Harry Potter and the Cedarville Censors by Brian Meadors

Author:Brian Meadors
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Published: 2019-02-20T16:00:00+00:00

13. “There are schools of magic”

“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”—J.K. Rowling, by the character Albus Dumbledore

I had allotted two hours for Angie Haney’s deposition. It ended an hour early. While we waited for the school board members to arrive, David called his office for some ongoing client emergency, and I let him set up shop in our conference room.

Psychologically, depositions should be one-on-one, mano a mano. Properly done, the questioner should set the stage so that the person being deposed focuses only on the lawyer asking questions. The other lawyer and the court reporter should be ignored.

But in this case I needed to make an exception. My proof required that I show the motives of a majority of the school board.

The motives of the majority? There were three of them. What if they each had different motives? What if one of the board members had an improper motive, but two of them had an acceptable motive (for example, if the book caused “disruption” in the school)? In that event, I couldn’t really ascribe the same motive to all three voters and, by extension, I could not portray the school board 3–2 majority as having a single, improper motive.

My depositions needed to lock the board members into an improper motive, and that same improper motive had to be endorsed by all three.

I had thought about how to handle this for several days. Deposing each of the three separately and asking them the same set of questions would not only be tedious, but treacherous. I needed them to agree with each other. The most likely way to make that happen was to have their depositions done together.

I tried to make this happen without alerting the other side what I was up to.

“David,” I said to the school district’s lawyer, “I’m just going to ask these guys the same things. Why don’t we just have all three there—I’d start with Hodges—and then if he says anything different than what the other two think, they can speak up. It’s my understanding that Hodges was kind of the driving force behind all this anyway.”

Luckily, David agreed. When we started the deposition, I got it on the record.

MR. MEADORS: David, just to reiterate what you just said, my understanding of the conduct of the proceedings is that I am initially going to depose Mr. Hodges. And Mr. Shelly and Mr. Koonce are both here and they are going to listen to the proceedings and take notes. And then I am going to ask Mr. Shelly and Mr. Koonce if they have anything to add or subtract from what Mr. Hodges said. And so we are going to do this so that it will go more quickly and more efficiently, and they are going to take notes to make sure that they haven’t missed anything or that I am trying to put words in their mouth with Mr. Hodges. Is that

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