Allegations of racism and discrimination were levelled from the very beginning. One of the lawyers — there were dozens hired, fired and removed — likened the preferred indictment to "the modern-day equivalent of a lynching." Moreover, in a letter written in 1995 to Ian Scott, then chief counsel for special investigations at the Crown Law Office, lawyers for the accused alleged that "this case has drawn a tremendous amount of publicity . . . not because of the nature of the crime itself, but because the defendants are all black, Ms. Leimonis is white and the incident occurred in an upper-middle-class restaurant frequented primarily by white people."