Blago's Lawyers All About Hyperbole

By Marcus Gilmer in News on May 9, 2009 4:35PM

With many, many mountains of evidence to climb, lawyers representing former governor Rod Blagojevich are now claiming they're overwhelmed by what the prosecution has turned over to them. With literally millions of pages of documents and hundreds of hours of recorded conversations to review, the lawyers are complaining there's no way they can get the case started on time. According to the Trib:

"With all those documents, how do you not go through the index and skim them, at least? You can't not look at them," Michael Ettinger, attorney for Rob Blagojevich, said in an interview. "The government created a monster."

The problem -- according to calculations by Ettinger and Sheldon Sorosky, the former governor's attorney -- is that it would take 51 years for one lawyer to digest all that paperwork if working eight hours a day, reading 160 pages a day, 364 days a year.

The Sun-Times' Natasha Korecki adds:

This comes after Judge Zagel said he would decide how many lawyers should be appointed to the case, in part, based on how much evidence there is.

Attorneys Michael Ettinger and Sheldon Sorosky asked Zagel to appoint a "sufficient number of attorneys so that the massive amount of discovery can be read and the tapes can be digested within a reasonable amount of time and Defendant Rod Blagojevich be afforded effective assistance of counsel."

We'd be lying if we said we were shedding any tears over this.