It isn’t clear

Friday, August 5, 2011

We wouldn’t be surprised if Brookliners screamed if they read, in The Telegraph, one more story about possible issues with the town’s police chief, but a story that ran on July 27 raises a question. See if this makes sense:

That story said that the state attorney general’s office had determined that the chief had not perjured himself at a hearing on a case involving his son and a protective order sought by his former girlfriend. Enough said about that.

The issue always seemed a little convoluted. Judge Martha Crocker, hearing the case involving the son, wrote in an opinion that cell phone records contradicted the chief’s testimony about whether the son called him during the alleged altercation with his girlfriend. Is “contradicted” the same thing as perjured?

Anyway, here’s where it seems a bit convoluted, for what that’s worth:

The court, according to the story by our Hattie Bernstein, got two sets of cell phone records.

• The first, “available and referred to during the hearing” on the alleged altercation, show a May 19 call made on Jonathan Quigley’s cell phone at 2:44 p.m. to his father’s (the chief’s) number. So far, easy to follow.

The other set of cell phone records included phone calls and text messages “examined by the AG’s office” and shows:

• A text sent from Jonathan Quigley’s phone to his father on May 19 at 2:43 p.m.

• And a phone call from the chief to his son at 2:43 p.m. That call lasted three minutes, according to the records.

OK so far? Clear? So, what’s the problem? At the hearing for his son, the chief said he didn’t get a phone call from his son.

But Jane Young, of the AG’s office said, in the end, “There was no evidence” that the chief committed perjury. “There was an initial text and he (the chief) made a call back to his son.”

Right? But what about the call logged at 2:44 p.m. from the son to the dad?

We have no idea and it’s not clear, as the Telegraph story said, “why the two sets of phone records appear to disagree,” nor is it clear why that discrepancy wasn’t cleared up by the AG’s office except that according to the story, the AG’s office only examined the cell phone records from 2:43 p.m., not the record listing the 2:44 p.m. call.

But we wonder about this: If the chief was talking to his son for three minutes starting at 2:43, how could his son have called him at 2:44?

And is it possible for a person on Phone A to text the person on Phone B at the same time the person on Phone B is calling the person on Phone A?

We find this technically confusing, but we are also confused by the notion that someone, somewhere, believed that the chief had perjured himself. We don’t have all the details, of course, but as far as we can tell, only Jane Young of the AG’s office used the word “perjured” and she only used it in the context of clearing the chief. So, who used it? Who said “perjured”? Judge Crocker? The story only said she felt the chief had “contradicted” himself. That isn’t necessarily perjury; that could just be a mistake.