Nothing much to add in Johnson-Klein trial
Fresno Bee, 11/21/07
Lani Baldwin-Malcolm spent all of 15 minutes on the witness stand to explain why she decided to fly to Fresno rather than get an early start on Thanksgiving with her family in Oklahoma. And, she added, she can't stomach some of her former boss' behavior.
"I really don't respect [Johnson-Klein's] personal and professional conduct, but I like her OK," Baldwin-Malcolm said.
To get to the witness stand, Baldwin-Malcolm had to wait out an often thunderous, nearly daylong dispute between lawyers for Johnson-Klein and defendant Fresno State.
And in the end, said a prominent Fresno employment-law attorney, the lawyers most likely walked away shaking their heads at the futility of it all.
"I think today's testimony probably amounted to a zero for both sides," said Nicholas "Butch" Wagner.
So much of the testimony in the 6-week-old Johnson-Klein trial makes sense only within a laborious context, and Baldwin-Malcolm's unexpected appearance in Fresno County Superior Court fits this pattern.
Johnson-Klein and Baldwin-Malcolm worked together from 1998 to 2000 at Cameron University in Oklahoma. Johnson-Klein was the women's basketball coach; Baldwin-Malcolm, her once-promising playing career curtailed by a knee injury, was a team student assistant.
During their Cameron years, Baldwin-Malcolm testified Monday in a videotaped deposition, Johnson-Klein on five or six occasions asked for some of Baldwin-Malcolm's prescription painkillers, prescribed for her after several knee surgeries.
Baldwin-Malcolm said she gave Johnson-Klein what she wanted -- usually hydrocodone, a generic narcotic painkiller that often goes by the brand name Vicodin.
Baldwin-Malcolm added two more dramatic charges: Johnson-Klein admitted to Baldwin-Malcolm in an August telephone call that she had lied under oath in a deposition, and Johnson-Klein suggested Baldwin-Malcolm could feign poor memory if asked under oath about the pill incidents.
The charges, which Johnson-Klein denies, are key to the claims of both sides.
Fresno State contends it had to fire Johnson-Klein in March 2005 because, among her many violations of university policy, she took a half-bottle of prescription painkillers from sophomore guard Chantella Perera in October 2005. The Baldwin-Malcolm allegations confirm a pattern of irresponsible behavior by Johnson-Klein in positions of authority, the university says.
Johnson-Klein sued Fresno State in August 2005, saying the university fired her in retaliation for her advocacy of gender equity. The Baldwin-Malcolm charges are merely more lies conjured out of thin air by a university desperate to discredit her, Johnson-Klein says.
For a trial that has had no shortage of anger and tears, Monday's session ended on note of apparent equanimity. Both sides agreed on Tuesday's agenda: Open with the final hour of Baldwin-Malcolm's taped testimony, add testimony from several former Fresno State players or athletic department employees, then break for a long Thanksgiving and return to court Monday.
That kindred spirit died Tuesday morning in the minute or so it took Fresno State lawyer Mick Marderosian to tell the court he wanted to put Baldwin-Malcolm on the witness stand.
The ensuing argument lasted for 30 minutes, and spilled into a lunch-time hearing, all out of the jury's earshot.
Fresno State's position: Baldwin-Malcolm, attending a convention in Dallas on Monday, heard from co-workers at a private Christian school in Lawton, Okla., that the school's ownership had become a trial issue. Once reluctant to testify in person, Baldwin-Malcolm, the school's principal, now wanted her day in court. The defense needs her.
Johnson-Klein's position: We were blindsided. Baldwin-Malcolm had her chance to testify in person, and rejected it. Send her back to Oklahoma. And, for good measure, remove from the record all of her explosive taped testimony from Monday.
With Fresno State President John Welty watching from the defendant's table, Judge Donald S. Black delivered a ruling that granted Fresno State's wish, but made it irrelevant. Baldwin-Malcolm may testify, Black said, but she can't repeat what she'd already said in her taped deposition.
What followed was this: Marderosian would ask a question; Johnson-Klein lawyer Dan Siegel would object, saying it was repetitive; Black would agree.
This generally repeated itself until, after about five minutes, Marderosian had had enough and sat down.
Siegel got in more questions under Black's guidelines, but they merely filled in the picture of how Baldwin-Malcolm came to be in Fresno, a topic that neither side contends is germane to the trial.
Wagner, who has no stake in the case, said Fresno State can't even take solace in figuring it at least displayed, in flesh and blood, a witness who had been seen only in two dimensions on a video screen.
Lawyers get no credit with a jury, Wagner said, for putting on a witness who "essentially says nothing."
More substance came later in day.
Former Fresno State trainer Nancy Furcsik, who served the women's basketball team in the 2003-04 and 2004-05 seasons, said Johnson-Klein once asked Furcsik if she had any Vicodin.
Furcsik said she told Johnson-Klein that she never carried prescription painkillers. Furcsik said Johnson-Klein never again asked her for Vicodin.
Former player Faith Probst said she was shocked during the 2004-05 season to see Johnson-Klein strike Johnson-Klein's daughter with the heel of her hand. Probst said Johnson-Klein did this in front of the team.
It was Probst who actually handed the half-bottle of Vicodin to Johnson-Klein in fall 2004. Probst said Perera, her roommate, had called, saying Johnson-Klein asked for the pills.
Handing Perera's medicine to Johnson-Klein was wrong, Probst said, but she did it because Johnson-Klein was their coach.
"It was my duty," Probst said.
Probst cried occasionally. She said Johnson-Klein portrayed herself as altruistic, but cared only for herself in 2004-05.
Probst said she can't forgive.
"There aren't many people in this world I hate," Probst said. "But I just couldn't stand her."