the failure of the justice system

[SmarterthanYou]

more appropriately called 'myths of the criminal justice system'

Part 1

Myth 1: You Can't Be Tried More Than Once For The Same Crime

The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states that no person shall "be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb." This protection against "double jeopardy" is intended to prevent the government from retrying the same defendant over and over until prosecutors can get a conviction.

But there are some exceptions. First, the protection only comes into play once a jury has convicted or acquitted a defendant. So in trials that end with a hung jury or a mistrial, the prosecution can usually bring the same charges again. One particularly egregious example is Curtis Flowers of Mississippi, who has been tried an incredible six times for the murder of four people in 1996.

Second, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the government can charge a defendant with both a crime and the conspiracy to commit that crime without violating the constitutional prohibition on double jeopardy. This gives the government two opportunities to convict for is essentially the same offense. Conspiracy is often easier to prove than the underlying crime. It also gives prosecutors a way to rope in alleged offenses they can no longer charge separately due to statutes of limitations.

Finally, there is the "separate sovereigns" exception to double jeopardy. This allows a defendant to be tried, convicted and sentenced for the same crime in both state and federal court. The most well-known example of the separate sovereigns exception is when the Los Angeles police officers who beat Rodney King were acquitted in state court, then convicted in federal court of violating King's civil rights.

Myth 2: The Government Can't Punish You For A Crime Without First Convicting You

Under federal sentencing law, once a defendant has been convicted of any federal crime, when determining a sentence, the judge can consider other crimes he or she may have committed. That includes crimes for which the defendant has never been charged and even crimes for which he or she has been acquitted.

In 2007 Antwuan Ball of Washington, D.C., was charged and tried for a long list of alleged federal crimes, including drug dealing, conspiracy, racketeering and murder. The jury was apparently unimpressed with the prosecution's case. They acquitted Ball on all charges, save for a relatively minor $600 sale of half an ounce of crack. But last March, a federal judge sentenced Ball to 18 years in prison, a disproportionately long sentence the judge said was due to his disagreement with the jury's decision to acquit on the other charges.

According to Douglas Berman, who teaches at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law and writes the blog Sentencing Law and Policy, three federal appeals courts (the 7th, 8th, and 11th circuits) have allowed judges to consider uncharged or acquitted murders in handing down enhanced sentences to defendants who have been convicted of less serious crimes. In one case, a Virginia defendant was given a life sentence for drugs and firearms charges because the judge found convincing evidence the defendant had been involved in three murders, despite the fact that he had never been charged for those murders, much less convicted.

The doctrine of civil asset forfeiture allows the government to seize the property of people it believes are engaged in criminal conduct before they've been convicted. In fact, the government isn't even required to file criminal charges, only to show some vague connection to criminal activity. Though the policy varies from state to state, the general idea is that the government can seize property if it can show any link between the property and some sort of a crime. The policy is most often used in drug crimes.

Under most civil asset forfeiture laws, the property itself is accused of the crime. The government then files a complaint against the property in civil court. Because it's a civil proceeding, the government's standard of proof is much lower. In fact, in some states the burden is on the property owner to prove he or she earned the property legally. That can be a difficult thing to prove.

The cost of fighting a seizure in court can often exceed the value of the property itself. As of 2008, the federal asset forfeiture fund had over $3 billion in assets. Less than 20 percent of the people from whom that property was taken were ever charged with a crime.

Myth 3: Ignorance Of The Law Is No Defense

Every introductory criminal justice class teaches this one. If you're pulled over for speeding, you can't claim you didn't know the speed limit. If you're pulled over while driving through, for example, in Virginia and the cop notices your radar detector, you can't claim you had no idea the device is illegal in that state.

This particular "myth" is mostly true. And the problem is that it's becoming nearly impossible to know what the law actually is. The U.S. Constitution outlines just three federal crimes -- treason, counterfeiting, and piracy. Various projects have tried to count the number of federal criminal laws passed since, and many have simply given up. But by most estimates, there are at least 4,000 separate criminal laws at the federal level, with another 10,000 to 300,000 regulations that can be enforced criminally.

To make matters worse, vaguely-written, broadly-interpreted laws like conspiracy and money laundering give prosecutors yet more discretion and leeway, and make it more difficult for well-intentioned citizens to simply comply with the law. Even the members of Congress who actually pass these laws often don't know what they've just passed, even laws that directly apply to them.

But there is one exception to this rule: If you work for the government, particularly in law enforcement, you can be forgiven for not knowing the law.

But despite the fact that these law enforcement officials wrongly raided, arrested, jailed and charged Graber based on a mistaken understanding of the law, they face no repercussions. It's unlikely Graber will even be able to sue. Prosecutors have absolute immunity from lawsuits related to the decisions they make about whether or not to charge someone with a crime, even when they are clearly wrong about the law.

In a Supreme Court case decided earlier this year, former New Orleans DA Harry Connick and his assistants failed to turn over exculpatory evidence in the case of John Thompson. Thompson was later exonerated of murder, but only after serving 18 years in prison, 14 of them on death row.

In depositions, Connick and his assistants claimed they didn't know the Brady rule, which requires prosecutors to turn over all such evidence. Connick was already protected by absolute immunity, and the Court added that the parish that employed him couldn't be sued either.

Police officers and most other government employees don't enjoy the broad absolute immunity afforded to prosecutors and judges, but they do have what's known as "qualified immunity:" In order for an officer to be held civilly liable for violating a citizen's rights, the law must be so clearly established that a reasonable person would have known that the officer's actions were illegal.

In Pennsylvania, the courts have repeatedly ruled that it is legal for citizens to record on-duty police officers. But people continue to get arrested for doing so. And so far, federal courts have refused to allow those who have been arrested to sue the law enforcement officials who arrested them, even though the officials did so illegally.

Last February, police officers in Philadelphia confronted Mark Fiorino for openly carrying a handgun in the city. They then threw Fiorino to the ground, handcuffed him, pointed their guns at him, and repeatedly threatened to kill him. He was then arrested and jailed.

As it turns out, Fiorino had done nothing illegal. He had his gun permit with him, a fact he told the officers before they arrested him. The police officers didn't know the gun laws in their own city. Fiorino did.

Not only were the officers not punished for nearly killing a man who had done nothing wrong, Philadelphia District Attorney R. Seth Williams then charged Fironio with reckless endangerment and disorderly conduct because Fiorino had a tape recorder with him, and recorded the entire confrontation.

 

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myth one:

a hung jury is not a conviction. without a final adjudication, how can you claim double jeopardy? seperate soveriegn - absolutely sound jurisprudence. conspiracy is a seperate crime in every sense of the word. while you can be charged for both, you cannot be convicted of both. iirc.

 

[SmarterthanYou]

myth one:

a hung jury is not a conviction. without a final adjudication, how can you claim double jeopardy? seperate soveriegn - absolutely sound jurisprudence. conspiracy is a seperate crime in every sense of the word. while you can be charged for both, you cannot be convicted of both. iirc.

i can get on board, sorta, for the hung jury one, though it SHOULD not happen. the separate soveriegn.......no f'n way. that is absolutely NOT sound jurisprudence whatsoever. and if you read the article correctly, you'd see that prosecutors use 'conspiracy' charges if other charges fail. That should be double jeopardy also.

 

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i can get on board, sorta, for the hung jury one, though it SHOULD not happen. the separate soveriegn.......no f'n way. that is absolutely NOT sound jurisprudence whatsoever. and if you read the article correctly, you'd see that prosecutors use 'conspiracy' charges if other charges fail. That should be double jeopardy also.

i don't want the federal government to have anymore control over the states than it currently has. i also, do not want other states controlling my state. the doctrine of seperate sovereign is one i would think a libertarian would support.

you're right about conspiracy being used in that manner. however, technically, it is not the same crime. that is why DJ doesn't attach.

i'm ok with hung juries, it is not a perfect system, but sometimes it is impossible for 12 people to agree or form the required majority.

 

[SmarterthanYou]

i don't want the federal government to have anymore control over the states than it currently has. i also, do not want other states controlling my state. the doctrine of seperate sovereign is one i would think a libertarian would support.

not a constitutional libertarian. your view would make it so that if I bought a handgun in new mexico as a texas resident, I could be tried for buying a handgun as a non resident in 3 different trials. I hardly think that's what the framers of the constitution wanted.

you're right about conspiracy being used in that manner. however, technically, it is not the same crime. that is why DJ doesn't attach.

with that kind of ideology, numerous statutes could be written to be able to prosecute someone for the same criminal act multiple times over if the prosecutor couldn't get a guilty plea the first half dozen times. again, not what the framers intended.

i'm ok with hung juries, it is not a perfect system, but sometimes it is impossible for 12 people to agree or form the required majority.

which is why criminal trials shouldn't be brought unless the government has a clearly convincing case. this is why we have people being charged with felony spanking of a child. so many crimes to choose from.

 

[SmarterthanYou]

Myth 4: We have appeals courts to check and verify jury verdicts.

Appeals courts review claims that a defendant wasn't afforded his rights under the U.S. Constitution, or the constitution of a particular state. They also review claims that the prosecution or judge did not follow the proper rules of criminal procedure and decide whether those lapses resulted in in an unfair trial. But they almost never second-guess a guilty verdict by reconsidering the evidence.

In a 2008 article published in the Columbia Law Review, Brandon L. Garrett, a law professor at the University of Virginia, reviewed how appeals courts handled the first 200 cases in which DNA testing exonerated a defendant who had previously been convicted of rape or murder. Of those 200 convictions, just 18 convictions were at one point reversed by appellate courts. Another 67 defendants' appeals were denied without even a written ruling. In 63 cases the appellate court opinion described the defendant as "guilty," and in 12 cases referred to "overwhelming" evidence of guilt. In the remaining cases, the appeals courts either found the defendant’s appeal without merit or found that the errors in the case were "harmless" -- there were problems with the case, but those problems were unlikely to have affected the jury’s verdict -- due, again, to the convincing evidence of guilt.

 

[SmarterthanYou]

Myth 5: Due to their position, law enforcement officials are held to a higher standard of conduct than regular citizens.

A strong argument can be made that they're actually held to a lower standard. Unlike any other profession in America, prosecutors and judges are protected by the doctrine of absolute immunity, which completely shields them from civil liability for the decisions they make in the course of their jobs. The courts have ruled that prosecutors can't be sued even if they intentionally manipulate or manufacture evidence that results in the conviction of an innocent person.

Police officers and most other government officials are protected by qualified immunity, which holds that even if they violate a citizen's rights, they can only be held liable if a reasonable person would have known their actions were illegal. And unlike private sector workers, most government employees -- including police officers -- are not expected to have specialized knowledge of the laws governing their professions.

Many states have also passed a "police officer's bill of rights," a special set of protections for officers accused of serious misconduct, including acts that could result in criminal charges. In many jurisdictions, police officers get a "cooling off period" after a shooting or allegation of excessive force. During this period, which can range from 48 hours to 10 days, the officers under investigation cannot be asked any questions about the incident. In most states, police officers also can't be questioned about misconduct without a union representative or attorney present. If any part of the police bill of rights protocol isn't followed, even officers who commit egregious misconduct can find themselves back on the force, often with back pay.

In most places these extra rights only pertain to internal, administrative investigations, not criminal investigations -- but the internal investigations usually take place first. That means bad cops can use those protections to gain advantages not afforded to those who don't happen to work in law enforcement.

Unlike other professions, police officers and other public officials also can't be fired from their jobs or disciplined for invoking their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

 

[SmarterthanYou]

Myth 6: Dangerous criminals frequently escape punishment by "getting off on a technicality."

A regular viewer of Bill O'Reilly or Nancy Grace could be forgiven for thinking our criminal courts are heavily stacked in favor of child molesters, drug dealers and cold-blooded killers. In truth, the conviction rate for federal prosecutors is 90-95 percent. For state prosecutors it varies by jurisdiction, but convictions rates generally fall between 60 and 85 percent.

It also isn't true that appeals courts are setting criminals free en masse because of technical errors that occur in the police station or the district attorney's office. Even when an appeals court does overturn a conviction, the defendant usually remains in custody until the state decides whether to retry the case, and isn't released unless acquitted at the new trial.

But reversals aren't as common as one might think. Though data is difficult to come by, according to a 2005 study in the Florida State University Law Review, from the mid-1940s until about 2004, 87 to 99 percent of federal guilty verdicts were upheld on appeal. A look at 2006 affirmance rates in criminal appeals published in the Marquette University Law Review put the reversal rate of guilty verdicts at about 12 percent. It's even more difficult to find data at the state level, but the same Marquette article looked at a multi-state study from the late 1980s that found about 70 to 80 percent of guilty verdicts were upheld on appeal.

 

[SmarterthanYou]

Myth 7: No one confesses to a crime he didn't commit.

False confessions are more common than one might think. In a 2008 op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, Washington, D.C., Detective Jim Trainum wrote about a case in which he was able to extract a murder confession from a suspect. The confession included details about the murder only the perpetrator could have known. Trainum was later shocked to learn that the woman who had confessed to him couldn't possibly have committed the crime. He went back to review the tape, and found that he had inadvertently revealed details about the crime during his interrogation.

According to the Innocence Project, about one in four convictions that have been overturned by DNA testing involved defendants who at one point had actually confessed to the crime for which they were later exonerated.

Minors and the mentally disabled are especially prone to false confessions, but anyone under considerable duress or who has endured an unusually long or harsh interrogation can be susceptible. Rob Warden and Steven A. Drizin point out in the book "True Stories of False Confessions," an anthology of reports of 48 people who confessed to felonies they didn't commit, the confession often puts a halt to the investigation, even when the confessions "aren't corroborated or don't fit the facts of the alleged crimes."

 

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OTE=SmarterThanYou;829495]not a constitutional libertarian. your view would make it so that if I bought a handgun in new mexico as a texas resident, I could be tried for buying a handgun as a non resident in 3 different trials. I hardly think that's what the framers of the constitution wanted.

that is not how it works at all. situs.

with that kind of ideology, numerous statutes could be written to be able to prosecute someone for the same criminal act multiple times over if the prosecutor couldn't get a guilty plea the first half dozen times. again, not what the framers intended.

what? that is not how it works. do you have an example? statutes have been struck down over and over as violating DJ. one of the seminole cases is about conspiracy iirc....

which is why criminal trials shouldn't be brought unless the government has a clearly convincing case. this is why we have people being charged with felony spanking of a child. so many crimes to choose from.

the government does usually believe it has a clear and convincing case, that is how they get passed grand juries, prelims, etc...the whole reason we have jury trials is to be judged by your peers, not the government. just because a jury may not agree, does not mean the case is bad and vica versa.

 

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Myth 7: No one confesses to a crime he didn't commit.

False confessions are more common than one might think. In a 2008 op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, Washington, D.C., Detective Jim Trainum wrote about a case in which he was able to extract a murder confession from a suspect. The confession included details about the murder only the perpetrator could have known. Trainum was later shocked to learn that the woman who had confessed to him couldn't possibly have committed the crime. He went back to review the tape, and found that he had inadvertently revealed details about the crime during his interrogation.

According to the Innocence Project, about one in four convictions that have been overturned by DNA testing involved defendants who at one point had actually confessed to the crime for which they were later exonerated.

Minors and the mentally disabled are especially prone to false confessions, but anyone under considerable duress or who has endured an unusually long or harsh interrogation can be susceptible. Rob Warden and Steven A. Drizin point out in the book "True Stories of False Confessions," an anthology of reports of 48 people who confessed to felonies they didn't commit, the confession often puts a halt to the investigation, even when the confessions "aren't corroborated or don't fit the facts of the alleged crimes."

whoever said that never happens is an idiot

 

[SmarterthanYou]

that is not how it works at all. situs.

ok, let me use another example. Illinois has a state law prohibiting possession of a machine gun, federally legal or not. so lets say I am found in possession of an unregistered machine gun, i can be found guilty of both the state AND federal laws in two different trials and server two consecutive sentences? do you think that's what the founders had in mind?

what? that is not how it works. do you have an example? statutes have been struck down over and over as violating DJ. one of the seminole cases is about conspiracy iirc....

and we never see someone charged with two dozen crimes for one criminal act in order to force a plea bargain, do we?

the government does usually believe it has a clear and convincing case, that is how they get passed grand juries, prelims, etc...the whole reason we have jury trials is to be judged by your peers, not the government. just because a jury may not agree, does not mean the case is bad and vica versa.

a grand jury would indict a ham sandwich....sound familiar? how many people do you think know about jury nullification and how many would be allowed to serve on a jury?

 

[SmarterthanYou]

http://reason.com/archives/2011/06/27/bad-boys

You might think that putting an innocent person in prison for a major crime like rape or murder would end or at least impede a prosecutor’s career. But prosecutors are rarely sanctioned for mistakes, even when their misconduct is egregious. In fact, they are often re-elected, promoted to judge, or encouraged to run for political office. Sometimes they even owe these successes to the publicity they get from high-profile convictions of people who turned out to be innocent. Here are some of the worst cases of prosecutors who put more than one innocent person in prison but suffered no significant professional consequences.

 

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The Death Row Gambler

Forrest Allgood, district attorney for four Mississippi counties

Four people Forrest Allgood has convicted of murder were later set free. Two of them served time on death row.

One was Sabrina Butler, an 18-year-old mentally retarded woman Allgood convicted of killing her infant son in 1990. Butler was retried in 1995 after the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled that Allgood had committed misconduct when he told jurors that Butler’s refusal to take the stand in her own defense was an indication of her guilt. In the retrial, the medical examiner that Allgood had used the first time around admitted to making some key mistakes, and outside examiners testified that Butler’s child likely died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome or kidney disease. Butler was acquitted and released from prison.

Another Allgood victim was Tyler Edmonds. In Ed-monds’ 2007 trial, Allgood posited that the defendant and his sister, Kristi Fulgham, had teamed up to kill Fulgham’s husband 13 years earlier. The duo, he argued, had waited until the man was asleep and then simultaneously pulled the trigger. At trial, Allgood called on controversial medical examiner Steven Hayne, who preposterously claimed that he could tell by the bullet wounds in the victim’s body that two people had held the gun. On review, the Mississippi Supreme Court threw out Hayne’s testimony and ordered a new trial. In 2008 Edmonds was retried, acquitted, and released. Kristi Fulgham was convicted in a separate trial and is still on death row.

In his 1995 prosecution of Kennedy Brewer, Allgood again solicited testimony from Hayne, this time accompanied by Hayne’s longtime sidekick, the disgraced bite mark specialist Michael West. West testified that he found bite marks on a 3-year-old murder victim that could only have been made by Brewer’s teeth. Based largely on that testimony, Brewer was convicted of raping and killing Christine Jackson, his girlfriend’s daughter, and sentenced to death. After the conviction, Allgood attempted to have the biological evidence from the case destroyed. Brewer’s lawyer objected and managed to preserve it.

A decade later, more-advanced DNA testing determined that there was semen from two men inside of Jackson, and neither of them was Kennedy Brewer. The state Supreme Court ordered a new trial. Despite the test results, Allgood planned to prosecute Brewer again. When The New York Times asked him why he hadn’t bothered checking the crime scene DNA against the state’s DNA database, Allgood replied that the state doesn’t have such a database. This came as a surprise to the man who had been running it.

Allgood’s decision to retry Brewer and his opposition to checking the crime scene evidence against the state DNA database kept Brewer in prison for another six years. When the DNA was finally checked, it revealed Christine Jackson’s murderer and showed that he had also raped and murdered another young girl two years later, just a few miles away. Allgood had used Hayne, West, and dubious bite mark testimony in that case too, convicting the wrong man. In 2008, that man, Levon Brooks, was exonerated and freed. The DNA in both cases matched a man named Justin Albert Johnson, who later confessed to both crimes.

Allgood continues to win re-election, and there are still countless people in prison based on his use of Hayne and West. One of them, Eddie Lee Howard, is still on death row.

 

[SmarterthanYou]

The Witch Hunter

Ed Jagels, former district attorney, Kern County, California

Ed Jagels finally retired as district attorney of California’s Kern County in 2009. During his 26 years in office, Jagels boasted that the Central Valley district had a higher per capita rate of imprisonment than any other large county in the state. The mock slogan for Bakersfield, the county seat, was “Come for Vacation, Leave on Probation.” Yet with crime rates nosediving across the country, the Kern County rate did not fall as quickly as those in neighboring areas.

The boyish-looking Jagels, who was fond of strapping on a gun and tagging along on police raids, was at the forefront of California’s disastrous “three strikes” law, which imposed a life sentence on anyone convicted of three felonies. He also led an effort to get anti-death penalty justices removed from the California Supreme Court. He was regularly berated by appellate courts for withholding exculpatory evidence.

Jagels’ most egregious transgression was his prosecution of 26 working-class residents of Kern County in the 1980s and 1990s for shocking sex crimes against children. A rash of similar (and, it would turn out, equally bogus) prosecutions was erupting across the country at the time, but Jagels’ office in Bakersfield may well have been ground zero. Police and prosecutors told fantastical tales of satanic rituals, orgies, and bestiality, painting gruesome word-pictures of children hung on meat hooks and infants sodomized with knives. None of it happened. Of the 26 people Jagels’ office convicted, 25 have since had their convictions overturned. (For a moving account of these cases, see the 2009 documentary Witch Hunt.)

Even as the sex abuse convictions began to fall apart in the mid-1990s, Jagels continued to win re-election. His colleagues selected him to head the California District Attorneys Association. When Jagels finally announced his retirement, Scott Thorpe, the current head of that organization, called him “a prosecutor’s prosecutor.” An aide to Jagels told The Bakersfield Californian, “Prosecutors from around the state seek and respect his advice on almost every issue of public safety.” After retiring, Jagels served as a policy adviser to 2010 GOP gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman.

 

[SmarterthanYou]

The Evidence Hoarder

Kenny Hulshof, former special prosecutor, Missouri Attorney General’s Office

For the first half of the 1990s, Kenny Hulshof was the go-to prosecutor when the Missouri attorney general’s office needed someone to handle a high-profile death penalty case. He quickly developed a reputation for winning big trials, which he later touted in successful runs for political office.

But in 2010 Missouri Circuit Court Judge Warren McElwain freed a man Hulshof had prosecuted, declaring Dale Helmig innocent of killing his mother in 1993, a crime for which he had been sentenced to death. In his decision, McElwain singled out Hulshof for harsh criticism, accusing him of withholding exculpatory evidence, knowingly presenting false or misleading evidence, and putting evidence before the jury that prosecutors could not prove was true.

That wasn’t the first time Hulshof had been reprimanded by a judge for his actions in a murder case. In 2009 Missouri Circuit Court Judge Richard Callahan declared Joshua Kezer innocent of the 1992 murder of college student Angela Mischelle Lawless, criticizing Hulshof for withholding exculpatory evidence and embellishing facts in his closing argument to jurors.

In 2008 an Associated Press investigation found five other cases in which Hulshof was accused of significant misconduct. And in November 2010, the Missouri Supreme Court ordered a new hearing for Mark Woodworth, whom Hulshof convicted of murder in 1995, again finding evidence that should have been turned over to defense attorneys, including a letter from another prosecutor recommending that Woodworth be released due to a lack of evidence.

Hulshof rode his tough-on-crime credentials to six terms in Congress (1997–2009) and ran as the GOP nominee for governor in 2008, losing in the general election. Today he works as a lobbyist for Polsinelli Shughart, a white-shoe law firm with offices in St. Louis, Kansas City, and Washington, D.C.

 

[SmarterthanYou]

Three Prosecutors Worth Praising

Many prosecutors, of course, understand that their job is to seek justice, as opposed to convictions by any means. Here are three particularly praiseworthy examples:

The Exculpator

Craig Watkins, district attorney, Dallas County, Texas

With his election in 2006, Watkins, a former defense attorney, became the first African-American D.A. in Texas history. He inherited the office long held by legendary law-and-order prosecutor Henry Wade (the respondent in the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion case), who was rumored to boast of his ability to convict innocent men.

Upon taking office, Watkins set up what he called the Conviction Integrity Unit, a team of lawyers that works with the Texas Innocence Project to seek out and reopen cases of possibly wrongful convictions. Since 2001, 21 men convicted in Dallas County have been exonerated by DNA evidence—more than any county in the country and more than in all but a handful of states. Watkins’ staff also has helped free prisoners in cases where non-DNA evidence has emerged that points to their innocence. There is now a remarkable tradition in Dallas in which former exonerees attend the final hearing of the latest exoneree and welcome him to life on the outside.

In 2010 Watkins was narrowly re-elected, defeating his challenger by a little over one percentage point.

The Snitch Snitcher

Earle Mobley, commonwealth’s attorney, Portsmouth, Virginia

In 2009, 28-year-old Ryan Frederick was put on trial for the murder of Chesapeake, Virginia, police Det. Jarrod Shivers, who had been part of a team that broke into Frederick’s home during a marijuana raid. Frederick, who had no prior record and who later said he thought he was being robbed, shot and killed Shivers during the raid. Frederick’s case turned on whether the jury believed him when he said he feared for his life and had no idea that the men raiding his home were police. During the trial, Prince William County Commonwealth’s Attorney Paul Ebert called a jailhouse snitch named Jamaal Skeeter to the witness stand. Skeeter claimed that Frederick had confessed to him in jail that he knew Shivers was a cop and that Frederick had boasted about killing him.

Skeeter was well-known to prosecutors as an opportunist who would say anything to get a break on his own (long) rap sheet. Mobley, a prosecutor, brought this information to Ebert’s attention. When Ebert didn’t call Mobley as a witness, Mobley reached out to the defense. It was an extraordinary move. It’s one thing for a prosecutor to have the integrity to not use unreliable jailhouse informants himself. It’s quite another to call out another prosecutor for doing so in the midst of a high-profile trial.

Mobley had warned other prosecutors about Skeeter in the past. He also has filed motions against police officers who miss hearings and publicly reprimanded cops and prosecutors who take shortcuts. “We have a sworn duty as prosecutors to make sure there’s a fair proceeding,” Mobley told The Virginian-Pilot. “You have to disclose everything under the rules.”

Mobley’s name also came up in Gene Weingarten’s “Fatal Distraction,” a moving (and Pulitzer-winning) 2009 Washington Post article about parents who had incomprehensibly but mistakenly killed their young children by leaving them alone in a hot car. While other prosecutors in similar cases had prosecuted the devastated parent, Mobley declined to charge Portsmouth electrician Andrew Culpepper in the death of his two-year-old son. Mobley said police found no evidence that Culpepper intended to kill the boy. He had simply made a crushing mistake. “The easy thing in a case like this is to dump it on a jury, but that is not the right thing to do,” Mobley told Weingarten. “I’m not pretty sure I made the right decision. I’m positive I made the right decision.” Mobley added that “a prosecutor’s responsibility is to achieve justice, not to settle some sort of score.”

 

[SmarterthanYou]

The Unlikely Reformer

Pat Lykos, district attorney, Harris County, Texas

In 2008 Pat Lykos, a self-described Goldwater-Reagan Republican who supports the death penalty, was elected as chief law enforcement officer of Harris County, Texas, the county that has executed more people than any other, in a state that has executed more people than any other. In fact, under the leadership of former D.A. Johnny B. Holmes—a handlebar-mustached, lock-’em-up tough guy whom the Los Angeles Times once called “the killingest prosecutor” in the country—Harris County by itself sent more people to death row than the 49 states that aren’t Texas.

So Lykos would seem to be an unlikely criminal justice reformer. But upon taking office she set up her own team to review prior convictions for mistakes, similar to Craig Watkins’ unit in Dallas. Watkins has been aided by a fortuitous historical accident in which Dallas County routinely sent crime scene evidence to a private lab for safekeeping. That means some biological evidence from cases dating back to the 1980s can still be tested. Lykos not only does not have that advantage, but the crime lab in Harris County’s largest city, Houston, has a history of mishandling and even destroying evidence.

Nevertheless, Lykos has initiated three exonerations so far. In 2010 the Innocence Project of Texas gave Lykos its Honesty and Integrity in Prosecution Award. The organization’s spokesman, Jeff Blackburn, told The Daily Beast earlier this year that “Harris County was the standard bearer of everything bad in criminal justice” until Lykos came along. Under her leadership, Blackburn said, the county “is becoming the single most powerful example of how to change this system and make it work right.”

 

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E=SmarterThanYou;829581]ok, let me use another example. Illinois has a state law prohibiting possession of a machine gun, federally legal or not. so lets say I am found in possession of an unregistered machine gun, i can be found guilty of both the state AND federal laws in two different trials and server two consecutive sentences? do you think that's what the founders had in mind?

you bring up a good issue. i do not know exactly what the founders had on their mind with regards to this specific scenario. i do know the founders gave the states sovereign power and the states abide by federal enumerated powers under the constitution and as you know all about the 10th. if the law is not superseded by a federal law, do you not want the states to have the power to create their own laws? i see that as the main issue.

and we never see someone charged with two dozen crimes for one criminal act in order to force a plea bargain, do we?

now you're talking about something different than i replied to. of course this is done all the time, it is the "throw it on the wall" prosecution tactic. unless it is an abuse of discretion or prosecution rather, it is legal.

a grand jury would indict a ham sandwich....sound familiar? how many people do you think know about jury nullification and how many would be allowed to serve on a jury

so you don't want to be judged by a jury of your peers? you would rather have one person?

 

[SmarterthanYou]

so you don't want to be judged by a jury of your peers? you would rather have one person?

if that jury of peers is dumbed down or hampered and restricted by the teeth of the justice machine, it's not worth anything. granted, this isn't all the fault of the government/courts, but they certainly do their part to prevent it's usage.