#124 An Attorney's Disrespect

I promised to give you the name of the attorney who was the most respectful in manner of any attorney I've talked to but the most disrespectful in what he said. I went by his office which was just a block or two from the Gainesville Police Department because I could not recall his name. The names I saw on the sign at his office did not ring a bell either so I went inside and described him. It turns out that attorney Bill Davis is now a Circuit Court Judge. Now let me explain the issue of respect. I went to see him about five years ago because Vincent "Keith" Starling had publicly charged me with carrying a firearm in the public. He had a picture of me wearing a sheath on my side as I walked a dog, Rambo, down the lane. The sheath contained a Bowie knife, and I was carrying it to protect Rambo and myself from Starllings' seemingly vicious Rotterweilers. Keith himself had warned me that the dogs would come through the fence and therefore did not want us walking down our lane becaue it upset his dogs. I wanted Keith to build a stronger fence so my wife and I could take our dogs for daily walks like we did in Virginia. But he wouldn't. Instead, he and his wife, Sherry, would yell at us whenever we tried to walk the dogs on our lane past his trailer. I should have called the police but I had worked for government so many years in Virginia that I wanted as little contact with it as possible. Anyone with any knowledge of handguns could look at the picture and see that it was not a holster for a short gun but a knife sheath. But State Attorney who represented the Starlings was just out of law school and was Jewish. Now American Jews are notoriously negative toward guns in spite of the fact that it is the gun that allows Israel to live as a small nation in a sea of murderously hostile Arabs. This young lady probably didn't know a holster from a sheath. The first lawyer I went to about this charge did not make his appointment because he and his wife were taking home their adopted child. When I drove into the lawyers's parking lot with the tallest palm tree in Gainesville nearby, I was followed by a Gainesville Police Department forensic truck. The truck drove to the back door of the lawyers' office and a cop got out of the truck and went inside. "These defense lawyers are entirely too chummy with the police department," I thought. "When did you ever see a policeman speaking for the defense and not the prosecutor? Never!" When I went inside, the very polite secretary said that Bill Davis would be seeing me. Bill ushered me into his office. He was an ex-Ranger and had his medals framed just above the chair I sat in. He spoke in a most gentlemanly manner, truly Old South. After I told him a little of the history behind the charge, he interrupted me, saying (this is paraphrasing, not a true quote), "I may not be able to help you, Mr. Nickerson. Some of what you have told me rings a bell. I know lawyers are supposed to remember everything, but I don't. Corporal Stout may have mentioned this, and thererfore I can't represent you and go to court on something he may have told me about."
"Did you represent him."
"No, but I can't speak of anything he may have told me, and I really don't remember all he spoke about."
"Dan Stout was not involved in this."
"He wasn't?"
"No, only Keith Stout, his wife, Sherry, and her son, Aaron."
"Okay then."
We discussed the case, I left, and soon he called me back to his office. "I have some bad news for you: I called Corporal Stout and asked him if he was involved in this issue of carrying a firearm in public. He said he was. I asked him if it were second hand or direct. He said he was a direct witness."
"That's not true. He was not there."
Bill Davis shrugged his shoulders in a helpless gesture and - here comes the disrpectful part - said, "This is all about your neighbors being terrified that you're carrying a gun down the lane. That's what this is all about!" Bill Davis was telling me that he didn't believe me. First impressions were right. He was too close to the police. At that point, I did not have a copy of the picture the Starlings took of me carrying the sheath knife. Unfortunately, my T-shirt was out and covered the hilt of the knife. But as a Ranger, certainly Bill would have recognized the sheath for a knife sheath and known it was not a handgun holster. I hope that would have made a difference as I would have liked working with him. When I told him about the behavior of the State Attorney toward me - being very short with me and hanging up without saying goodbye and described what she looked like, he said, "She sounds like my intern. I am a professor at the (University of Florida) lawschool." When I had my second visit with him, he had called around about her too and said, "I was right about who that State Attorney was. She had been my intern. I'm sorry you got treated so roughly by her. She wasn't like that here." Peter Nickerson at peternickerson12@yahoo.com or 352-359-0849. Calling is much better.