The play sometimes gets rough in the courtroom and sometimes a lawyer's verbal shot lands south of the belt.
Maybe that's what happened Wednesday to veteran Philadelphia criminal defense lawyer Nino V. Tinari, one of the lawyers defending former city Common Pleas Court Judge Willis W. Berry Jr. against criminal conflict of interest charges brought by state prosecutors.
Questioning prosecution witness Eric Eklund, an agent for the state Attorney General's office, Tinari asked in faux innocence about his employer: "That means you work for Kathleen Kane?"
If the import of Tinari's remark escaped some jurors, the reaction of Deputy Attorney General Daniel J. Dye did not.
Dye angrily objected: "If we're going to play that way" and then went on to say that Eklund, he and everyone else who worked for the Attorney General's office worked for the "people of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania."
Tinari then had his own objection: "I think you're objecting in anger."
The jurors, some smiling, watched as Common Pleas Court Judge S. Gerald Corso, a senior judge from Montgomery County specially assigned to preside over the trial, ordered the lawyers into an anteroom.
The allegations -- Berry, 72, used his judicial office and staff to manage his personal real estate business -- go back to 2007 in a series of articles in The Inquirer. Two years later, after a probe by the state's judiciary, Berry was suspended without pay for four months for what the Court of Judicial Discipline determined was a conflict of interest. But it was not until May 2014, almost two years after Berry retired following 16 years on the bench, that the Attorney General's office announced the criminal charges against Berry.
That last fact has been cited repeatedly by Berry's lawyers in an unsuccessful attempt to get the charges dismissed under the theory he's being punished twice for the same crime. In the interim, however, Kane has run into her own legal problems. A grand jury in Montgomery County has recommended Kane be charged with perjury, official oppression and related charges for leaking confidential information to a newspaper to embarrass a critic. A second grand jury in Philadelphia is reportedly looking into Kane's decision not to prosecute six elected Democratic officials caught on tape taking money or gifts from a lobbyist in an undercover sting investigation.
When judge and lawyers emerged from behind closed doors and the sparks between Tinari and Dye threatened to resume, Corso cut them both off.
"I think you both made your points," the judge added.