Speaker 1: Pat Screlley has been live streaming and tweeting about the trial.
Speaker 1: But on Friday, he walked into a courtroom set up
Speaker 1: for reporters and began to vent were you there? Yes,
Speaker 1: I was there, And it was quite by surprise that
Speaker 1: happened during the court break. And the only thing we
Speaker 1: can surmises that maybe he got lonely because he realized
Speaker 1: that no one was in the courtroom. We must be somewhere.
Speaker 1: So he walked into this open courtroom where the reporters
Speaker 1: are writing their stories during the lunch break, and he
Speaker 1: started saying, why are you writing this? Why are you
Speaker 1: writing that you know and criticizing the government's witnesses, and
Speaker 1: how how did he leave the room? How and how
Speaker 1: long did this conversation go on? The It was about
Speaker 1: five minutes long, and most of us were so shocked
Speaker 1: when it happened that we sort of everyone would kind
Speaker 1: of take turns asking a question because it was so
Speaker 1: shocking that or surprising that the defendant would come in
Speaker 1: and start personally talking about each witness and assessing their
Speaker 1: credibility and making comments about the government, just accrediting the
Speaker 1: government and the prosecutor's style, and so it finally ended.
Speaker 1: It was about five minutes long, and it finally ended
Speaker 1: when we suddenly heard the door courtroom door open it
Speaker 1: and was Benjamin Braffman, his defense lawyer, saying Martin, could
Speaker 1: I see you for a minute, and then Screlli was
Speaker 1: basically asked to take a taken away by his lawyer. Well,
Speaker 1: Braffman did seem to be keeping him under control. As
Speaker 1: for our social media for a little while, but so
Speaker 1: that seemed to be the last straw for the prosecutors.
Speaker 1: Tell us what they asked for and what happened. Well,
Speaker 1: he's been um tweeting and retweeting comments criticizing the government's case,
Speaker 1: the veracity of the witnesses under a new Twitter handle.
Speaker 1: You guys might remember in January he was banned from
Speaker 1: Twitter for harassing a female reporter and he reincarnated himself
Speaker 1: under a new handle, and that's what he was using
Speaker 1: to retweet comments about, Oh, this witness is a victim,
Speaker 1: how could she be a victim? For example? So, um,
Speaker 1: he's been doing that during the trial and making comments
Speaker 1: about things that in court on his on his Twitter,
Speaker 1: on his Twitter page, and in Facebook. So what did
Speaker 1: the prosecutors asked to have done, they asked to gag him,
Speaker 1: and they wanted him either to be gagged completely during
Speaker 1: the trial to prevent it from me talking around the courthouse,
Speaker 1: or to partially sequestered the jury, which is they only
Speaker 1: do in mafia or in terrorism cases when the safety
Speaker 1: of the juries under in questions. So what they do
Speaker 1: is they'll have a marshal escort them to in front
Speaker 1: of courthouse and keep them away from other people. The
Speaker 1: judge said she would refuse to do that because that
Speaker 1: would be punishing the jury and they're already in the
Speaker 1: courtroom for ten hours a day listening to testimonies. So
Speaker 1: she decided they needed to have their time outside in
Speaker 1: the in the free outdoors, in the fresh air. Pat.
Speaker 1: In your story today, you mentioned that prosecutors revealed that
Speaker 1: Screlly's lawyers offered to have him plead guilty talk. Can
Speaker 1: you tell us a little more about that. Yeah. One
Speaker 1: of my colleagues asked, when Screlly came into the press
Speaker 1: room on Friday, So, Martin, why did you go to trial? Oh?
Speaker 1: Did the government after ever offer you a plea deal?
Speaker 1: And he didn't quite answer it. He kept insisting I
Speaker 1: wanted my day in court. I wanted my day in court,
Speaker 1: and the prosecutor UM today raised that as another example
Speaker 1: of inaccuracies the Screlly statements. She said that Um there
Speaker 1: had been repeated multiple requests by initiated by the defense,
Speaker 1: by Screlli's legal team to a plea deal as recently
Speaker 1: as UM June nineteenth, which was a week before the
Speaker 1: trial started, So she wanted to put the you know,
Speaker 1: the truth to the matter that the defense had repeatedly
Speaker 1: asked the government for a plea deal. Pat Screlly's own lawyer,
Speaker 1: Benjamin Breathman, in his opening statement, said that his client
Speaker 1: might be just nuts and called has called him strange
Speaker 1: but brilliant. Today he said, well, he's relatively young though
Speaker 1: he's thirty four. Is Breathman building a defense around Screlly's
Speaker 1: odd and erratic behavior. In some way, it does seem
Speaker 1: to be the case because his lawyer is explained, as
Speaker 1: he was trying to explain to the judge, the judge said,
Speaker 1: you have four lawyers with this, why wasn't someone watching Martin?
Speaker 1: So now a defense lawyer is going to be assigned
Speaker 1: to watch him at all times, and UM, it does
Speaker 1: seem that that's the defenses argument that he may be strange,
Speaker 1: he may be odd, but he's not guilty. And how
Speaker 1: much longer do you and the jurors have to sit
Speaker 1: through this trial? Well, this is supposed to be up
Speaker 1: to a five week trial, so we were only in
Speaker 1: day um, technically day four of today's the fourth day
Speaker 1: and we're only on the fourth witness. So more to
Speaker 1: more to, you know, stay tuned. And oh and also
Speaker 1: scrawley um newest Twitter handle, just got the suspended