Lambkin wrote:Schlegel said he intends to appeal because “my attorney never allowed me to testify. If I had testified, we would’ve won. … I’m going to fight this to the end.”
The decision as to whether a criminal defendant testifies is not the lawyer's, it's the defendant's. The lawyer can try to talk a defendant out of it, but the defendant decides. I have even seen judges inquire of a non-testifying defendant (out of the presence of the jury, of course) whether the decision not to testify was his. As nd says, this is self-serving bullshit.
Schlegel called one witness - one John O'Neill Green. I thought I had seen that name before. Green is a lawyer,
a former colleague of Tommy Cryer in the tax nonsense movement. I would really like to see a transcript of his testimony. Transcript or no, some nonsense got before the jury.
One good thing did come out of the trial -
the govt's trial memo. Not only does it show that Schlegel's testimony would have made no conceivable difference, but it is a good primer on the legal issues likely to arise in a tax prosecution. It deals with
Cheek, the relevance of prior bad conduct, the advice of counsel defense, the evidence which comes in to prove conspiracy (and therefore why that charge is a prosecutor's best friend), summary and expert testimony and more. It has a pro-govt bias - duh, it's a govt trial memo - but not outrageously so.
