Kendall Coffey featured in Attorney at Law



Kendall Coffey

Kendall Coffey was named Attorney of the Month for Attorney at Law Magazine and featured on the cover.  They also put together a wonderful bio for him. 

Miami litigators cleared of all wrongdoing

According to the Daily Business Review Miami litigators Michael Tein and Guy Lewis have been cleared of all wrongdoing in a recent dispute.

The legal issue involved concerned their representation of Tribe members Tammy Gwen Billie and her father, Jimmy Bert, who were involved in a car crash that killed a Miami woman 14 years ago.  Although the woman’s family was supposed to be awarded $3.2 million in 2009 the amount has yet to be paid. 

The two lawyers were accused of wrongdoing over alleged discovery violations in their representation of Billie and Bert and have been cleared of all charges. 

Kendall Coffey, who is representing Lewis  and Tein in front of the bar explains that the two of them were completely cleared.  “The Bar examined the issues thoroughly and carefully, and the result is a complete vindication for Lewis Tein, one of our pre-eminent litigation firms," Kendall Coffey said.

But there is still a dispute that the Bar is monitoring, regarding whether the assertion by Tein and Lewis that the clients- not the tribe- paid their legal fees. 

Why is this an issue?  Read the full article over at the DailyBusiness Review. 

How long did the police spend investigating Trayvon Martin?

Did the Trayvon Martin investigation run its course too quickly?  This seems to be one of the biggest issues that protestors return to again and again, the fact that it only took seven hours and 50 minutes for Sanford police and the state attorney to decide to let George Zimmerman to go home, not charging him with the shooting death of Trayvon Martin.

 

According to MSNBC, nearby Lake Mary is a similar town with the same number of detectives (five).  Two years ago a shooting happened in Lake Mary and although eventually no charges were filed that city’s homicide unit called in the county sheriff’s department with its fully staffed crime lab to assist.  That investigation lasted for 16 days. 

 

Was seven hours too quick of an investigation?  Kendall Kendall Coffey, former United States Attorney thinks so.  “When a man with a gun kills someone who is unarmed, certainly should take a lot more than seven hours to reach the bottom line as to whether there's a crime,” he explains.

                                                                                                                                    

The special prosecutor examining the case will be the one to determine the truth of the matter, and is expected to report to the grand jury soon.

It doesn't take much to get away with murder

There a lot of different issues at play in the Trayvon Martin case.  There are the pictures of George Zimmerman’s injuries.  There’s the fact that he refused to stay in his car after the police dispatcher instructed him to.  There’s the mere seven hours that the police held him.  There’s Martin’s innocence and complete right to be exactly where he was.  There’s the confusion over who was calling for help in the 911 call. 

 

But the only issue that matters, according to Kendall Coffey, is who threw the first punch. 

 

This is because the case comes down to a strange Florida law called Stand Your Ground which allows someone to meet force with force if they aren’t engaging in unlawful activity and are attacked in someplace where they have the right to be. 

 

As Kendall Coffey explains, if Martin threw the first punch, no matter if he was scared of Zimmerman, Zimmerman would have had every right to shoot him.  If Zimmerman threw the first punch then he would have been taking part in unlawful activity and could not seek protection under the SYG statute.

 

With such a strange law, apparently all it takes in Florida to get away with murder is getting the other guy to attack you first.

 

Does all the evidence bolster Zimmerman's claim of self defense?

A great deal of evidence has been released in the Trayvon Martin case.  Several weeks ago the case seemed very different, before the stories, the pictures of the injuries, the witnesses accounts, all of which seems to bolster Zimmerman’s claims of self defense.  But does it?

 

Kendall Coffey was asked that very question on MSNBC.  Author of Spinning the Law, he’s an expert at trying cases in the court of public opinion.  But Coffey doesn’t think that the public reaction will change much, although it could affect the case all the same.

 

“This does more good for Zimmerman than it does for the prosecution because it tells us there are very important unanswered questions,” he explains.  “Enough unanswered questions mean unproven facts and... those are the tools of a defense lawyer trying to establish a reasonable doubt.”