Originally Posted by
pmocek
That's all sensible, and I want to be careful not to exaggerate, so I appreciate you pushing back, Richard.
BUT, there's a big difference between 1) the difference between a) "I'm not going to answer any questions" and b) "I'm going to remain silent" and 2) the difference between a) ordering someone to leave four times, after each of which he refused, sometimes explicitly, followed by issuance of a verbal criminal trespass order and b) never once ordering or even asking someone to leave, eventually telling him to accompany you out, at which point he promptly complies.
Well, even there, sort of. I'm
purposely not going back to the transcript here, but instead relying on my memory. And my memory is that somebody, at some point, said something like "follow me" or "come with me".
As to one time vs. four times, how often have you meant to tell somebody something, didn't, but then became convinced that you did? If we intend to do something, we often remember that as something we
did.
This is clearly a case of "contempt of cop" and it's clear there was a massive overreaction at the airport that day and also that the testimony didn't match what happened, but I'm
still not ready to call that testimony an outright fabrication. Human memory is notorously fallible and we can fall into all kinds of traps where we remember what we
intended to do instead of what we did, or remember how we interpreted what was said, instead of what was said, and so on. Yes, it
could have been fabricated, but it could just as easily have been an example of "wishful memory".