Attorney Eric Hard comments on Second Circuit’s denial of en banc review for Tom Brady – Fox 61 News

0:01 A crushing blow to Patriots fans today with a federal appeals court deflating Tom Brady’s attempts to squash his pending suspension. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell ordered that four game suspension after the league investigated claims that the Patriots deflated footballs in a January 2015 playoff game.

0:19 So deflate gate will likely be this season or Jo me now to answer what is next is West Hartford attorney Eric Hard. Thanks so much for being here we love getting your insight and weighing in on this stuff.

0:36 Okay, so you’ve been following deflate gate along with us. Does Brady have any other legal options at this point?

0:43 Well he’s got a couple of different options. One of them is to try to proceed on to persuade Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Supreme Court that he should get a stay while he petitions for a certiorari, which is a fancy way of saying they can either take your case or not take the case. They’ll decide, and this is of the Supreme Court so they’ve got to believe that it’s a case of sufficient significance to the Constitution, people’s rights or some other burning issue that we really need to resolve in this country. Whether he will achieve that is very questionable.

1:12 Is that likely to happen and what’s the timeline on something like that?

1:19 To just show you how odd things are right now, Justice Ginsburg just had a little war of words with Donald Trump who has backed Tom Brady and has described him as a friend on this issue, and yet Tom Brady now is in Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s hands to have her grant this sort of extraordinary relief.

1:40 Okay, so has this case set any sort of precedent?

1:42 Well when Berman ruled the way that he did in the initial federal court case that was somewhat unusual. If you talk to people who are knowledgeable about labor law and what happens with arbitrator decisions, they are treated as sacrosanct in general.

2:00 Do you think deflate gate has cost Tom Brady anything in terms of image and his reputation? We know he’s been very vocal about I did not do it.

2:08 Well I think on a slender read of 51%, the Wells report indicated that it was more likely than not that he was generally aware that there had been some shenanigans. This is a slender read indeed. So for anybody who believes that Tom Brady’s been sullied by that sort of investigation, which also included people who claimed there was one Twin Tower, not two, and so on, and some of the insurance cases, whether cigarette smoking is not harmful to your health, junk science is the way that people describe it when they want to criticize the people they use to say oh yeah this probably happened.

2:45 So there’s a lot to question about the way that they came to the conclusion, but that he had the legal authority to issue that conclusion and the penalty that went with it I think is probably not that questionable.

2:54 I got to say a lot of fans out there have been following this very closely. How upset should they be about this punishment moving forward?

3:01 Well, I mean that’s up to them. Tom Brady obviously is a fellow whose legacy is in the record books to a great extent at this point, so I don’t think this is going to sully it too much. And again, because we don’t really have very good evidence as to what did or did not happen with the footballs, we know high school physics tells us balls go down if you start at 12.5 and they go into winter plain conditions from a 70° room, it’s going to be under 12.5. They were running around saying we’ve got a smoking gun here when any high school science teacher could tell you that’s not a smoking gun.

3:36 So all right, Eric Hard, thank you. You’re always wonderful to weigh in on deflate gate and it sounds like we’ll be having more conversations in the very near future. We appreciate your time this afternoon.

3:43 Thank you, Brent. Back to you.

3:46 All right, Audrey and Eric, thanks.