Thomas-Rasset attorney: jurors thought she lied; wishes he could have fought in Somalia

CNET's Greg Sandoval has an entertaining profile of the "odd couple" pair of attorneys who defended Jammie Thomas-Rasset at her recent copyright trial that ended in a $1.92 million verdict for the record label plaintiffs: Kiwi Camara, the "evil genius" wunderkind from Hawaii, and Joe Sibley, the Nietzsche-reading ex-Army Ranger who started off a "poor kid from East Texas."

Among the highlights:

"I like pain. I like fighting. I like conflict," says Joe Sibley. "Going to war was something I always wanted to do (but didn't)...later in life I discovered I was more capable of fighting and ending wars with my mind."

***

On Thomas-Rassets' blame-the-kids-or-ex-boyfriend defense: "On one end, if the jury believed it, they could let her off," Sibley said. "On the other end, if they disbelieved it that could create the opposite effect. If the jury thought she was lying and pointing a finger at family members, that could result in inflation of the statutory damages and in my opinion that is what happened in this case."

***

After getting out of the Army, [Sibley] took a series of odd jobs in his East Texas hometown of Spring. No one in his family had ever gone to college and he never thought he would either--he was an average student in high school who got disciplined a couple of times for fighting--until one day he woke up and wanted to study philosophy and Frederick Nietzsche. First came community college then the University of Texas, where he took 21 hours of course work each term and graduated with honors, all the while working part-time, maintaining a marriage and raising a child.

As I've said before, while I disagree with most of the factual and legal arguments Sibley and Camara made in Thomas-Rasset's defense (and I thought their specious personal attacks on the plaintiffs' attorneys were beyond the pale) I thought they put up a fairly strong defense, given that they were stuck with many decisions that had been made well before they arrived on the scene, and that they had only about three weeks to prepare for trial. Charges that they did a "terrible job" are uninformed and unfair.

Read the whole thing.