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Denver Post
DA demands gag order be enforced
Friday, October 24, 2003 - The prosecutor in the Kobe Bryant sexual-assault case Thursday demanded that the judge enforce a gag order on participants, citing a leak attributed to a former judge who is a friend of one of the basketball star's attorneys.
District Attorney Mark Hurlbert claimed in a court filing (click here for the full text) that defense attorneys Hal Haddon and Pamela Mackey have "been on a campaign to get information in the public domain that has been specifically prohibited by the court." Hurlbert accused retired Eagle District judge William Jones of lying when he denied to Hurlbert's investigator that he was the source of the leak attributed to him in the New York Daily News. Jones, who did not return calls on Thursday, was quoted in the Oct. 11 edition of the paper - between the two sessions of the split preliminary hearing in Eagle - as saying that Mackey had evidence that the 19-year-old accuser had sex with other men about the time of the June 30 incident. "There was more than one man's semen found in her panties," Jones told reporter Corky Siemaszko. "That's what's behind all of this." At the time the story was published, Mackey had only just raised the notion in the preliminary hearing that the woman's injuries could have resulted from having sex with "three different men in three days." It wasn't until the second part of the hearing on Oct. 15 that Mackey elicited testimony that the woman wore yellow panties stained with semen to a sexual-assault examination the day after the incident. Authorities already had recovered the blood-streaked panties she wore during the encounter with the Los Angeles Lakers star guard. The paper reported that Jones, the former chief judge in the district, learned from Haddon that semen was found in the yellow panties. "I have known him for 40 years," Jones told the paper. "He was doing some work for me, and he mentioned it to me. It will come out in due course." When contacted by DA's Investigator Gerry Sandberg, however, Jones denied that Haddon had told him about the semen in the panties and said he hadn't talked with Haddon in 10 years. "At the time of the quote, one half of the preliminary hearing had been conducted, (and) this information had not been presented as evidence ... Given that few people knew the information before the second part of the preliminary hearing, Jones does not appear to be telling the truth," Hurlbert said in his motion requesting a hearing on the enforcement of a gag order. In a letter to Hurlbert on Thursday, Haddon said he had not talked to Jones since he appeared in his court in the 1980s. "I have not discussed the Bryant case with him and have certainly not authorized him to 'disseminate by means of public communication' any information concerning the case," Haddon said in the letter. The battle over leaks has been as contentious as the rest of the case against Bryant, who faces four years to life in prison if convicted of felony sexual assault. Hurlbert contends that Haddon and Mackey, who did not return calls Thursday, are intentionally revealing information through leaks. |