Defense Lawyer Seeks Removal of Courtroom Sign About Seeking the Truth
A lawyer for a defendant in a triple murder prosecution is asking a judge to take down a sign hanging in every Miami-Dade courtroom.
The sign reads: “We who labor here seek only the truth.” Lawyer Louis Jepeway Jr. argues the sign invites jurors to speculate when they sense a judge has excluded evidence, the Miami Herald reports. “Truthful evidence may be excluded” by the judge, the motion says.
Jepeway represents Samuel Cadillon, one of three men accused in a daylight ambush that killed three men in a van in June 2006. “Why have a sign?” Jepeway asked in a Miami Herald interview. “What does it add? It’s certainly not a jury instruction.”
The sign was first posted in Miami-Dade courts in the late 1940s by a judge who apparently wrote the phrase, the story says.
