Replies

Heya Spunky - yeah that's basically the law I'm referring to. But, in that case, the Court (ie the finder of fact) which is just like a jury when its a non-jury trial, found that the silence was not an admission.

Admission by silence is not a 100% finding, it's something in the hands of the jury. Meaning, if YOU personally feel like there's a good reason for his silence you don't have to consider that silence as evidence of guilt.

That's why I love the jury system - it leaves the chance to do the right thing under the circumstance open.

But, when someone like Rush, or Martha Stewart, or etc etc stays silent for months and months and months - there's only one real reason. They have the million dollar lawyer/private-investigator/PR spin machine churning. I truly believe in my heart that its this simple....Rush is guilty of illegally buying and using prescription drugs. Rush is guilty of conspiracy to break the law by cooperating with his maid and her connections to buy and use illegal prescription drugs. And the only reason Rush doesn't come right out and deny it is because (a) he's waiting for his lawyers/investigators to find out all the info possible so his excuse matches the facts, and (b) he doesn't want to say something that gets used against him in his criminal trial.

So whose direct questions has Rush failed to answer? Palm Beach County's DA? Law enforcement officers and investigators? Or is it that he hasn't revealed the facts to The National Inquirer? Or The New York Times? Or Crossfire? Or his audience? Or YOU? If you were to walk up to me on the street, as a complete stranger, and start asking questions about possible litigation against me and I tell you I won't discuss it with you, am I confessing through my silence?

Rush Limbaugh is in no way obligated to you, sir, or anyone else for that matter, not directly empowered to demand information from him. His silence on the subject in the public arena is not a tacit confession, and wouldn't be admitted as evidence of guilt in a single courtroom in this country. Silence in an interrogation room in the presence of detectives or prosecutors asking direct questions about a case - certainly. But reticence over a microphone that happens to be broadcasting your voice to twenty million private citizens and strangers? "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, Mr. Limbaugh had ample opportunity to discuss the details of a pending case in which he was involved with millions of people he did not know and who had no legal right to demand such details from him, as well as with several nationally distributed tabloids that routinely display him shaking hands with bigfoot, but HE.... DID... NOT! His wife even testified that he suspiciously failed to answer the phone once after seeing Entertainment Weekly's number on the caller ID display. I ask... what does that say to YOU?"

Sounds ridiculous, because it IS. No judge would admit such "evidence," because it is NOT evidence. NO ONE need fear that reluctance or even REFUSAL to divulge details of an ongoing case to parties who do not have the authority to demand them can be used in a courtroom to prosecute them. They need not fear it because it is ABSOLUTELY inadmissible.

As an uninvolved party, you have NO IDEA why he's silent on the subject. You have no idea what's happening - you don't even know if he's the TARGET of the investigation, and not a material witness! You don't even know if investigators are THEMSELVES asking him not to divulge information to the public, so as not to disrupt their investigation! Remember the selective and controlled release of information during the sniper shootings? They did it that way for a REASON. Or how about the Ramsey case? Remember how the police kept complaining that information leaks were impeding the investigation?

Don't lay claim to information that, as a private citizen, isn't any of your business, and insist that Rush Limbaugh can be held responsible LEGALLY for failing to update YOU. Go apply for a badge in Palm Beach County, and then get assigned to the case. And if, after having done so, even your good cop/bad cop routine doesn't get him to spill the beans to you, THEN come back here and talk this talk. Because THEN you'd be CORRECT concerning the law - your interpretation of it would be legitimate. As it stands now, your argument is merely an inept attempt to reverse-engineer a concept to make it fit your lame argument. But it's a square peg, sir. As much as you desperately wish, it just won't fit through this round hole.

And by the way - people who use the "I should know, I'm an expert" line in their argumentation are always suspicious, and we'll supplement "suspicious" with SUPREMELY LAME as well, for good measure. "I should know, I'm a lawyer," is just such a line. "I'm right, because I'm an expert on this subject." Or, "How should you know what happened at Normandy? I was ALIVE in 1944. You weren't even BORN." If you are indeed a lawyer, you would of course have attended law school, where you would have learned in your first logic course that this is a logical fallacy known as an "appeal to authority." Or perhaps you wouldn't have learned this in law school - by then, I'm sure, your instructors would probably expect you to ALREADY know something so basic from your undergraduate studies. This line of argumentation is especially douche-esque when attempted online - in anonymous chatrooms or MESSAGEBOARDS, where YOU exist to OTHERS and THEY to YOU as nothing more than disembodied lines of TEXT.

"I'm a lawyer."

Well then, my good, long-time, trusted and intimate friend Bronco_Buster_FweetHyagh, who I do not know and who I have never met - point, set, MATCH! I yield! You win the argument! You're right, because you're a LAWYER, and not, in fact, some pimple faced 14-year-old sitting in front of his computer wearing nothing but his Lord of the Rings T-Shirt and tube socks as he switches browser windows between this messageboard and bigblackbooties.com, typing his posts quietly so as not to be discovered by his mother, who will immediately revoke his XBox privileges for messing around with the parental controls on the family AOL account - AGAIN! And you know how I know this? Because we're SUCH GOOD FRIENDS.

Go lie somewhere else. Or - no, stay. Continue on with us here. It's entertaining.