In response to his wife Amber Heard’s “desperate” request for a retrial, Johnny Depp said that it should not be permitted.
After the attorneys for Depp’s ex-wife referred to the jury’s decision as “nonsensical and unjustified,” Depp’s legal team requested the Virginia judge to uphold the jury’s $10 million defamation judgment.
On a number of occasions, including an apparent case of mistaken identity with one of the jurors, Heard’s attorneys had requested that the judge throw out the decision.
One of the claims is based on the fact that although a man, 52, with the same last name and address as the 77-year-old man, who was summoned for jury duty, was ineligibly seated for the six-week trial.
The Heard team’s allegations concerning the juror’s identification, in the opinion of Depp’s attorneys, are unimportant and would not have negatively impacted the actress.
“Ms. Heard’s frantic, post-the-fact demand for a probe of Juror 15 based on an alleged inaccuracy in his birth date is…misplaced,” the star from Pirates of the Caribbean’s legal team said. Furthermore, Ms. Heard’s argument is founded solely on conjecture.
After finding that Depp was falsely accused by Heard in an op-ed she published for The Washington Post in 2018, a civil jury in Fairfax last month awarded him $10.35 million.
Heard’s counterclaim that she was slandered by one of Depp’s attorneys after he referred to her allegations as a fake was also settled for $2 million by the jury.
Heard’s attorneys submitted petitions earlier this month requesting that the judge throw the findings out based on a number of different legal reasons.
In response, Depp’s legal team wrote: “Following a six-week jury trial, a jury of Ms. Heard’s peers found her guilty in almost every way. Despite being appropriately upset with the trial’s outcome, Ms. Heard has found no good reason to overturn the jury’s verdict in any way.
According to Virginia law, a decision cannot be overturned unless it is “plainly incorrect or without evidence to support it.” Virginia Code 8.01-680.
‘Here, the verdict was well supported by the overwhelming evidence, consistent with the law, and should not be set aside. Mr. Depp respectfully submits that the Court should deny Ms. Heard’s Post-Trial Motions, which verge into the frivolous.’
The lawyers at Brown Rudnick LLP concluded by again calling Heard’s argument ‘frivolous’.
‘For all the reasons set forth above, Mr. Depp respectfully requests that this Court deny Ms. heard’s frivolous Motion in its entirety and reject her outlandish requests to set aside the jury verdict, dismiss the Complaint, or, in the alternative, order a new trial, and investigate Juror 15.’
It was obvious that the person who served was not 77 years old, despite the fact that court documents portrayed him as such, according to Depp’s attorneys, who contend that if Heard’s team had concerns, they should have raised them at the time.
