Kiwi Alejandro Danao Camara is a legitimate wunderkind. During a phone interview from his law office, the 24-year-old Camara said he skipped high school after taking a series of tests for talented youth at John Hopkins University in Baltimore.
When he was 11 he wrote a medical paper on alternative treatments for rheumatoid arthritis for a school project at the Punahou School -- the same private school Barack Obama attended. His paper was published in the Hawaii Journal of Medicine.
Camara graduated from Hawaii Pacific University with a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science at 16, and became the youngest person to graduate from Harvard Law School magna cum laude at 19 in 2004.
"I come from a family of doctors [his father is a psychiatrist and his late mother was a rheumatologist], so they were all disappointed in me that I became a lawyer,'' Camara deadpanned.
"Kiwi is such a great lawyer for this particular case,'' said Brian Toder, Jammie Thomas-Rasset's attorney until recently. "His undergraduate degree was in computer science, on top of the fact that his other credentials are so impressive."
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Camara has a new argument since the first case. He contends that the evidence the Recording Industry Association of America collected against Thomas-Rasset through its agent Media Sentry was illegally collected and that Media Sentry violated Minnesota, New Jersey and federal Wiretap Acts and the Minnesota Private Detectives Act in collecting the evidence.
Media Sentry has a network of intelligent monitoring agents and proprietary databases that track, verify, measure and report on digital media use.
In a motion hearing Wednesday, Camara will argue that the evidence gleaned by Media Sentry be suppressed.
"They have no evidence to prove anything or that she downloaded or shared this information if the Media Sentry evidence is excluded,'' Camara said.
Cara Duckworth, director of communications for RIAA in Washington, D.C., disagreed Monday. She said the information RIAA's contractors collect is publicly available to the millions of users. "This is simply an unfortunate and desperate attempt to direct attention away from the defendant's lack of defense,'' Duckworth wrote in an e-mail responding to Camara's comment.
It's been said that when a lawyer has bad facts the lawyer tries to win the case on the law, Camara said, and when the lawyer has bad law the lawyer tries to win the case on the facts. That's what a good lawyer does.
He laughed. "We're going to try to do both in this case,'' he said.
How does he get around the fact that the hard drive from Thomas' computer at the time of the alleged pirating was clean when she turned it over to the plaintiffs for inspection? Thomas said she made a mistake in remembering the dates that she had her computer repaired when she gave her deposition and when she testified at trial.
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"We'll save some of our stuff for trial,'' Camara said. "Our position at trial is going to be that the evidence is that she never used KaZaA herself and hasn't done any of the acts she's accused of doing, but the details I'll have to leave for trial.''
