Several defense lawyers in California whose clients squared off against Joe Biden accuser Tara Reade while she was serving as an expert witness on domestic violence are re-examining their cases after questions were raised this week about her credentials, The New York Times reports. After CNN broke the news that the university where Reade said she earned her bachelor’s degree said she had never earned a degree there, the Monterey County public defender’s office and several other criminal defense attorneys began digging up old cases to see if they should be reopened. Reade, who testified in court cases for years as an expert on domestic violence, has said the school would not have a record of her degree because she completed it as part of a “protected program” after fleeing domestic abuse. A spokesperson for the school, Antioch University, disputed this, according to the Times.
Lawyers say even a slight exaggeration on her part is grounds to scrutinize previous cases. “People have been convicted based upon this, and that’s wrong,” Roland Soltesz, a criminal defense lawyer whose client went up against Reade as an expert witness in 2018, told the Times. The Monterey County chief assistant district attorney, Berkley Brannon, told the Times that if it’s proven Reade never earned her bachelor’s degree, his office would notify all defense lawyers she’d crossed paths with in court. “We don’t want people that we call lying about anything,” he was quoted as saying.
Read it at The New York Times
