6B
Tuesday, March 28, 1995
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Kaelin tries 'acting' on the stand
The Associated Press
LOS ANGELES — Reprimanded by the judge for asking one inflammatory question, prosecutor Marcia Clark quickly popped another one yesterday, asking whether O.J. Simpson argued with his ex-wife by phone the day she and a friend were murdered.
Simpson's former house guest, Brian "Kato" Kaelin, insisted in his fourth day on the witness stand that he knew nothing about such a phone conversation between the Simpsons.
Kaelin acknowledged Simpson was "upset" when he arrived home from the dance recital of his daughter, Sydney, the evening of June 12. But under Clark's stern questioning, Kaelin had a difficult time explaining, in his words, the degree of "unsetness."
Asked by one of Simpson's lawyers to give jurors a better idea of Simpson's demeanor that
evening, Kaelin, an aspiring actor,
tried to play the role.
He spoke in the first person as if he were Simpson, saying, "Nicole didn't let me see Sydney. I want to see my daughter. Oh, boy."
He spoke in a soft voice that he said reflected Simpson's demeanor. "The degree of upset, it's such a hard thing." Kaelin said.
Clark apparently startled the defense and Kaelin with a question about a cellular phone conversation she suggested occurred while Simpson was at the Riviera Country Club the morning before the
Clark offered no evidence that such a conversation had taken place and the defense objected to the question, setting off one of many long conferences at the judge's bench.
murders.
"Isn't it true, Mr. Kaelin, that Mr. Simpson told you he'd had a conversation with Nicole on his cell phone while he was at the Riviera Country Club in which he had had an argument with her?" Clark asked.
"No." Kaelin said.
After the bench conference, Clark posed her question about the phone conversation again, in two different phrasings but raised no objections from the defense.
At the start of the day, Clark drew a sanction for an improper question asked last Thursday, in which she suggested Kaelin knew that a maid had opened a door for Simpson to beat his wife in 1989, three years before Kaelin met the Simpsons.
Superior Court Judge Lance Ito told jurors yesterday that a lawyer may not ask a witness questions without a strong belief that the witness has the information sought. "You should not assume to be true any implication given by the question." Ito said.
Clark immediately tried again to raise the relationship between Ms. Simpson and the former Simpson maid, Michelle Abudrahm, but the judge sustained a flurry of objections. The only statement by Kaelin that he allowed was that the two women didn't like each other.
Clark, whose anger with her own witness was obvious from the beginning, sought yesterday to have Kaelin declared a hostile witness. The judge did not announce a decision in court, but UCLA law professor Peter Arenella said it was obvious that he granted Clark's request because she was allowed to ask more leading questions and the defense stopped objecting to them.
Blind student files grievance against UMKC
The Associated Press
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A 46-year-old blind woman who returned to college to get a master's degree has filed a grievance against the University of Missouri-Kansas City, claiming she was discriminated against.
Mary Knoch said an adviser had reassured her two years ago that she still could get a master's degree in special education, despite being legally blind. Professors would make exams as big as newspaper headlines. If needed, they'd let her sit nose-length from the blackboard.
But, four semesters later, Knoch is telling officials the university let her down.
"It's hard enough to study when you're visually impaired without having to beg professors every semester to bring in large-print tests." Knoch said.
At a closed grievance hearing Friday, Knoch claimed that education professor Mary Hatfield discriminated against her by refusing to say what she'd written on the blackboard and by giving her an exam she couldn't read.
Knoch also contended that UMKC officials minimized her need for large-print exams in a letter they wrote to Hatfield before her course began.
Knoch, who has a degenerative eye disease called retinitis pigmentosa, said she needs special exams because she sees the unenlarged printed word as "just a bunch of dots."
Hatfield maintained that she did provide a large-print exam but that Knoch claimed the type was not legible after taking the test.
Hatfield declined comment on Knoch's grievance, which was heard by a panel of students and faculty members. In papers filed with the panel, Hatfield denied Knoch's accusations, characterizing them as unjust and Knoch's defensive and angry.
"We certainly welcome and try to accommodate disabled students," said Lucinda Lu, a UMKC representative.
University officials also have declined comment, but they have defended the school's treatment of its 300 disabled students. Under federal law, UMKC must make "reasonable accommodations" for the disabled or risk losing more than $4 million in federal research grants.
For instance, the university tries to inform a professor before the start of the semester that a disabled student has enrolled, said Agapito Mendoza, vice provost for affirmative action. Usually, the university encourages students and teachers to devise a plan to accommodate the student's needs.
Mendoza said that in light of the Knoch case, the university might spell out the exact needs of disabled students to teachers to avoid future misunderstandings.
"By pressing the matter in a civil rights context, Mary Krohn is doing the right thing," said James Gashel, director of governmental affairs for the National Federation of the Blind.
"Fortunately, her experience is not commonplace these days."
Economic slowdown may curb interest rates
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Wall Street has been positively giddy of late because of a growing belief that the Federal Reserve has finished raising interest rates. Stocks hit another record high yesterday, but many private economists said the euphoria might be premature.
The view that the Fed has achieved its hoped-for "soft landing" helped to spur rallies in stock and bond markets in advance of today's closed-door meeting of Fed policy-makers.
The markets believe widespread signs of an economic slowdown could make the Fed's February rate increase, the seventh in a year, the last. There was more evidence of a slowdown yesterday with a report that sales of existing homes plunged 5 percent in February to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 3.43 million units, the slowest pace in two years.
This added evidence of a slowdown helped push the Dow Jones industrial average to a record 4.157.35, a gain of 18.67 points according to preliminary data. Yesterday's increase followed a 50.84 gain on Friday.
Heavy demand for bonds helped push the rate on Treasury's benchmark 30-year bond to a nine-month low of 7.34 percent, down sharply from a November high in long-term rates of 8.18 percent.
But many private economists, while not looking for a rate increase this week, said recent signs of weakness in interest-sensitive sectors such as home sales could represent only a pause that will be followed by renewed strength.
"The Fed is patting itself on the back right now," said David Jones, an economist at Aubrey G. Lansston & Co. "Policymakers think the soft landing is at hand, but I think they are premature. I am looking for a pause and then a rebound."
"The conventional wisdom is that interest rates aren't going any higher, but I believe there will be a snap-back in consumer spending that will keep the economy growing at a faster pace than the Fed's target for sustainable growth," said Eugene Sherman, chief economist at M.A. Schapiro & Co, in New York.
Jones and other analysts predicted the Fed would remain on the sidelines at this week's meeting but could resume raising rates at its next session of the Federal Open Market Committee on May 23.
meeting on Feb. 1 boosted the target for the federal funds rate — the interest that banks charge each other — to 6 percent. That was double where the funds rate stood when the Fed began tightening credit on Feb. 4, 1994.
The Open Market Committee at its last
The committee is composed of the seven Fed governors in Washington and five of the 12 regional bank presidents. Yesterday, Fed governor John LaWare announced he was resigning effective April 30 and would not participate in today's session.
While LaWare has recently been a proponent of tighter credit policies, analysts said he had generally followed Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's lead during his six years on the Fed. They predicted no major impact on Fed decisions from his departure.
Both Jones and Sherman forecast the funds rate would stand at 7.5 percent by the end of the year.
They predicted that banks' prime lending rate, currently at 9 percent, would rise by a matching 1.5 percentage points over the course of this year, resulting in higher borrowings costs for millions of businesses and consumers.
Home mortgage rates, now near a seventh low for 30-year mortgages at 8.40 percent, could rise to close to 9 percent by year's end, Jones said.
Not all economists agreed with this rising-rate scenario. Some said they believed the economy was slowing to a pace that will keep inflation under control and thus allow the central bank to stay on the sidelines.
The most optimistic are even forecasting that the Fed could start cutting interest rates either late this year or early in 1996.
David Wyss, chief financial economist for DRI-McGraw Hill, who holds to this view, calls it the "Fed-got-it-right scenario."
"At this point, it looks like we will have a soft landing, but we are saying that with our fingers crossed because the historical record shows the Fed has seldom pulled it off," Wwss said.
The central bank was able to keep inflation under control by slowing growth while avoiding a recession in 1966 and 1986, he said. But on nine other occasions since World War II, Fed credit tightening helped bring on outright recessions.
"The risk always is that a slowdown can easily become a recession." Wyss said.
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