Baltimore attorney Christos Vasiliades was on his way to the rape trial of his defendant at the downtown courthouse Tuesday when the criminal focus pivoted away from his client and toward him.
Vasiliades, 38, was arrested and charged with trying to intimidate the alleged rape victim in the case by telling her that testifying would make her vulnerable to deportation by the Trump administration, according to a grand jury indictment against him.
Vasiliades offered the woman and her husband $3,000 in cash if their absence in court got the case "thrown out," court documents show, then encouraged the couple to track down the defendant and "kick his ass."
"If we were back home where I'm from, from Greece ... we would go fâââ him up, that's it," Vasiliades allegedly said during a meeting with the couple that was secretly recorded.
Due process is for the birds -- it's only a requirement for a bunch of stuffed shirt, Puritanical prosecutors -- but a little vigilante "kick his ass" is just what the rapist's doctor/counsel ordered. It sounds like a line from "The Godfather."
I would close with something like, "Welcome to defense lawyering," but we've already seen it before, e.g., with defense counsel's false representation to the court that child killer Wendell Callahan was not a threat to the safety of the community, and in the defense package presented in the Stanford rape case, arguing that the court shouldn't be too hard on the defendant for just "20 minutes of action.."
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