The Verdict - Part 2

Season 6, Episode 22

The Verdict Part 2

Can expert witness testimony overcome decades-old missing records?

In Part 2 of this trial breakdown, Karen Koehler and Mo Hamoudi discuss the expert witnesses, courtroom strategy, and pivotal testimony that helped establish liability in a childhood sexual abuse case involving institutional failures and destroyed records. From former child welfare professionals to a trauma psychologist whose testimony stopped the courtroom cold, they explain how expert testimony helped the jury understand what happened, what should have happened, and the lasting impact of childhood trauma.

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Hosted by Karen Koehler and Mo Hamoudi, trial lawyers at Stritmatter Law, a nationally recognized plaintiff's personal injury and civil rights law firm based in Washington State.

Featuring Mike Todd, producer, audio engineer, and the Disembodied Voice of Wisdom & Reason.

Produced by Mike Todd and Kassie Slugić.

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Mo Hamoudi
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https://www.linkedin.com/in/mo-hamoudi-77a38733/

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Transcript

Part Two And Witness Lineup

Karen Koehler 0:00

Okay, so this is part two of our uh trial that we just finished yesterday, and we're gonna now move on to our wonderful ex uh uh eyewitness experts, uh Jane Raymond and Barbara Stone.

Mo Hamoudi 0:17

So both of them are former employees of the state, and they worked in the welfare system, they worked, you know, in dependency cases, they'd done a lot of work.

Karen Koehler 0:28

Well, Barbara for her entire career at one point she was a director.

Mo Hamoudi 0:31

Yeah, so Barbara did licensing, and so part of the aspect of licensing was to get Barbara to talk about what did they actually do when they licensed, and um she was retiring and she did not want to work on a case, and uh I could not for the life of me get her to work on a case and I s and I was like, Can I pause

Winning Over A Reluctant Expert

Mo Hamoudi 0:50

here just for a second?

Karen Koehler 0:50

Yeah, so she says no, and I'm like, we gotta have her, we gotta have her, you gotta he's like, he's like, okay, let me let me work on this. And I just want to stop and pause here because this is our dynamic, right? We don't take no for an answer.

Mo Hamoudi 1:07

That's right.

Karen Koehler 1:08

And we're gonna go throw ourselves against the wall, and but we're not gonna do it belligerently. We're like, okay, how can I do this? What's gonna work? And I'm like, this is terrible, but this is the truth. Should I tell the truth?

Mo Hamoudi 1:21

Yeah, tell the truth.

Karen Koehler 1:22

I said, you gotta go tell her that you that you were also abused as a child.

Mo Hamoudi 1:28

Yeah, I mean, I told her that I didn't tell her that to manipulate her at all. Well, I did not, because she was not manipulated.

Karen Koehler 1:35

She was not manipulated, she was not manipulated.

Mo Hamoudi 1:37

She was very clear.

Karen Koehler 1:38

We want we we wanted her to understand that this came from a very good place.

Mo Hamoudi 1:43

Well, let me talk about the conversation I had with her.

Karen Koehler 1:47

If you were noble, I I just want to say I was not noble, but you were noble.

Mo Hamoudi 1:51

Well, because she gets a lot of calls from a lot of lawyers asking for help, and she does not know who the lawyers are and what the nature of the case is. Right. And so what I explained to her was that look, this is not right. This guy was convicted in 1981 of abusing them, and we have no records because they destroyed the records, and we really need somebody to help us understand what you would have done back then. And I was and I and she was asking, you know, well, what's your involvement in the case? And part of it was like, yeah, there is a personal connection to the case because of what I experienced as a child. And I sent her a book of my poems that I, you know, wrote in in when I was in New York City.

Karen Koehler 2:32

You can't stop laughing.

Mo Hamoudi 2:33

You know, and uh and she loved the poem. She loved the poems because it was a great chap book that I'd written about life and growing up and about memories and about regrets and hope.

Karen Koehler 2:44

And Imagine this, Mo, how many cases she's worked on in her career where the child who was abused did not have your outcome. I would imagine you are in the top 1%. And that hearing from someone like you, which is why I wanted you to talk to her and tell her, must have given her a sense of hope.

Mo Hamoudi 3:04

Yeah. You know, she she was not only hopeful, she was she said what she said was, I will, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna testify, but I will provide you with a declaration um and uh about my thoughts. And uh the declaration was incredibly helpful, but she didn't even charge us.

Karen Koehler 3:25

You topped, you you touched her heart.

Mo Hamoudi 3:27

Yeah.

Karen Koehler 3:27

And that was our secret weapon.

Mo Hamoudi 3:29

I yeah.

Karen Koehler 3:30

Our secret weapon, folks, if you want to know how to do it like Karen and Mo, is to touch the heart. Yeah. Because she was moved by Mo. She felt connected him for very for, I mean, that's her whole dedication of life is to helping people that were abused within the system. Yeah. And here is this child grown into a man, man child, who man child, a man child, who connects with her really on a very profound, intimate level. Yeah. And she was willing to do that with you on the cusp of leaving this whole practice area.

Mo Hamoudi 4:08

Yeah. On the cusp of leaving it. And you could tell she was exhausted.

Karen Koehler 4:12

Yeah.

Mo Hamoudi 4:13

Just a career that exhausted her. And the second person. Wait, wait, wait. Yeah.

Karen Koehler 4:17

So so we just stick with Barbara. Yeah,

Barbara Stone Sets The Standard

Karen Koehler 4:20

Barbara, yeah. So so as we know from the last last issue, they tried to subpoena her, and we're like, sorry, Barbara. They're trying to do it, we want to call you instead. And she shows up in court on that big screen with her big glasses and just looking like you would want her to be your caseworker. And she comes in with you, and what happens?

Mo Hamoudi 4:45

She just knocks it out of the park.

Karen Koehler 4:46

She's in Zoom, by the way.

Mo Hamoudi 4:47

She's on Zoom, she knocks it out of the park. She provides really compelling testimony about like these manuals that we are talking about.

Karen Koehler 4:56

And he starts it off by saying you've never seen a single document on this case.

Mo Hamoudi 5:00

Yeah.

Karen Koehler 5:00

You don't even really know the names of the people involved. You have not been hired by us to testify. You are here as a fact witness. That is compelling.

Mo Hamoudi 5:11

Yeah. Yeah. She just she provided the groundwork for the standard of care of what was supposed to happen to license this guy.

Karen Koehler 5:21

He didn't show a single exhibit.

Mo Hamoudi 5:22

I didn't show her a single exhibit.

Karen Koehler 5:24

And then tell him about the cross.

Mo Hamoudi 5:26

The cross was start.

Karen Koehler 5:28

You gotta do it. You gotta do it just like it happened. Um it better involve a lot of sarcasm.

Mo Hamoudi 5:34

Yeah.

Karen Koehler 5:34

Uh you let's see that let's wait. This is a build-up moment.

Mo Hamoudi 5:39

Yeah.

Karen Koehler 5:39

Remember, they think I'm the actor and he's not the actor. He went to acting school and has actually been an actor.

Mo Hamoudi 5:45

Yeah. Okay, let's do it. You're a character. Um you actually refused to work for the plaintiffs, didn't you? Yeah. Because I'm retiring. I'm done with these cases.

Karen Koehler 5:58

I was like, that was the cross.

Mo Hamoudi 6:00

I was like, why? Yeah, you know, the the point there was like there was something about the case that made her not want to work on the case, but then she showed up anyways and told what we needed her to say. It was so dumb. It was so low.

Karen Koehler 6:13

There was a lot of low moments.

Mike Todd 6:15

Isn't that I mean? Because I I feel like they were going like, see, you thought it was so bad that you wouldn't even take it. And she just was like, she's like, no, uh, you're wrong.

Karen Koehler 6:30

We actually like these lawyers because they were they were not assholes, oops, can I say assholes? They were not jerks. No. They were they were polite. However, their cross-exam on uh on a whole was absolutely atrocious.

Mo Hamoudi 6:44

Yeah, that's what it sounds like. Yeah, and and on lawyer. It wasn't even that.

Karen Koehler 6:48

It was embarrassing.

Mo Hamoudi 6:49

There was not even that many questions really asked. And the jury asked some thoughtful questions about the times, about like what really was going on, and we got what we needed from her. You know, we got important aspects of what we needed from her. And the second thing was was then the the the second person was Okay, so I want to shortcut it on the second person.

Karen Koehler 7:13

Yeah. So it's Jane Reiman. Same vintage, same vintage. About three years younger, she's not

Drawing Out Jane Raymond’s Opinions

Karen Koehler 7:18

gonna be around forever, folks. Incredibly impressive, got everything from us, was paid by us. Took Mo took her agonizingly, which I do not want him to recount here, through the manual G, which as we know turns out to be a very important part. But I do want to forward fast you to um the end. What was the when you were freaking giving the 15-minute long questions and pounding the um pounding the podium like you were a gospel um orator in church.

Mo Hamoudi 7:49

I know.

Karen Koehler 7:50

You gotta tell them.

Mo Hamoudi 7:51

Okay, okay. So, like uh the rule just very quickly, and the rules require you to provide notice of the opinions the expert's gonna provide. Jane provided three real opinions, two tops, which she provided, three a little bit vague. And um I just was like, I'm gonna go for the gold, and I'm gonna draw out another 10 to 15 opinions from her and see if they object. And so the way I set it up was that Karen had done the direct of uh the foster parent's wife, the husband's wife, the day before, and she laid some really good testimony about their total failure after the kids were uh, if they found out that the abuse had happened, they went to the home and a social worker told the spouse, Oh, I suspected something was going on, and what they didn't do afterwards. So I'd taken notes about that testimony and thought about like what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna lay those facts in front of Jane Raymond and then ask her opinions about it. And so the way I did it, I was like, um, so the juries heard testimony, and then I went through literally the entire testimony of the woman, and then I started to ask questions. What's your opinion there? Did they breach the standard of care there? Did they breach the standard? And they were not objecting. I heard them whispering about it.

Karen Koehler 9:15

He was yelling too, and over the top of the podium, um, he was just like so aggressive and rage-filled, and the jury was like, Yeah, yeah, let him do it. You know, they're just watching this. Like it's this is this this trial was high theater the whole way through it.

Mo Hamoudi 9:33

But it was the permission to get angry about what happened.

Karen Koehler 9:36

They should have objected. That was the most, first of all, she's his witness. I I wrote down to Darcy and Sinnett to her, I said, he's leading her through the nose, and they are not objecting. She's like, Yes, yes, you know. But she then started getting into it, and when they went up there to cross-examine her, she was not having any of it and went at them.

Mo Hamoudi 10:00

No, and she she I thought she did exceptionally well. She would answer their question and say, But I gotta explain to you.

Karen Koehler 10:06

Oh my god. Over and over there.

Mo Hamoudi 10:08

It was really good.

Mike Todd 10:09

So I mean that's that's the nothing. Well, and that's what she I mean, that's that's where it really worked for you guys because all the with the lack of evidence that you had, all you had were these policies. And then you've got these people who were there who were enacting the policies and who knew them back and forth. And that's the evidence that the that the jury was looking at. Yeah, you know.

Karen Koehler 10:31

I kept seeing them looking at the state had this person, Arneson, who showed up every single day, and the and she was the first witness, and it wasn't great. Like, Modus let her talk a lot, and he was saying, you want and she'd say, Well, can I add something else? And he'd say yes. Like, I would never allow that. He was so nice and kind. So we started off like in a hole, in my opinion. And that turned out to be great because we only had the only place we had to go was up. And these two people just basically leveled the state. So the state had shown, you know, testified. And then she also, they were, we had also two more people we were gonna call from the state. She kept saying, Well, someone else is gonna talk about this, but she answered all the questions, uh, thinking she was doing such a great job. She volunteered all the stuff, and then these two experts come in and just say, Yeah, none of that's correct. And then we decide we're not gonna call those other two witnesses anyway, and

Building Momentum And Forcing Silence

Karen Koehler 11:25

the state doesn't end up calling anybody. We can get to that point.

Mo Hamoudi 11:29

But but but those experts and the liability case was but can I say did I predict that they would not put on a defense? You did. Okay.

Karen Koehler 11:40

I didn't.

Mo Hamoudi 11:41

Okay, I predicted that they wouldn't put on any more witnesses. And so when I went with their first, we led with their first witness. Well, by the way, I predicted they wouldn't put on a defense. She selected the order of witnesses. I didn't.

Karen Koehler 11:53

Yeah.

Mo Hamoudi 11:54

She said, let's call their witness first. I wanted it. And so I I let her explain everything, okay, because I knew that these two were gonna come in and annihilate her testimony.

Karen Koehler 12:06

Let her say whatever she wanted. And and and here's the deal. You can once you lose your momentum, you cannot get it. So if you start off with your best witnesses and then the state goes and you lose your momentum, you're not gonna get it back. Yeah. Not normally. Now it's possible, but it's different when you start off at the bottom and then you you're you're building a momentum that we never lost our momentum after that. And we never really had it to lose after the first what one sets the stage. She was horrible for us and horrible for them in the end.

Mo Hamoudi 12:41

Because she was gonna stay there the whole day. But I think that the the gamble paid off because I did not think It was not a gamble, it was a calculated decision. It was a calculated decision, but I call it there was a show. What I what I predicted was like after these two testify, there is no way they're gonna put her back up.

Karen Koehler 13:00

Which they weren't.

Mo Hamoudi 13:01

Okay. And I said, I know the other two. There is no way that they could match credentials to these two. So for them to put the other two up would be a huge gamble for them.

Karen Koehler 13:12

And none of them had been there back then.

Mo Hamoudi 13:14

No, no, no. So that's that that was the strategic judgment.

Karen Koehler 13:18

All right, let's cover one more witness and then we'll do one more episode on closing. Okay. Let's let's uh let's cover the psych.

Mo Hamoudi 13:27

You you handled that.

Karen Koehler 13:28

So the psych

The Damages Expert And A Heinous Question

Karen Koehler 13:29

was retained by Mo, and he'd worked with them when he was a public defender. This the psych had really never worked on any civil abuse cases like this. And he was known known for doing uh evaluations primarily of sex offenders.

Mo Hamoudi 13:43

Yeah.

Karen Koehler 13:44

So uh Mo handled him for the first year. I never even talked to him, and then I was gonna do damages, I took over. Um, I I talked to him like twice before trial. Uh, we did trial, and oh my god, he was one of the best ever. Um, he was so good. He mumbled a little bit, but it just made you want to hear more. He was like your trusted uncle.

Mo Hamoudi 14:09

Yes.

Karen Koehler 14:09

The way he talked. He was so clear, he was so he was so good. He brought it so much to life. He was so authoritative, um, without being um, you know, book bookheaded because he's he's he's not that kind of a person. And he's humble, he's a humble guy who lives on Squim. Squim.

Mo Hamoudi 14:29

Yeah.

Karen Koehler 14:30

Lives on Squim. So Nathan gets up to cross him. This was actually the worst, single worst cross. I don't know that he ever, he could not recover after his cross of this guy because he and I just lay it down there. Um, you know, one of the issues is he um recognizes institutional betrayal, which is uh basically a trauma and um exacerbator. It's not in the DSM 4. So Nathan comes up there with six pages of typewritten cross and starts going through it. I am not gonna bore you with the boring part because it was terrible. This expert who looked like I said, your laid-back Pacific Northwest uncle from Squim, who was probably wearing dockers and you know, tennis shoes, like we were always wearing, not only handled everything, he could give them the sights. He told them the names of the professors, and I mean, he just did it, he never looked at his whole entire file the whole time he testified. He was great, he just knew the case. So Nathan's getting ready for his big, huge, giant, you know, moment with the guy. Do you remember what he said? I mean, I'll never forget it.

Mo Hamoudi 15:47

The distinction between just go ahead and do it.

Karen Koehler 15:49

No, you're gonna do it, you gotta do it with the acting abilities that we all know that what you have.

Mo Hamoudi 15:56

Yeah.

Karen Koehler 15:57

And you're gonna do it with Nathan's tone, and then you're gonna do it with Dr. Manley's answer. Can you do that?

Mo Hamoudi 16:04

I don't know if I remember exactly his answer.

Karen Koehler 16:06

But you remember pretty much. I remember the quite okay, do the qu you have to you have to be in character and do that.

Mo Hamoudi 16:11

Yeah. Um Dr. Manley. Um you admit that um Mr. McFarland was subjected only to fellatio, whereas Mr. Hockhalter was sodomized, and that fallacious is not as bad as sodomy.

Karen Koehler 16:38

Pretty much. He didn't use those actual words, but he he said those.

Mike Todd 16:42

That is what he said.

Karen Koehler 16:43

He asked them basically to rate the level of Yeah, which one's worse, essentially.

Mike Todd 16:48

And that that if you were abused in one way.

Karen Koehler 16:51

You could hear a pin drop in the courtroom. We were horrified. I was like, did he just ask that question? And you know that the jury's gonna get an instruction saying for ch child sex abuse, sexual intercourse is any orifice, any penetration, no matter how slight, that is considered sexual intercourse. So he asks that question. Now I would like you to be Dr. Manley who's so quiet and sedate and professional and uncly in a squim way.

Mo Hamoudi 17:26

He says basically, he looks at him and he says, sexual trauma of any kind. Of childhood sex childhood sexual trauma of any kind is uh damaging.

Karen Koehler 17:38

No, he said the most heinous thing that can happen to a human being.

Mo Hamoudi 17:45

Yeah. Yeah.

Karen Koehler 17:46

And he said it, I'll never he said heinous, and he was like, he wasn't out of his chair, but he was so upset.

Mo Hamoudi 17:55

He was upset.

Karen Koehler 17:56

This like, are you kidding me, you fool? He didn't say those words, but he was like, if if he if his emotions could speak, he would have said, I'll I'll do this part. Are you kidding me, you dumb fool? How could you ask me such a stupid question in a court of law before all these jurors? What the heck is wrong with you? I'll answer your question. Childhood sexual abuse is what the most heinous thing that can happen to a human being.

Mo Hamoudi 18:27

It's terrible. It was a terrible question. It was a horrible question.

Mike Todd 18:30

Yeah, do you think that they pretty much lost it right there?

Mo Hamoudi 18:33

I think they lost, they lost on the on the question of like damages. Like they weren't like like I don't know, I don't I don't know what the hell he was thinking, honestly. I have no idea what the hell he was thinking. He wasn't thinking.

Karen Koehler 18:47

It was the low moment for him. It was terrible. And in fact, I you know, I diary after every day, and I wrote down, and I do believe this is true, as soon as he said it, I think he wished he hadn't.

Mike Todd 18:58

Oh, I'm sure.

Karen Koehler 18:59

I think when he's articulated because so now they everything was written down. They were not gonna ask anything that they hadn't asked in a deposition, it was all written down. And anytime they went off script, there was a problem. They should have stepped to their stuck to their boring scripts. He went off script on that one and asked a question, and you could just tell, like, oh, I shouldn't have asked that question. And he just got leveled with that question, the with the answer. Leveled. And of course, then I get up and he goes, he's grabbing me. He's like, Don't get up, just let it don't say another word.

Mo Hamoudi 19:34

Yeah, yeah.

Karen Koehler 19:35

Don't say another word. And I did. I got up there and I said because he was insinuating that that uh this stuff wasn't in the DSM, therefore it wasn't. And I said, hasn't child sex abuse and the effects of it been known since the beginning of time? And he just went off. Went off and just it was it made it even more it was like a double whammy to their throat.

Mike Todd 20:03

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's been my thing about this whole thing. I I I didn't have to hear it from an expert. I know that that I mean, anybody that's had anything happen to them when they're child, don't don't even make it sex abuse. I remember my horrible things from my childhood to this day.

Karen Koehler 20:21

Because it's built in your body, it never goes away. It's inside of you, it's part of you, part of your DNA. Yeah.

Mike Todd 20:26

And I mean, you may be able to talk about it, you may be

Trauma Triggers And Final Reflections

Mike Todd 20:30

able to limit it somehow, but it's always gonna be there. It's always gonna affect you. And this kind of stuff, yeah, and to have the gall to try to pull the Bill Clinton on it is the most absurd thing I've ever heard.

Karen Koehler 20:45

It was so bad, Mike. There's two other things, you know, on this topic of it's in your body. The both of them described that to this day, if they s hear the sound of a creaking stair, because that guy would go down that stair. Yeah. Yep. The creaking stair, it's just they are back there.

Mike Todd 21:09

Yeah.

Karen Koehler 21:09

Instantly back there.

Mike Todd 21:11

Back there. Well, and you said the you said the one where he was in the church and you saw the guy put the armor around the child young child and thought that guy must be a molester. I mean, that's that's the kind of stuff that we're talking about.

Karen Koehler 21:21

That's that it fundamentally changes.

Mike Todd 21:23

It changes you in a deep way. Yeah. It's horrible.

Karen Koehler 21:28

Horrible. Okay, let's end it there.