When NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell hired attorney and league confidant Ted Wells to investigate what was alleged to have been a conspiracy in the Patriots organization to deflate footballs running up to January's AFC Championship Game, he proclaimed the integrity of the proceedings as independent.
Seven months hence, United States Federal Judge Richard M. Berman disagreed.
Ruling against the NFL's four-game suspension of quarterback Tom Brady on Thursday, Berman placed the word "independent" in quotation marks in his opinion, clearing placing what he believes a reasonable doubt on that original declaration.
Chief among his reasons for doubting that independence was that NFL general counsel Jeff Pash was permitted (and had been proved to so permit) to edit the official verdict of Wells' report after it was submitted to the league, and that the accused was not entitled to see those edits.
"Denied the opportunity to examine Pash at the arbitral hearing, Brady was prejudiced. He was foreclosed from exploring, among other things, whether the Pash/Wells investigation was truly 'independent,' and how and why the NFL's General Counsel came to edit a supposedly independent investigation report," Berman wrote in his opinion.
Then, of course, there is the fact of to whom Wells really owed his loyalty. The man who his employers were convinced was guilty of the crime they alleged him to have committed, or the league that would, for his services, enrich him by millions of dollars.
The defense rests.
No comments:
Post a Comment