Jury gets assault case involving ex-judge

A Philadelphia Common Pleas Court jury has begun deliberations in the case of the Philadelphia detective charged with assaulting his paramour, former Common Pleas Judge Leslie Fleisher.

The 12 jurors began their review of the charges against Lewis B. Palmer III at 3:40 p.m. after about 50 minutes in instructions in the law from Judge Charles B. Smith, a retired federal magistrate judge and a senior Chester County Common Pleas Court judge appointed because of Fleisher's service on the Philadelphia courts.

Palmer, 49, suspended from his job as a detective with the District Attorney's office, did not testify but attorney A. Charles Peruto Jr. presented five character witnesses and identified four others who would provide similar testimony.

Palmer is charged with aggravated and simple assault in the Oct. 17, 2009 incident at Fleisher's Society Hill townhouse as well as violating state wiretap laws by recording six phone calls from Fleisher, 48, three days after the altercation without her consent.

Earlier today, the jury heard Palmer's half-hour audiotaped statement to state investigators in which he said Fleisher started the physical altercation in which she was injured by jumping on his back and trying to grab his revolver.

The Nov. 25 statement, with a lawyer present, was made to agents from the state Attorney General's office, who handled the probe because of Palmer's job with the city District Attorney's office.

In the audiotape, Palmer tries to minimize the cut scalp and bruises Fleisher sustained in the confrontation that occurred after she began berating him for watching a football game on television when she wanted to go out.

By the end of the 30-minute interview, however, Palmer had acknowledged that he "probably choked" Fleisher and banged her head against a door.

"She was on my back and beginning to make a play for my thirty-eight [caliber handgun] on my right hip," Palmer says on the recording. "I backed her up against the wall hard enough to get her grip loosened up."

But when the investigator asked Palmer to explain the fingerprints seen on Fleisher's neck, the detective said he probably choked her and detailed what he described as an increasingly violent relationship in which Fleisher also assaulted him.

Initially, Palmer says, he put up minimal resistance when Fleisher went after him: "It started as simple defense and went to more than defense over the course of time. I allowed her to assault myself . . . but then I started hitting back."

Fleisher was a city Common Pleas Court judge from 2001 until the end of March when she retired under the pressure of several pending judicial conduct complaints about her courtroom temperament and conduct.

She and Palmer had a volatile and increasingly violent relationship over the last four years.

Today's testimony, including Fleisher's questioning by Peruto, which played out in a courtroom packed with spectators - many of them criminal defense attorneys - drawn to the trial because of its salacious details.