The facts were simple enough to fit on an index card.

The prosecution wrote a novel trying to explain them away.

The jury needed only thirty minutes to put the truth back where it belonged.

Our client, a veteran police officer, woke to violence at the hands of his wife and did exactly what the law instructs: he stopped the attack and called 911. What the government did with that simple sequence of events was – bafflingly – to turn him into the defendant.

From the start, the state’s theory was as simple as it was problematic: the wife’s assault of our client never occurred, and his restraint of her was domestic violence. Once that assumption took root, the case grew backward: their narrative appeared first and they expected that the hard evidence would simply follow. Prosecutors aimed to show they would not hesitate to charge a police officer but in pursuing this political goal, they were ignoring the facts of the case.

Once prosecutors granted immunity protection, the wife admitted that she had, in fact, struck him first. She explained that she had lied to police to avoid being jailed and separated from her child. Despite her admission, the state continued to move forward with their case. At trial, the state relied on a domestic violence “cycle of abuse” expert whose sweeping generalizations wilted under co-counsel Jonathan Greenlee’s cross-examination.

During the closing argument, we asked the jury: where was the electrifying, chilling evidence that would justify a conviction? Where was the riveting proof that could overcome reasonable doubt? The prosecution leveraged every angle they could, but they were proceeding in fiction rather than fact. Their argument was legal gaslighting, masquerading as a case.

The officers who testified understood this. After they stepped down from the witness stand, they walked over to the defense table and shook our hands in front of the jury. The jury knew what to do. Their deliberations were brief, and their verdict decisive: not guilty on all three counts. Click here to listen to a portion of the redacted transcript of the closing argument where Kenneth F. Eichner explains how the government “got this one wrong.”