were really, it was awful.
Some of the evidence thatcame in was horrible,
but obviously those aren't our injuries.We can do our best to sympathize,
but we can't really empathize becausenone of us have been there and we did have
(53:28):
fun doing the prep work, butit did feel very weighty.
It did feel, I don't know howyou all felt after the trial,
but it certainly felt like, "Holy smokes,
what did I just go through?" Thatwas a lot. It was a lot. Yeah.
I think as a lawyer, wecan see that it's fun,
but we also take on theweight of our clients.
(53:51):
We are advocating and telling avery personal story for these people
who have suffered immensely andtheir lives are forever changed.
They can no longer go to thebars or to the grocery store,
couldn't leave their housefor a period of time.
And so recognizing this veryreal and personal harm and
taking and telling a jurythis story, it was fun,
(54:14):
but it was a lot and it feltlike a real responsibility.
But I think that we set aside thetime and we put in the time to
really make sure that we were doingeverything that we could to tell it in the
best way. And I think that thatworked out to our client's benefit.
And I think this trial was like a greatexample of like why we became civil
(54:36):
rights lawyers.
It definitely felt like we were able tolike restore our clients like dignity.
Wow.
And it did feel like theywere relieved in a sense.
And to me, that made a lotof the hard work worth it.
Yeah. I probably used the wrongword fun. It's maybe rewarding.
(54:56):
In the hindsight, you putin all of this effort,
you get a great resultfor truly just clients
that have gone throughsomething that, like you said,
none of us can imaginethe sense of satisfaction
must just be immense.
And kudos to you all forsuch an amazing result.
(55:19):
And I want to thank you all for takingtime out of your very busy lives and
professional careers to talkwith us. So Crist, Ciara, Omeed,
thank you so much for appearing on thisprogram and congratulations to you and
your clients for a trulyjust result. Thank you.
Thank you so much for having us.
(55:39):
And good to finally meet you.Yeah, it's great to meet you too.
To our listeners, thankyou for listening in again.
We'll be back next time with anotherepisode of the Colorado Trial Lawyer
Connection podcast where we love to talkwith trial lawyers about what they do,
what worked, what didn't work,
and bring some of those real lifeColorado trial lawyer stories to life.
(55:59):
So we'll see you all, hear you allnext time. Thanks for listening.
Thank you for joining us.
We hope you've gained valuable insightsand inspiration from today's courtroom
warriors, and thank youfor being in the arena.
Make sure to subscribe and join us nexttime as we continue to dissect real
cases and learn fromColorado's top trial lawyers.
Our mission is to empowerour legal community,
(56:21):
helping us to become better trial lawyersto effectively represent our clients.
Keep your connection to Colorado'sbest trial lawyers alive at
www.thectlc.com.
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