CAPE MAY COURT HOUSE, New Jersey–Defense attorneys representing a New Jersey state trooper facing two counts of vehicular homicide after a crash that killed two teenagers hope to wrap up their case this week. The big question is whether the defendant, Robert Higbee, will take the stand. Others expected to testify in Higbee's defense are Bruce Siddle, an expert in cognitive and motor processing and the impact of stress on law enforcement officers, and several character witnesses.

Robert Higbee, seated right, next to his attorney

“Higbee was doing exactly as he was trained to do, exactly as he was expected to do,” according to Lt. Col. Frank Rodgers, who retired in 2007 as the head of the New Jersey State Police’s investigations branch. Rodgers told jurors that the trooper acted as any reasonable law enforcement officer would have in a similar situation.

Higbee was attempting to catch a speeding motorist when he went through a stop sign and struck a mini-van carrying Christina Becker, 19, and her sister Jacqueline, 17. The two were pronounced dead at the scene.

Prosecutors say the trooper was driving recklessly as he went into the intersection and should be held criminally responsible for the Beckers’ deaths. They say he either ignored the stop sign or should have known he was approaching it. During the prosecution’s case, experts testified Higbee was driving about 65 mph when the cars collided. The speed limit for the area is 35 mph.

A collision reconstruction expert for the prosecution also testified last week that the stop sign Higbee went through was fully visible from 350 feet away.

The defense contends Higbee did not see the stop sign until it was too late. They say poor visibility and the location of the stop sign are partially to blame. Rodgers told jurors it was his opinion that Higbee thought the stop sign at the next intersection was the one he should stop at.

Higbee faces up to 20 years in prison if he is convicted. Stay tuned to In Session for all the latest coverage of this case with correspondent Jean Casarez.

–In Session staff

BOSTON, Massachusetts–Sandra Boss, ex-wife of imposter Christian Gerhartsreiter, is expected to testify Monday as more details emerge in the trial of the man who calls himself Clark Rockefeller. He’s charged with kidnapping his own daughter last July during a court-ordered supervised visit; before the visit Gerhartsreiter hadn’t seen the seven year old in seven months.

Clark Rockefeller aka Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter sits alone at defense table in Boston court

The first two days’ witnesses have focused on both the kidnapping and events in the months leading up to it. A Baltimore realtor testified she sold a house to Gerhartsreiter about two weeks before the kidnapping, but Julie Gochar said she knew Gerhartsreiter as Chip Smith. He told her that he was a single parent, that the child’s mother was a surrogate from Sweden and that he had destroyed all the papers about her.

Gerhartsreiter also told Gochar that he was a ship’s captain who was relocating to the United States from Chile, and that he was home-schooling his daughter on the ship as they traveled from South America.

A special metals broker testified that Gerhartsreiter was exchanging money into gold in the weeks before the abduction. He purchased the Baltimore house on July 18, 2008 for $450,000 using cashier’s checks.

Another tale jurors heard came from Aileen Ang, Gerhartsreiter’s friend who drove him and his daughter to New York City shortly after the abduction. Ang testified that Gerhartsreiter, whom she knew as Clark Rockefeller, told her the child’s mother worked for Vogue magazine and left them when the child was only three months old. They were married in Nantucket, he told Ang, but the wife never filed the papers. “She only comes around when she needs money,” according to what Gerhartsreiter told Ang. Ang never knew his wife’s name, and said that she didn’t know she facilitated a kidnapping on July 27, 2008.

A few months before the abduction, Gerhartsreiter invited Ang to join him and his daughter that summer to sail around the world in his apparently fictitious 72-foot catamaran. The plan was for Ang to tutor the child and give her piano lessons. She ultimately declined.

The psychologist who arranged the supervised visits between Ferharsreiter and his daughter following the December 2007 divorce testified that the man she knew as Rockefeller told her in early 2008 that he now had another family and was expecting twins.

A private investigator hired in 2007 by Gerhartsreiter’s ex-wife, Sandra Boss, to conduct an assets trace check during the pending divorce, said he expanded his inquiry to a background check on Gerhartsreiter but he came up short. The only references to a Clark Rockefeller began in 1993 and were solely related to Sandra Boss. His conclusion? “There was no such person as Clark Rockefeller,” said the witness on cross-examination.

That explains why Sandra Boss reportedly asked the FBI upon Gerhartsreiter’s arrest: “Who IS  he?” Her testimony comes on the third day of the trial.

–Beth Karas, In Session correspondent

NEW YORK – I clerked for the California Supreme Court so I was uniquely disappointed, but not at all surprised, by the decision of the court this week on gay marriage.

Same-sex marriage supporters march through the streets following the California Supreme Court's ruling to uphold Proposition 8 May 26, 2009 in San Francisco

The news got drowned out a bit by the announcement of a nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court which is ironic because this whole gay marriage thing could end up there eventually. But for this state supreme court, the whole question boiled down to the will of the people.

Now, in my humble opinion, the California initiative process is a cop-out. It relieves state legislators of the responsibility of making the hard decisions they were sent there to make; and, it leaves the public holding the bag that contains the thorny really tough questions.

That being said, the justices were loath to overturn a decision made by a majority (however slim) of voters.

The gay marriage fight in California is far from over, however. Yes, the court ruled to uphold Proposition 8; but the ruling does not mean the justices agree with the sum, substance or mean spirit of the law. Remember, the same court upheld same sex marriage in May, 2008. The difference from May, 2008 and now? One election cycle.

Prop 8 passed with 52 percent of the vote. But that is hardly the end of the story. Change is still coming, it just comes slowly. Iowa, Maine and Vermont have recently legalized same sex marriage. Massachusetts before that. And already advocates in California are planning to take it back to the voters.

So the court’s ruling on Proposition 8 was a big moment in the evolution of the law in this area; but it by no means ends the debate.

-Jami Floyd, In Session anchor

BOSTON, Massachusetts–In the trial of a man who posed as a member of the Rockefeller family, jurors heard from three witnesses Thursday who detailed Christian Gerhartsreiter’s first supervised visit with his daughter following his 2007 divorce. That visit took place over the weekend of July 26-27, 2008. On the second day, Gerhartsreiter, known at the time as Clark Rockefeller, kidnapped his daughter and allegedly assaulted a social worker who was with them.  He has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to the charges in this case.

Clark Rockefeller sits behind defense table in Boston court

Before the testimony began, the attorneys delivered opening statements to the 16 jurors and a courtroom packed with spectators. Assistant District Attorney David Deakin put a photo of Reigh Boss, Gerhartsreiter’s daughter, on a large monitor at the start of his half hour opening. The photo remained on display until testimony began. Gerhartsreiter, wearing a blue blazer and khaki slacks, sat stiffly and rarely took his eyes off his daughter’s photo. Reigh Boss will not testify, announced Deakin, but her mother will.

As Deakin laid out for the jury what the evidence will show in the next few weeks, he harkened back to 1978 when Gerhartsreiter came to the U.S. on a tourist visa. Gerhartsreiter succeeded in obtaining a student visa, then a green card, when he married in 1981. That former wife, who met him only twice before marrying him on a promise of financial compensation, will also testify.

Deakin then jumped forward to 1993 and the advent of Clark Rockefeller, an art dealer who claimed he worked in debt restructuring for Third World countries, who married Sandra Boss in 1995, started a family in 2001, and divorced her in December 2007.

Gerhartsreiter’s attorney, Jeffrey Denner, focused on his client’s mental illness which he said is to blame for the complicated web of lies that Gerhartsreiter spun and the crimes he is accused of committing. He is not criminally responsible for the acts charged, stressed Denner. His narcissistic personality disorder and delusional disorder of grandiose type prevented him from appreciating the wrongfulness of his conduct. Denner told the jurors in very general terms about other identities his client assumed in between 1981 and 1993 in Los Angeles and Connecticut.

Howard Yaffe, the social worker who supervised Gerhartsreiter’s July 2008 visit with his daughter, described the hours he spent with father and daughter culminating in an alleged assault on him when Gerhartsreiter abducted his daughter in a fairly elaborately-laid plan. Robert Warren, a private investigator hired to surreptitiously monitor the custodial visit, told the jurors that he lost sight of the trio just as the alleged assault and abduction occurred. He came upon the scene seconds after Gerhartsreiter sped away in an SUV with his daughter.

On Friday, jurors are expected to hear from Aileen Ang who drove Gerhartsreiter and his daughter to New York City, not knowing she was participating in a kidnapping. Police witnesses are expected to follow.

Stay tuned to In Session for all the latest coverage of this case.

–Beth Karas, In Session correspondent

NEW YORK – We got our first look at a new member of the Casey Anthony defense team inside an Orlando, Florida court Thursday and she will play the primary role in saving Anthony's life.

Casey Anthony with Jose Baez, far left, and new attorney Andrea Lyon, right

Anthony is facing the death penalty, if convicted of first-degree murder charges involving the death of her two-year-old daughter, Caylee.

Attorney Jose Baez introduced Andrea D. Lyon to the judge and prosecutors at a hearing Thursday. Lyon is qualified to handle death penalty cases, Baez is not. He informed the court of her resume, "Professor Lyon has tried over 130 homicide cases. In [sic] over 30 of those occasions, the state has attempted to seek the death penalty and it had never been successful."

Lyon is a clinical professor of law at the DePaul University College of Law in Chicago, where she also directs the law school's Center for Justice in Capital Cases. Her resume includes a stint as a former public defender in Illinois, where she served on the homicide task force.

Lyon plans to file motions challenging the state's use of the death penalty.

The two sides also argued over two critical defense motions. Anthony's attorneys were hoping to convince the judge to prevent authorities from releasing jailhouse video which allegedly shows Anthony breaking down when learning that the remains of her daughter were found last December 11. Defense attorney Todd Macaluso reacted to any plan to release the tape by saying, "This is cruel. This is inhumane. This is illegal."

The court would not rule on the matter until a hearing with the media was scheduled to determine why the video should be public record.

On another issue, the judge ruled that the defense can access some of the cell phone records they were seeking, but asked Anthony's attorneys to refile a more narrowly focused motion for the records of Anthony's former fiancé, Jesse Grund, Anthony's former friend Amy Huizenga and meter reader Roy Kronk - whose phone tip led to the discovery of Caylee's remains.

The trial is currently slated to begin October 12.

-Bob Regan, In Session senior executive producer

BOSTON, Massachusetts–Jury selection wrapped up Wednesday in a custodial kidnapping case that gripped the nation last summer. A man who posed as Clark Rockefeller was on the lam for a week with his then seven-year-old daughter before authorities captured him in Baltimore, Maryland on August 2, 2008. What those authorities learned during that week constitutes the most fascinating back story of any trial I’ve covered.

Mug shot of Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter aka Clark Rockefeller

He is no Rockefeller. He’s Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, a German native, who came to the United States in 1978. He’s lived from California to New York under at least three long-term identities.

From at least 1982 until 1985, he was Christopher Chichester, an aspiring filmmaker who claimed to be of British royalty (included in his fictitious ancestry was Lord Mountbatten), and who boarded at a home in San Marino, CA. In the late 1980s, he was Christopher Crowe of Greenwich, CT and New York City, who worked at a brokerage firm, as a corporate bondsman and briefly at a securities firm. From 1993 until shortly before his arrest in 2008, he lived as Clark Rockefeller, an art collector who also helped Third World countries manage their debt.

As Rockefeller, he married Sandra Boss in 1995, a successful businesswoman and the household’s sole breadwinner. In 2001, their daughter, Reigh, was born and in 2007 their marriage ended in divorce. Boss was onto her husband, especially after a private investigator questioned whether he was, indeed, a Rockefeller. Following the divorce, Gerhartsreiter was given only three supervised visits a year with his daughter: spring, summer, and Thanksgiving. He cancelled the first visit scheduled for March of 2008. The summer visit was his first one, and it was on that visit that he kidnapped his daughter and, at the same time, allegedly assaulted the social worker who was supervising the visit.

According to authorities, a plan was in place by July 2008. Gerhartsreiter had already purchased a carriage house in Baltimore, MD under the name of Chip Smith. He told the realtor that he was a single parent and that his daughter Muffy would join him. On July 27, he duped two drivers into participating in the kidnapping. One driver took him partway across Boston. Another drove him to Manhattan. Six days later, living as Chip Smith, he was lured from the Baltimore carriage house, arrested and charged with kidnapping, assault and battery, and giving a false name. He now says he is not criminally responsible by reason of mental disease or defect; in other words, he was criminally insane at the time.

This intriguing story will continue to unfold in the next few weeks in a Boston courtroom. But the trial judge is not permitting jurors to hear everything about Gerhartsreiter’s past. One key fact they cannot know is that a grand jury in Los Angeles County is currently hearing evidence presumably linking Gerhartsreiter to a 1985 double homicide when he lived there as Christopher Chichester.

Opening statements are scheduled for Thursday morning. Among the first witnesses will be the alleged assault victim, social worker Howard Yaffe, a private investigator who was tailing the supervised visit on the day of the kidnapping and Aileen Ang, who drove Gerhartsreiter and his daughter to New York City that day while an Amber Alert went out across the country.

–Beth Karas, In Session correspondent

NEW YORK –The news is only a day old and, already, I have issues with the coverage.

Judge Sonia Sotomayor with President Barack Obama after announcing her as his Supreme Court nominee

Issue one: Barack Obama did not pick judge Sotomayor just because she is Puerto Rican or female.

The president picked her, first and foremost, on merit. The woman went to Princeton on scholarships, graduated summa cum laude; she then went on to Yale Law School where she edited the Yale Law Journal. The story of her life journey, including the fact that Sotomayor comes from the projects, only serves to underscore her intellectual prowess, as do her race and gender, since she came up at a time when few women of color went to law school at all. The bottom line: Judge Sotomayor is more qualified than any of the current justices were at the time of their appointments.

Issue two: The description of Sotomayor as a judicial activist.

Anyone who has taken the time to study her record has to know that any description of her as such is plainly false. While she may be a trailblazer in life, she is a moderate in law. Yes, she will have to explain some off-the-cuff remarks she has made, when she gets to Capitol Hill; but the very fact that the opposition has to dig that deeply for fodder with which to criticize this impressive woman, only demonstrates the strength of her record as a judge. As the New York Times headline reads today – “A Careful Pen With No Broad Strokes.”

Issue three (and most concerning): The suggestion that the practice of law should have nothing to do with empathy.

Of course the rule of law must always prevail; and it is for judges to apply the law not to change it when they don't like it. To suggest that a judge should not be cognizant of the real world consequences of her decisions, however, is to ignore the reasons so many of us go to law school in the first place. That is, as Sotomayor suggested in her remarks yesterday, to sustain the vision of the Founding Fathers and a Constitution that protects the minority from the tyranny of the majority. Who better to do that than a minority woman with the intellectual heft of her forbearers? That is why she will ultimately prevail.

-Jami Floyd, In Session anchor

CAPE MAY COURT HOUSE, New Jersey–To loyal In Session court watchers, if the name of forensic pathologist Charles Siebert Jr., M.D. seems familiar, it is because he has played a major role in one of our live trials in the last few years..

Dr. Charles Siebert on the witness stand

Siebert was the medical examiner at the center of  our 2007 live trial in Florida involving Martin Lee Anderson, better known as the "Boot Camp" trial out of Panama City, Florida.

Anderson, 14, was serving time at one of Florida’s boot camps because of his problems with the law. On the first day of camp, as Anderson was running around the track, he started to collapse. Prosecutors in the case said that guards at the camp, thinking he was faking it, pushed him to keep going and forced the young man to keep him running. Anderson eventually collapsed on the field, and died at a local hospital.

In that case, Siebert, who performed the initial autopsy on the young man, found much internal bleeding and a sickling of red blood cells. He determined the cause of death of 14-year-old Anderson, who was African American, as a natural death caused by complications from sickle cell trait.

Prosecutors made a rare move and brought in another medical examiner who countered Siebert’s conclusions, saying it was the guards and nurse on duty who caused Anderson’s death, by recklessly disregarding a risk of death or seriously bodily injury to Anderson. The second medical examiner, however, could not determine an official cause of death.

Renowned forensic pathologist Michael Baden observed the second autopsy on behalf of Anderson's parents and agreed with the new conclusion that the death was a homicide. The case went to trial with the defense relying on Dr. Siebert's autopsy report and the prosecution relying on the second autopsy report.

The defendant guards at the boot camp were ultimately acquitted of aggravated manslaughter of a child. Many believed it was because of Siebert’s findings, along with the lack of an official cause of death in the state's case.

Following the trial, Siebert’s conclusions, although viewed as extremely controversial by people outside of the medical community, were upheld by other forensic pathologists in this country.

–Jean Casarez, In Session correspondent

CAPE MAY COURT HOUSE, New Jersey–Forensic pathologist Dr. Charles Siebert will be the final witness for the state in the Robert Higbee trial.

Defendant Robert Higbee in court on Wednesday

Siebert is currently the medical examiner for the southern region of New Jersey. He did not perform the autopsies on Christina and Jaqueline Becker, killed during a crash with Higbee's police cruiser, but he will read from the autopsy reports of Dr. Chase Blanchard. Dr Blanchard is currently with the medical examiner's office in Philadelphia, and due to her current caseload is unable to come here to testify.

Siebert testified this morning that the autopsy reports determined the cause of death of each victim to be attributed to "multiple blunt force injuries."  The manner of death, he said, was an accident.  The second element of the crime of vehicular homicide states the defendant must have caused the death of the victims.

The defense in this case has not conceded that Higbee caused the deaths of the girls, because at the time of the crash there were multiple impacts with a third vehicle. The prosecution, however, is expected to ask for a jury instruction which includes a "but for" test, which essentially asks the question, but for Higbee driving through the intersection that night at a high rate of speed, the collision and resulting deaths would not have occurred.

The jury was shown two especially graphic photos of the victims during Siebert's testimony. These photos were at the center of a pre-trial motion to suppress evidence by the defense, and after argument this morning, Judge Batten determined these photos are relevant to corroborate the testimony of other witnesses.

Stay tuned to In Session for gavel-to-gavel coverage of this case.

–Jean Casarez, In Session correspondent

NEW YORK – Another Memorial Day has come and gone: Cookouts, baseball games and parades. And that's okay; but let's not forget the real purpose of the day: To remember the men and women of our armed services who have died at war.

A soldier sits at a grave in Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day

At Arlington National Cemetery, soldiers, sailors and marines from the U.S. Army Old Guard placed flags at the grave stones there. It took thirteen hundred soldiers three hours to place a flag at each of the more than 300,000 gravestones.

Thousands of visitors paid their respects, not only at Arlington, but at the Long Island National Cemetery, the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, in Honolulu, and of course at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C., and all across the country.

There are freshly placed flags flying over the graves of civil war veterans in Green Mount Cemetery in Montpelier and elsewhere. After all, this holiday was first enacted as Decoration Day, to commemorate Union soldiers from the Civil War, and later expanded to honor casualties of any military action.

But somehow Memorial Day has evolved to mark the unofficial start of summer. So let us never forget that, while we cookout and visit with our families, other families are separated by war. On Memorial Day 2009, members of our military deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan continued their service, in the full knowledge that the next Memorial Day could also honor them.

That is why, when I put my children to bed at night, I tell them about the men and women who have died to protect their freedom. I tell them not just on Memorial Day, but often. I want them to honor those who have sacrificed their lives so that we can live ours in freedom.

-Jami Floyd, In Session anchor