Category Archives: federal criminal issues

Depends on what you mean by justice: 50 years of Brady

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It’s a brilliant concept, if you think about it: an adversarial system in which one side – the one trying to steal the liberty of the other – has to show all its cards up front. “Here”, they have to say “this is what we have against you and, oh, by the way, in the interests of justice, here’s what we have that might show that you didn’t do it.”

It’s the ultimate salvo in an open and fair system; where the goal is rigorous examination of the allegations, no tricks and traps by the government and an outcome that can then be reliably relied upon.

Justice. Such a grand notion; an admirable ideal. It is justice that prompted Brady v. Maryland – an unworkable, but yet noble attempt at drawing lines and taking stances:

The principle of Mooney v. Holohan is not punishment of society for misdeeds of a prosecutor but avoidance of an unfair trial to the accused. Society wins not only when the guilty are convicted but when criminal trials are fair; our system of the administration of justice suffers when any accused is treated unfairly. An inscription on the walls of the Department of Justice states the proposition candidly for the federal domain: “The United States wins its point whenever justice is done its citizens in the courts.” A prosecution that withholds evidence on demand of an accused which, if made available, would tend to exculpate him or reduce the penalty helps shape a trial that bears heavily on the defendant. That casts the prosecutor in the role of an architect of a proceeding that does not comport with standards of justice, even though, as in the present case, his action is not “the result of guile,” to use the words of the Court of Appeals. 226 Md., at 427, 174 A. 2d, at 169.

Perhaps it was a bit optimistic, but they can hardly be blamed for wanting the system to be above board; honest.

But it all got lost somewhere down the road. Why? Who knows. Politics, legislators baying for blood, a public with passions aroused – “tough on crime”, an overburdened system and overworked lawyers with a taste for resolution and no stomach for a fight? But it happened. And the calling was no longer “justice”, it was “convictions”.

Justice is never personal; winning always is. And when the nature of the game that one side is playing changes so dramatically that it becomes personal, the stakes are raised. Raised stakes lead to seeking the advantage and then Brady – and its very ideals – get turned on its head. Now the fox is the gatekeeper, not just the guardian: how do you know if something is exculpatory if they don’t turn it over? And the arbiter of what is “exculpatory” is that very prosecutor whose job it is to administer justice. Statements that cast doubt on the complainant’s version? Not believed by the prosecutor, so not exculpatory. You can imagine the machinations.

And when the goal becomes winning and convictions rather than justice, you get stories like this.

[Prosecutor Keller] Blackburn explained that House Bill 86 not only made a distinction between cocaine and crack cocaine and the weights of the drugs, but it also significantly changed the prison sentences associated with lower level felony crimes. Prior to the changes, fifth-degree and fourth-degree felonies carried the real possibility of prison time. Now, probation or jail time is more likely for first-time offenders. Third-degree felony crimes carried a maximum of five years in prison but now only three can be ordered.

…

“When you change the numbers, then negotiations get more difficult. If someone is only risking six additional months by not taking a deal, they’ll go to trial. It harms negotiations and pass costs to local communities,” Blackburn said. According to Blackburn, there are around 600 cases that come across his desk in a year. He said it’s not possible for the prosecution and defense to try that many cases, nor is it possible for the courts to handle such a load and taxpayers cannot afford that many cases. He said there is also additional stress placed on the probation department.

Did you get all that? Prosecutor Keller Blackburn is miffed that the legislature reduced penalties for low-level crimes, not because it offends justice, but because it makes his job harder. Prosecutor Keller Blackburn is more concerned with warehousing his fellow citizens, guilt or innocence be damned, because this makes it more difficult for him to put the squeeze on defendants.

Tough penalties were the worst thing this country did in the name of justice. It did exactly the opposite: it forced the hands of unwilling prosecutors and provided great ammunition for the sadistic ones. The greater the exposure in jail, the greater the chance of putting someone away for a disproportionate amount of time.

People ask why I do what I do. This is one reason. Not because I condone crime; not because I like it. But “justice” is hard to come by in the American system. Because of prosecutors like Keller Blackburn. Because there is no oversight of prosecutors. They can get away with almost anything because law and order and criminals and other buzzwords. And if ever found to have violated the Constitution, there is no punishment. Just a stern wag of the finger and be set free to do the same again and again, leaving how many untold victims in their wake while they pursue their quest of “convictions”.

Brady was a valiant effort. Too bad justice doesn’t mean what it used to.

[I swear to God if one of you says "hey, not all prosecutors are like that", I will tie a peacock to your butt and sprinkle birdseed on your head. Of course they aren't.]

H/T: SL&P.

 

Perhaps intelligence committee is a misnomer

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The Constitution of The United States of America is a self-executing document. It does not need permission to grant you your rights, nor does it require a magical incantation to appear and shield you with its protections, as if it were a concoction of a fantasy universe created by a now-very-wealthy female author from England.

But people – many people – with purported intelligence and advanced degrees and those who are presumed to have a basic understanding of these simple facts continue, yet again, to exhibit why we are electing a Congress of fools.

Lawmakers in our nation’s capital – albeit mostly ones with an R next to their name – have made an abrupt about face when it comes to the inviolability of the Constitutional guarantees and have now subjected the rights to a matter of convenience.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R., Mich.) said in an interview Thursday. “We have a long-standing tradition that the judiciary does not interfere with investigations. This sets a very dangerous precedent.”

The “this” that he is referring to, is the story that a Magistrate Judge, on Monday, advised Dzhokhar Tsarnaev of his Privilege Against Self-Incrimination at his arraignment [PDF]. We will get to Mike Rogers, who went on to make even more dangerous comments, in a minute. But first some background.

Apparently, the entire Federal Law Enforcement PolitBuro was “surprised” when a “judge and a US attorney” entered the interrogation room. By then, 16 hours had passed, and any semblance of legitimacy for the use of the “public safety exception” in Quarles. The danger of their “surprise” is that law enforcement expected to be able to “interrogate” Tsarnaev indefinitely/longer/for however long they wanted. Because the Constitution explicitly states that these Rightf are Not Enforceable Until At Leaft 48 Hourf Have Paffed And Thou Art Not A Muflim Terrorift. Wait, no it doesn’t? As my buddy Scott Greenfield writes (linked above):

If this is about the public safety exception, than the government has taken a quantum leap into the temporal abyss. But it’s not clear that this has anything to do with the public safety exception, as it’s hard to imagine anyone arguing with a straight face that they needed five hours, ten, 16, more, to find out whether this 19 year old kid, this kid who had been shot, this kid who (for all he knew) was about to disappear in some black hole the government reserves for terrorists, knew anything about another imminent attack.

Indeed one need only look to this compilation of the changing information of the dangerousness of the two Tsarnaevs to realize that law enforcement’s state goal of “public safety’ was nothing more than an excuse for extraction of information from a U.S. citizen in an extra-judicial manner.

But Rep. Rogers, a former FBI agent, apparently has no such concerns because he’s white not a Muslim.

“What I find shocking is that the judiciary proactively inserted itself into this circumstance and the Justice Department so readily acquiesced to the circumstance,” he said. “The court doing this proactively, they may have jeopardized our ability to get public-safety information.”

A sitting United States Congressman has just stated that the judiciary should not interfere with the administration of law and our rights and that determination of those rights depends entirely on the goodwill of law enforcement agents.

If this were the McCarthy era, or 1984, and I had to give up people I suspected as Communist sympathizers, the first name out of my mouth would be Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan.

It gets worse.

The revelation about the judge’s role came late Wednesday at a briefing before the House Intelligence Committee. One lawmaker in the meeting asked FBI Deputy Director Sean Joyce why the FBI didn’t raise objections, according to another U.S. official. Mr. Joyce said in essence it wasn’t the FBI’s role to object to such a determination, the official said.

It came as a surprise to the nation’s lawmakers that it was not law enforcement’s role to intercede in the judiciary doing its job. In other words, something as basic and simple as the separation of powers, the administration of justice and due process elude these people who sit on the “Intelligence Committee”.

Let me repeat: the Constitution is self-executing. The rights exist, whether you like them or not, whether you say the magic words or not. The rights enumerated therein do not require the grace and goodwill of lawmakers like Mike Rogers of Michigan to “activate”. Do you want your Constitutional rights to be subject to the permission of Mike Rogers of Michigan?

Let Jon Stewart take it away:

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The cost of Quarles: from Tsarnaev to you

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It appears now that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was begun to be questioned late on Sunday evening, almost 48 hours after he was apprehended, hiding in a boat in a backyard.

There are some things that should be without dispute:

1. That Tsarnaev is an American Citizen;

2. That the Constitution and all of its protections apply to all American Citizens (and, to be sure, to all residents, but that’s not necessary here), and;

3. That, by virtue of 1 & 2, Tsarnaev has the inalienable right to remain silent, to be appointed counsel and to not be made a witness against himself.

It is irrelevant that the privilege against self-incrimination is a trial right, in that if the right is violated, the statements cannot be used against him at his own trial. It is irrelevant that Miranda is prophylactic and isn’t a right in of itself, but an advisement of already existing rights.

The right exists. It is his right; it is my right; it is your right.

And yet we dither and equivocate and we say, but there is an exception. All laws have an exception. This one is called the “we are scared” exception, also commonly known as the “public safety exception”. It is also the exception to swallow the right.

In New York v. Quarles, a 5-4 majority of the United States Supreme Court said that if the police were faced with the “immediate necessity” of obtaining information that would prevent danger to themselves or others they could invoke a “narrow exception” to the Miranda rule and question a suspect about that “immediate” danger without having to advise him of his rights first¹. They further ruled that those statements would then be admissible in court to prove the defendant’s guilt. See also U.S. v. Abdulmutallab [PDF].

The Obama administration, which has put on a clinic [Bazelon at Slate] of how to forcefully and conclusively [FBI memo] encroach on individual liberties [NYTimes], was quick to state [TPM] that they “plan to invoke the public-safety exception to Miranda in order to question the suspect extensively about other potential explosive devices or accomplices, and to gain critical intelligence.”

It’s been 48 hours. You know the funny thing? As of 9:00pm on Friday night, there were people lining the streets of Boston, cheering and celebrating as they so much deserved to do.

Had there truly been a immediate necessity and an imminent threat to public safety, would that have been allowed? Should it?

I don’t say the above to participate in the more looney fringes of internet discussion that are sure to crop up arguing that the whole thing was a set up, but rather to point out the obvious: that the “public safety” exception is an excuse used by the administration to rip a hole into the Constitution and drive a truck through it.

Others have written more persuasively than I have about why Tsarnaev should have been read his rights: James Holmes was, Timothy McVeigh was.

What makes Tsarnaev different? His name? The color of his skin? The fact that he used a “bomb” and not a gun?

Is our application of the Constitution dependent on the person who seeks its protection? Scratch that; of course it is. Should it be? Can we sustain our moral superiority as the foremost defender of freedom and liberty in the world if we are so quick to make it a Constitution of convenience?

The cost of Quarles is that we are living in a fear-ridden society; that everything is a “public safety exception”. That the bogeyman at night is now a terrorist with a slightly different colored skin, nevermind the fact that we used to proudly trumpet being the “melting pot of the world”. We are xenophobic and afraid. Hiding in the dark clutching our guns, paralyzed in fear, because the terrorists are out to get us, whoever they might be. We are like a person in the throes of a mental illness whose anxiety and fear have taken over every aspect of their existence.

We are a country that has sacrificed everything we believed in at the altar of a promise of safety:

our constitutional rights are now deemed to be partial or provisional rather than absolute, do not necessarily apply to everyone, and can be revoked by the government at any time.

A safety that is illusory – and if it comes, at what cost? Consider the following quote:

“I think that the good news is we don’t need ‘enemy combatant’ to get all the information we need out of him. No. 1, the court, the one court that has ruled, has allowed a lot of flexibility in the public safety exception before you Mirandize somebody,” Senator Schumer said. “But second, at any time, what’s called a HIG, a High-Value Interrogation Group, composed of the F.B.I., C.I.A. and anyone else, can question him without a lawyer in a secured situation and find out whatever they need.”

A second U.S. Senator (Schumer) had said, with a straight face apparently, that an American citizen can be interrogated after denying him the Sixth Amendment right to counsel “in a secured situation and find out whatever they need”. If that isn’t an euphemism for torture, I don’t know what is.

Tsarnaev – and you and I – has the right, Miranda notwithstanding, to refuse to answer questions. Do you realistically think that is an option here?¹ Either he won’t be aware of that right (in which case the government has subverted a U.S. citizen’s Constitutional right), or he won’t be allowed to exercise that right if he knows it. I don’t know which is more frightening.

And therein lies the problem. We can quibble about the legal realities of the admissibility of his statement, but such a discussion is a mere distraction allowing the Government to get away with much more. They’re making off with our rights and our protections; while you’re staunchly guarding the second, they’ve stolen your fourth and fifth and sixth. They’ve made it impossible to exercise a right, either because you weren’t paying attention or too scared of terrorism.

You want to know something funny? There’s a perfectly legal way for the Government to have its cake and eat it too: they can “question” Tsarnaev under the “public safety” exception, the Mirandize him, then ask him the same questions again and the second statements are now admissible in Court. There. Dispensed with that pesky “Fifth Amendment”.

You think this doesn’t happen every day in police stations across America? You’re wrong. Ask any cop you know about the “pre-interview“. It’s here. It’s real. It’s in violation of your Fifth Amendment right.

If Quarles was about the immediate need to find a gun in a supermarket and Tsarnaev is about finding “critical information” 48 hours later, is there a scenario that isn’t covered?

The Constitution is a document that deserves more than lip service. It is a document that deserves obedience. It is not a suggestion of rights that may be offered, if enough people agree that the recipient is deserving. It is there to protect the worst among us, because if the worst are protected, then the best are protected – and more importantly, the vast majority of us – the only human – are protected.

The rights exist. They are his rights; they are my rights; they are your rights. Do you want your rights to be subject to a popularity vote? To convenience? To the color of your skin?

If the world is full of “terrorists” and “criminals”, then will you abide a judge ruling that the “public safety” exception wasn’t met and suppressing statements? If an “exception” can be so broad, can it be called an exception at all?

And if the exception so swallows the Right, can you be said to have that Right at all?

—

¹Putting aside entirely the question of whether, had he been Mirandized and then confessed, such a confession would have been voluntarily made.

—

N.B. 1: If a single one of you so much as suggests that this post in any way implies that I have no sympathy for the victims of the bombings, I will track you down using thermal imaging and shove you inside a boat and leave you adrift on land.

N.B. 2: It seems that the Federal Public Defender of Massachusetts is on standby, waiting appointment. If it were Connecticut (and State court), the police would be required to inform Tsarnaev that he had legal counsel available to provide pertinent legal representation if he chose to, prior to being presented in court and appointed. It is the practice of many public defender offices in CT to fax letters to or call police departments when they know suspects are in custody and may be questioned. State v. Stoddard.

No trespassing

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I'm talking to you, officer.

I’m talking to you, officer.

[Update: See update at end of the post.]

Have you given strangers permission to come to the front steps of your house? Have you given a stranger permission to cross onto your property line and walk to the front door of your house? Certainly, none of us have given this explicit permission – we don’t post a sign at the edges of our property that “all are welcome”, but we have implicitly given some people permission to enter without our prior approval: the mailman, the neighbor borrowing sugar, the girls selling cookies, the cops with drug-sniffing dogs.

Wait, what? That’s precisely what happened in Florida v. Jardines [PDF], decided today by the United States Supreme Court and the State of Florida, along with 4 Supreme Court justices, argued that it was quite all right for cops to bring their drug sniffing dogs onto private property without a warrant in an attempt to sniff out illicit activity. Luckily for us and our individual rights, 5 members of the Court disagreed.

The case itself is an easy one to resolve, as both Justice Scalia’s majority opinion and Justice Kagan’s concurring opinion state: there is a physical intrusion onto your property by government agents:

The officers were gathering information in an area belonging to Jardines and immediately surrounding his house—in the curtilage of the house, which we have held enjoys protection as part of the home itself. And they gathered that information by physically entering and occupying the area to engage in conduct not explicitly or implicitly permitted by the homeowner.

The rest of the opinion is a good recap of some basic principles: what is a curtilage, was the intrusion unlicensed and that this “physical intrusion” test of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence is in addition to the standard “reasonable expectation of privacy” test of the Fourth Amendment.

And this is where, if this were a TV show, you’d hear the oft-used scratched record sound effect meant to imply halting.

Continue reading →

Maryland court rules sex offender registration cannot be retroactive

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Bucking the national trend, Maryland’s Court of Appeals ruled earlier this week [PDF] that requiring an individual to register as a sex offender for a crime committed 12 years before the registry came into existence violates the Maryland Bill of Rights and the ex-post facto clause of the Federal Constitution.

The prohibition against ex post facto laws is rooted in a basic sense of fairness, namely that a person should have “fair warning” of the consequences of his or her actions and that a person should be protected against unjust, oppressive, arbitrary, or vindictive  legislation. See Demby, 390 Md. at 608-09, 890 A.2d at 327 (citations and quotations  omitted) (noting that there are “[t]wo paramount protections” provided by prohibitions  against ex post facto laws; “the assurance that legislative Acts give fair warning of their  effect and permit individuals to rely on their meaning until explicitly changed,” and a  restriction on “governmental power by restraining arbitrary and potentially vindictive  legislation”);

…

Based on principles of fundamental fairness and the right to fair warning within the  meaning of Article 17, retrospective application of the sex offender registration statute to  Petitioner is unconstitutional.

The whole opinion is quite the read and a great lesson for those interested in how the U.S. Supreme Court has watered down and narrowed the Federal protection against ex-post facto laws, starting with Youngblood and including Smith v. Doe and CT v. Doe.

Connecticut, in turn, through legislation and jurisprudence has taken the opposite view: that sex offender registration is not a punishment and thus cannot violate the ex-post facto clause. State v. Alex Kelly:

The defendant also contends that the trial court further violated the ex post facto clause by imposing a sentence that required him to register as a sex offender in accordance with §§ 54-102r and 54-102s. Those sections, commonly referred to as Megan’s Law, were enacted in 1994 and 1995, respectively, and § 54-102r was amended in 1997. Megan’s Law requires that a sexual offender register with the local chief of police or resident state trooper after establishing residency in the state and notify his or her parole or probation officer whenever he or she changes residence address. In turn, the parole or probation officer is required to notify law enforcement authorities of the change. See General Statutes (Rev. to 1997) § 54-102r (c), as amended by No. 97-183, § 1, of the 1997 Public Acts, and General Statutes (Rev. to 1997) § 54-102s (b). The defendant argues that these provisions are punitive and, therefore, 91*91 the requirement that he register under the statutes violates his constitutional right to be free from the application of ex post facto laws because, at the time he committed the offense, Connecticut did not mandate registration of sex offenders with community law enforcement. We disagree.

Although this court never has specifically addressed the issue, most other state and federal courts have held that registration statutes, similar to our § 54-102r, requiring convicted sex offenders to register with local authorities in the communities in which they reside, are regulatory and not punitive in nature.[35] Those courts have concluded that such regulatory measures do not constitute punishment as proscribed by the ex post facto clause.

There was talk for a long time of sensible sex offender registration reforms in Connecticut, but nothing has happened yet. Maybe it will; maybe it won’t. But I believe it’s time for our courts to revisit this issue.

Your rights are only worth the probable cause used to extinguish them

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This, folks, is what happens when you don’t pay attention to the erosion of our collective rights. This is what happens when you steadfastly maintain an “us vs. them” attitude. This:

Maryland Deputy Attorney General WINFREE: But what I — the cornerstone of our argument is that when an individual is taken into custody, an individual is arrested on a probable cause, on a probable cause arrest, that person by virtue of being in that class of individuals whose conduct has led the police to arrest him on — based on probable cause surrenders a substantial amount of liberty and privacy.

If your eyes haven’t popped out of your head yet, you should check with an ophthalmologist. They may be stuck in place. The Government – Your Government – has brazenly started taking the tact in open court that simply by virtue of being arrested, an individual surrenders a “substantial amount” of liberty and privacy. I’m pretty certain she didn’t mean this in the literal sense of arrest and being locked up (which also has some requirements of balancing interests). This is in the sense that once you’re arrested, your rights are limited and you, by virtue of causing the police to arrest you, have forfeited privacy expectations and Constitutional rights.

Her argument, in that brief moment before Justice Kagan challenged her on it, was that by virtue of an arrest, an individual has voluntarily sacrificed his Fourth Amendment rights as is the issue in the case she was arguing.

Do you know what it takes to arrest someone? Next to nothing. You know the “ham sandwich” joke? Well probable cause is what they replaced grand juries with. And probable cause is whatever the hell they want it to be. It doesn’t have to be probable cause of the particular officer making an arrest, either and it can be based on completely innocuous every day actions of regular people.

I don’t normally say this, but thanks Justice Kagan:

JUSTICE KAGAN: But, Ms. Winfree, that can’t be quite right, can it? I mean, such a person, assume   you’ve been arrested for something, the State doesn’t have the right to go search your house for evidence of unrelated crimes; isn’t — isn’t that correct?

MS. WINFREE: That’s correct, Justice Kagan.

JUSTICE KAGAN: It doesn’t have the right to search your car for evidence of unrelated crimes.

MS. WINFREE: That’s correct.

JUSTICE KAGAN: Just because you’ve been arrested doesn’t mean that you lose the privacy   expectations and things you have that aren’t related to the offense that you’ve been arrested for.

Of course, what’s lost is that this State (Maryland) and the 49 other states that joined Maryland via an amicus brief already routinely take the position that once you’re arrested, you lose rights. (CT passed just such a bill last year. All my posts on DNA are here.)

In the case being argued, Maryland v. King, the Court is tasked with applying the Fourth Amendment to the 21st Century (is your computer’s recycle bin like your home’s trash can?). When someone is arrested for Crime A, can they take the person’s DNA and then enter it into a cold-case database to see if it matches any old crime. In King’s case, it did. He was then charged with and convicted of Crime B. At the time they took the DNA, they had absolutely zero suspicion that he was involved. It’s a routine procedure done with all arrestees.

These laws permit the collection of DNA from anyone who’s been arrested because they got into a drunken bar fight or because their boyfriend called the cops and said they were threatened or because a vindictive neighbor doesn’t like your dog pooping on his lawn or because you’re driving while black. And you have to give up your DNA, because the Man said so. And with that DNA, you give up your genome, your individual traits and characteristics.

You can read the oral argument transcript here and reports from SCOTUSBlog, the ABA Journal, the WaPo and the NYTimes to get a sense of how the court will rule. There are some Scalia zingers in there too. But I wanted to highlight this separate quote, for fear that it will get lost in the greater discussion.

And I want to keep asking that question: why aren’t you scared yet? Why don’t you care enough?

Justice Alito called this the “most important criminal procedure case this court has heard in decades”. He’s absolutely right. It’s time for the court to decide what’s more important: helping cops catch crooks or the individual liberties and freedoms of every citizen of this country. The answer’s clear to me. Is it to you?

Reciprocal discovery: should we have to?

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The United States is a vast place and practices that seem de riguer on one coast are apparently unheard of on another border. This discordant approach – a product of State’s rights – is quite evident in criminal justice procedure. While the substantive laws are usually the same and the rights of each defendant are necessarily identical, the manner in which justice is delivered varies greatly from state to state.

Take, for example, the issue of discovery. For the non-lawyers, discovery refers to the disclosure by the prosecutor of the evidence it claims to have and intends to use against you in a criminal prosecution. It also includes evidence that it has or has notice of that would tend to undermine their theory that you are guilty. Discovery is an essential component of due process and the right to be informed of the charges against you.

But a hotly debated topic is what, exactly, constitutes discovery? And that’s where a haphazard application of the Constitutional protections becomes evident. Brady v. Maryland, the seminal case establishing the State’s obligation to turn over exculpatory information has limited value precisely because prosecutors are free to – and generally do – adopt a moving target theory of what “exculpatory” means. Similarly, some prosecutors take a very dim view of “discovery”. The arrest warrant, if one exists, the charging document and maybe a police report or two. I know of jurisdictions – even CT back in the day – where prosecutors turn over witness statements after their direct examination of the witness on the stand during trial and as a defense attorney, you have about 10 minutes to read it and see if there’s anything you can use to cross-examine. Continue reading →