Friday, May 18, 2007

Hue-Morning Observations Day 5

Suh and Barnett are going at each other. Barnett tries the "Young Ruse" (which consists of coaching the witness by a lengthy speech tipping the witness off to the "correct" answer) but Suh will have none of it today. Barnett is clearly pleased with his big day yesterday, feeling his oats as it were.

Young, the consummate professional, brings Barnett's argumentative objection into focus using three words "asked and answered". I really like Mr Young.

[MORE]


Young and Dunn seem to have turned over the "objection" duties to Barnett. They are working while he is listening. Is his work otherwise done?

Brunet is back at the helm today, making all rulings and controlling the proceedings. He is also trying to help the interpreter, as are many members of the audience. That is funny to everyone.

Mr Campell had to have a break (we ALL needed it) and we are back in session.

Mr Jacobs is establishing through Ms Ayotte, a number of other mistakes with the LNDD testing graphs. Not a single one nor their total mean anything negative about those procedures to her .

The lab experts are all saying that anything missing doesn't affect the results. But it clearly affects fairness. The machine is working and there is a test for the machine to see if it can identify a known positive.The results of that are not in the packet of information given to the athlete. But that is not neccessary because the machine works. Circular, n'est pas?

Similarly, Dr Ayotte doesn't need to see the controls, because she has the test results which appear to be reasonable and in the appropriate ratio. Thus the assumption seems to be that the controls upon which the testing was based must have been accurate without ever have having to see them for confirmation. The athlete need not see them either because they are not in the document pack.

At the end of the hearing, Mr Barnett raised the Will issue and suggested in open hearing that Suh was hiding the witness. Suh corrected the notion and all 3 Panel members independently, made staements that he had a right to counsel, that they adjourned to let him seek legal advise and that Barnett should take it up with counsel Will has retained. Barnett wanted the Panel to know Suh told him a "friend" of his would help will. Barnett got another 15 minutes of fame from that but the results, this time were not good for him.

UCLA WADA lab head Henson has been helping USADA lawyers with their examination of Montreal WADA lab head Ayotte and confers with her after lunch. Rome WADA lab head Botre is helping the Panel as their "Independent" expert, to evaluate Ayotte's testimony. Anyone see any problems? I thought not. The system views it as perfectly ok as well.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

What's is the significance of the 'strictly confidential' document shown in court before the lunch break? Was is just to show the lab isn't as secure as the USADA team is making it out to be?

Laura Challoner, DVM said...

Jacobs represents many athletes in doping cases. He needed to illustrate how the Montreal lab does a document pack, so that Ayotte could not testfy her lab did it some other way (the Montreal lab includes control runs and other documents in its packet that LNDD did not include in this case). so my guess is that he used graphs from another client, redacting any and all identifying information. Ms Ayotte was indiganant but it is the athletes medical information that is confidential. It is not the WADA lab's priviledge to claim. But she is not used to that stuff becoming public so she acted as though it was.

Anonymous said...

IMO: Another important reason to utilize her own labs docs was also to suggest that "her" own lab only uses chromatography that is very clear and unambiguous when determining E/T ratios. If you visualize the two graphs side by side; even a lay person can tell which one "looks" better…

Anonymous said...

Anon 12:46 and Bill,
Thanks for the exchange. I don't have a feed and would not have known about it at all.

So we have labs generating different packets and information for test results. For those who might miss it; this opens a line of argument as to why LNDD fails to do the same thing as Montreal or did not in this case.
pcrosby
pcrosby