I love the State's arguments in response to Lazaro's motion.
State Response: Kouri Richins
www.scribd.com
Particularly these strong arguments:
The Court should deny the Defendant’s Motion to Enforce Order and For Contempt Sanctions. The Motion is a “fire, aim, ready” reaction to the Defendant’s misconduct in jail. The Motion contains factual errors and legal misunderstandings, rendering it unpersuasive at best.
The State Did Not Violate the Court’s Gag Order
The Court’s narrowly tailored gag order applies to “extrajudicial statements.” The State has not made any extrajudicial statements.
The Walk the Dog Letter is an Exhibit to the State’s Motion for No Contact Order. This is the very definition of a judicial statement. This Court has been very clear that all issues in this proceeding will and shall be conducted transparently and with an associated public record. The Walk the Dog Letter is an exhibit, and a material one, which provides critical justification for the State’s request for relief.
As a footnote, the Motion also suggests that the State violated the Court’s gag order because filing the Walk the Dog Letter “disregarded the parties’ stipulation to produce documents in a specific, orderly and formal manner.” It is difficult to imagine a production that is more specific, orderly and formal than a judicial filing.
The Defendant
asserts that the Walk the Dog Letter is a privileged attorney-client communication because “upon information and belief” a Sheriff’s Deputy recovered it from an envelope that was labeled “Skye Lazaro (Attorney Privileged).” A Sheriff’s Deputy in fact recovered the letter from the Defendant’s LSAT prep book. Since the Motion to Enforce Order and for Contempt was filed, the Defendant has characterized the Walk the Dog Letter as a work of her own fiction writing, not a letter to her lawyer.
Regardless,
hiding a non-privileged communication in an envelope labeled “privileged” does not magically transform it into a privileged communication. If it did, such envelopes would quickly be converted to devices for circumventing jail safety rules.
Moreover, as the Motion recognizes, Sheriff’s Deputies are allowed to inspect the Defendant’s legal envelope to determine whether she is using it to hide contraband. The Walk the Dog Letter is evidence of a crime, which is classic contraband.
The Walk the Dog Letter is not a privileged attorney-client communication because it speaks directly to the Defendant’s mother and includes passages about the Defendant's attorney (not to the Defendant’s attorney). It’s audience, content, and purpose are readily apparent – the Defendant is asking her mother to facilitate witness tampering involving her brother, seeking to have her brother support a false factual narrative.
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Lazaro's motion has no leg to stand on, IMO. And now with KR's admission that she made up the whole thing -- that the contents of the letter are simply a work of fiction -- she's once again cut off her nose to spite her face. And ruined any chance of using the fictional story in her defense at trial. AIN'T LIFE GRAND?
www.kpcw.org
