Read Online A Case of Redemption by Adam Mitzner - Free Book Online

professional witness. Others in the office, which up until a month ago included me, do the work, and when it’s showtime, Dr. Harry Davis steps out in front of the cameras and reveals the findings.”
    â€œHere’s my first bit of legal advice, Marty. You don’t have to outexpert him. All we need is for you to fight him to a draw. If the jury’s not going to be able to tell which expert is telling the truth, we’ll be awfully close to reasonable doubt.”
    â€œI’ll do my best,” Popofsky said, now looking less confident than I would have preferred.
    It was time to explain the facts of life.
    â€œOne thing that you may not have experienced when you were at the ME’s office,” I said, “is that there’s a difference between a testifying expert and a consultation expert. Right now, we’re going to retain you solely to provide consulting advice to help us as part of our legal representation. That means that what you tell us will be covered by the attorney-client privilege. Later on, we may choose to designate you as our testifying expert, at which time we’ll also have to waive the privilege. That’s when the real work begins, and we’ll be spending a lot of time with you, preparing for testimony.”
    â€œI get it,” he said with a knowing smile. “Just because I’m new to the private sector doesn’t mean I don’t know how the game’s played. If you like my opinion, I’ll be your expert. And if you don’t, you’ll find someone else.”
    Spoken like a man who’s seen the light.

8
    A t the time, I thought Darrius Macy was going to be the case of my career.
    It wasn’t without good reason. Darrius Macy was that year’s Cinderella story of the NFL. He’d begun the season as a walk-on at the Jets’ training camp, and ended it as the Super Bowl MVP. A full-on superstar, and one with all the trappings, he was on the Wheaties box, hosted Saturday Night Live, and hawked half a dozen products on TV, in magazine ads, and on billboards.
    And then, when it seemed like there was nowhere to go but up, the bottom fell out. A waitress named Vickie Tiernan, who worked at a fancy New York hotel, claimed that two months after his triumph, Darrius Macy, America’s Mr. Everything, and a married father of three, invited her up to his hotel room and raped her.
    The confluence of events that fueled Darrius Macy’s meteoric rise and even greater fall began when the Jets’ starting quarterback went down during the preseason, moving Macy up from third- to second-string. Ahead of him, however, was a former All-Pro named Michael Ross, who led the team to the playoffs with a 10-6 record. The Jets advanced through the playoffs, getting a huge break when the top-seeded Patriots fell to the wild-card Raiders, making the Jets the favorite in the AFC Championship Game. They won by ten, and headed to the Super Bowl against Chicago.
    But from the Super Bowl’s opening kickoff, which the Jets fumbled, it was clear that it wasn’t going to be their day. In the first half, the Jets were within striking distance only once, and that drive endedwith an end-zone interception that the Chicago cornerback ran all the way for a touchdown.
    The score was 24–0 when, about five minutes into the third quarter, Ross was crushed under more than a thousand pounds of Bears, and left the game on a stretcher. That’s when Darrius Macy came in to take his first NFL snap.
    In the next twenty minutes, Macy threw for three touchdowns, bringing the Jets within three. With four and a half minutes to go, the Jets had the ball on their own twenty, when Macy engineered a final drive that left them sixteen yards from victory, with twelve seconds to go. It was enough time for one more play from scrimmage. Touchdown, and the Jets would be world champions; fail, and they’d call a time-out and go for the game-tying field goal.
    That