The Facts Speak For Themselves — Or Do They?

You’ve heard the cliche, “the facts speak for themselves,” but actually, they can’t.  It takes a lawyer skilled in the fine art of trial presentation with the ability to tell the story to make the facts speak to a judge or jury. Elaine’s background as a print journalist for eight years before she went to law school in the United States puts her light years ahead of most lawyers in the art of trial presentation.  It’s in vogue today for a lawyer to take courses on “finding the client’s story,” or “learning how to tell a story.”  Elaine has been doing this for 35 years.   Here are  a few samples of Elaine’s storytelling abilities.

Cloud computing: Hidden danger to everyone’s civil liberties?

Published in The Drum / UK SAT 21 MAY 2011 By Elaine Whitfield Sharp, distinguished British-born US lawyer In Google’s latest move to take over the world, it is touting its newest shiny toy — the “Chromebook” — as technology empowering us to reach into “The Cloud” (aka, off-site digital storage) for all our needs in computer operating systems, software and data storage. But, will this technology free us or enslave us?  My view is that Chromebook and any other device that relies on “Cloud Computing,” creates stormy skies for lawyers and their clients by risking the loss of privacy and liberty at the hands of Big Brother. Let’s get down to brass tacks: Storing data on the “The Cloud” is just a trendy term for storing data on someone else’s server so that when you are away from your desk, you can access that data by WiFi or 3G network. … Continue reading

Article: A penchant for survival

Editor’s Note: Pang and Xue spoke through Jue Vue, Xue’s brother who has lived in the U.S. since the spring of 1978, and until recently was a bilingual technician for the Indochinese Education Program at WCC. By: Elaine Whitfield Sharp Pang has the details of the death of his son, Kau, and his family written in a small, tattered mission-school exercise book, a book he has carried wit him from his jungle hideout in Laos to a refugee camp in Thailand. Finally, on July 23, it came 9,000 miles with him to Ann Arbor. Pang’s cousin witnessed the killing and, afraid his mental message would die with him, wrote the details in the book for Pang. In 1978, Kua, 22, his wife Yang Lue, 25, and their two children Mai Thai, 3, and 10 year old Thor, were riddled with the communist Pathet Lao bullets trying to escape from Laos … Continue reading

Article: The Virtuous One

Like hundreds of other missionaries, Gladys Aylward went to China with nothing but faith and courage. They were all she ever needed. By: Elaine Whitfield Sharp Gladys Aylward’s report card from the mission training school in London was far from impressive. She had failed theology and couldn’t speak any Chinese. Yet as she trudged along London’s streets to return to her former occupation as a parlor maid, Gladys was certain God was calling her, as he had called hundreds of Western missionaries since the early 1800’s, to evangelize in China. If no missionary society would back her, then Gladys resolved that she must trust God and go alone. The Roaring Twenties were in full swing. World War I was a distant memory, and London society celebrated its every whim. For Gladys this meant there was plenty of overtime work carrying trays of champagne and hors d’oeuvres for England’s upper crust … Continue reading

Article: Toledo’s Golden Rule Mayor

Samuel Milton Jones believed the Golden Rule,  and not the ‘Rule of Gold,’ should govern men’s lives. By Elaine Whitfield Sharp SAMUEL Milton Jones, one of Toledo’s most controversial mayors, had a penchant for change and a vision that inspired hope in the city’s jobless thousands during the national Depression of 1890s. That vision also sent shock waves through the city’s crusty political elites. The Welsh-born oil driller made his fortune in the oil fields of Pennsylvania and Lima, and first came to Toledo in 1894 to manufacture an oil-drilling device he’d invented. The streams of ragged men begging for work at the door of his factory, the Acme Sucker Rod Co., moved him to pity. These conditions didn’t square with the young idealist’s concept of democracy and equality. The 1890’s Depression put one out of every five men out of work and sent mortgage rates soaring and farm prices … Continue reading

The Elephant on the Moon

There is no greater assault on American families by the State than the current use of junk science to accuse and convict mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, grandparents, friends and babysitters of abusing babies by so-called “shaken baby syndrome” (SBS). Continue reading

A Matter of Gravity

“A Matter of Gravity” is Part II of a three-part series. In Part I, “The Elephant on the Moon,” we saw that in the world of science, if one sets out to prove a hypothesis, one risks proving a fallacy and creating pseudo science rather than reliable science. The syndrome called “shaken baby syndrome” or “SBS” is based on faulty assumptions that, in the past half century, many set out to prove, but few set out to test. While shaking may cause injury to a child’s brain stem, cranio-cervical junction and upper cervical cord, it has now been falsified as a mechanism of causing intracranial bleeding above the convexities of the brain and to other areas of the brain. Read the article in PDF format

The Eighth Circle of Fire

Junk science lurks in child abuse cases of every variety, whether they are alleged sexual molestation, or other physical and mental abuse cases. Parts I and II of this series covered the scientific flaws of a specific area of child abuse: so-called “shaken baby syndrome” (SBS) cases, and the scientific flaws in short falls cases. This article will cover some of the ways to characterize and challenge those flaws in a pretrial Daubert or Frye motion using the rules of evidence governing the admissibility of scientific evidence. (If you do not have a SBS case, you may still find the section on scientific evidence rules helpful because it applies not only to cases of alleged SBS, but to all scientific evidentiary issues in all civil or criminal cases.) To the extent that the judge agrees to exclude testimony that is not based on reliable science, testimony that is not based on the correct application of reliable science to a case, … Continue reading

The House of Innocents

Evil events are rarely committed to paper. The history of child abuse inherently involves pain inflicted in the dark and behind closed doors, providing us with only the barest of facts. We know that royal children were poisoned and murdered for convenience or for their crowns and that the ancient Greeks disposed of handicapped children at birth. We hear words like “beaten,” “burned,” “raped,” and “exploited,” but these do little to reveal the enormous tragedies for which they are mere codes. Today, there is a vast infrastructure of child protective services (CPS) in America. It is funded by billions of federal and state tax dollars. History has been turned on its head. Instead of children being ‘seen and not heard,’ or having no right of survival at birth, children are now revered as precious, as our modern day mocking birds. The entire ‘village’ is involved in their protection and welfare. … Continue reading