Curran: Meriweather accusations smell like shakedown

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By Tom E. Curran
CSNNE.com

Brandon Meriweather is no Rhodes Scholar. Nor is he a choirboy. And there is a difference between "innocent" and "not guilty."All that said, the "Apopka Incident" smells like a shakedown. Attorney John Morgan made the rounds of the morning radio shows on Thursday and it's important to note that he is not a criminal attorney, but a personal injury attorney. In other words, the end game is not jail. It's compensation. Let's look at this objectively. If a bullet grazes one person and then lands in the head of another on February 28 and - by March 10 - nobody's been arrested for firing that bullet, it's a pretty safe bet the policeinvestigation isn't going well.A possible reason? The whole scene was a crapstorm. The cops can't figure out who shot the gun because nobody's saying and they have no physical evidence to establish who did it. Morgan did a terrific job on WEEI drumming up reasonable doubt that it was Meriweather who shot the gun when he said, "There's a shooting in the dark in a yard in front of a house. My client identified Meriweather as the shooter."I'm going to climb out on a limb here and say that, of all the peoplein attendance, Meriweather had the most stable job and highest income in 2010. Andthe guy with the "hole in his cheek" as Morgan described it, was probably aware of that. So, voila,Meriweather becomes the shooter. Now, ifI were in Attorney Morgan's shoes, I'd want to make sure these guys were pretty reliable before I put myself out there as the face of the incident. The trouble isMorgan doesn't even sound like he believes them, professing thathe has "a lot of doubts."It sucks that someone ended up with a hole in their cheek. And it would suck even more if, in fact, Meriweather fired the gun, wasn't brought to justice and ambled merrily along with his NFL life. But this doesn't add up.

Tom E. Curran can be reached at tcurran@comcastsportsnet.com. Follow Tom on Twitter at http:twitter.comtomecurran

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