Trial Secrets of Rusty Hardin, the Lawyer for Acquitted Baseball Star Roger Clemens
Careful preparation and careful listening are among the traits that help lawyer Rusty Hardin win cases.
Hardin’s latest victory came earlier this week when jurors in Washington, D.C., acquitted baseball great Roger Clemens of perjury. Before the verdict, Hardin offered trial tips at a meeting of the State Bar of Texas, Texas Lawyer’s Tex Parte Blog reports.
Hardin said lawyers should like and feel comfortable with the jurors they pick, the Tex Parte Blog says. There is no need to focus on gender, age or race. Lawyers picking jurors should ask open-ended questions, he said, and they need to really listen to the answers. “I want to know who they are, how they feel about things,” he said.
The Wall Street Journal also analyzed Hardin’s winning tactics. The Clemens acquittal “owed as much to his dogged pretrial digging as it did to the lawyer’s folksy charm and killer instinct in front of a jury,” the story says.
Former trainer Brian McNamee was the government’s star witness against Clemens, who was accused of lying under oath to Congress about steroid use. Hardin sent investigators to Florida to investigate McNamee and learned he was accused of lying to investigators in a prior legal matter. A lawyer for McNamee, Richard Emery, told the Wall Street Journal that a judicial ruling limiting testimony about the incident made it seem far worse that it was.
“Mr. Hardin’s use of the incident was artful in its distortion,” Emery said.
