“Respectfully, no, Your Honor,” Burrows says. “A text is not entitled to any presumption of reliability because it is so easily manipulated. For example, sometimes my children text me using my wife’s phone. When I get a text message from my wife that says, ‘Dad, when are you coming home?’ I assume it’s from one of my children, not my wife, even though if you look at my phone it appears that the message has come from my wife.”

“I love it when modern technology muddies what heretofore had been so clear,” Judge Gold says. “I’m going to need more guidance on this before issuing a ruling. So I’m going to send the jury home and tell them to come back tomorrow at eleven. You all need to be here at ten and prepared to recite chapter and verse on the law on this issue.”

48. DANA GOODWIN

48.

DANA GOODWIN

It’s going to be a long night. LeMarcus gave me the choice of where to order from, but when I said I didn’t care, he selected a pizza place. He also said he was open to any toppings except olives and anchovies, but I still didn’t have an opinion, so he ordered the pie plain.

I usually do my own legal research, and I can see by LeMarcus’s familiarity with the legal databases that he doesn’t delegate this task to junior lawyers either. Our issue—the admissibility of a text message against a hearsay challenge—wasn’t even a consideration ten years ago, which greatly limits the scope of the research. The “patient zero” of text admission cases is from Pennsylvania, a September 16, 2011, ruling issued by a “Bowles, J,” according to the written decision. I can’t tell if “J” stands for his first name or signifies that he’s a judge.

To my utter shock, “Bowles, J” ruled that the text message in that case was inadmissible. I start reading from the opinion out loud, breaking what must have been twenty minutes without either of us making a sound.