Posts Tagged ‘prosecutorial abuse’

Targets of fake subpoenas can sue Louisiana D.A., underlings

“A federal appellate court … ruled that a Louisiana district attorney and several prosecutors in his office violated the law by using fake ‘subpoenas’ to pressure the victims and witnesses of crimes to meet with them, finding that the attorneys were not entitled to “absolute immunity” from legal liability.” [Jerry Lambe, Law and Crime; earlier (“Even though the subpoenas were unlawful, he really did jail people who didn’t obey them.”)]

Louisiana: a remedy for fake subpoenas?

The district attorney in Orleans Parish, Louisiana, which includes the city of New Orleans, pressured witnesses and crime victims into cooperating through the use of fake “subpoenas” warning them of fines or jail time for nonappearance. “The documents were neither authorized by a judge nor issued by a county clerk…. Cannizzaro’s office was producing them itself. Worse yet: Even though the subpoenas were unlawful, he really did jail people who didn’t obey them.” Can they sue him? [Zuri Davis, Reason]

Prosecution roundup

  • Let justice be done: conviction integrity units “operate within prosecutors’ offices to investigate old cases for errors or misconduct that may have led to a wrongful conviction.” [C.J. Ciaramella]
  • “Allegation: Georgetown, Ind. man comes home to find his wife and two children killed. He’s detained for 13 years before he’s finally acquitted in a third trial. And this happens because the state lied about an ‘utterly unqualified’ assistant pretending to be a blood-spatter analyst. (The extent of his scientific training was a single chemistry class, which he flunked.) And there’s so, so much more. The state also lied about running a DNA test that could have exonerated the man. The second prosecutor was sanctioned for trying to cash in on a book deal. The first prosecutor ended up representing the real murderer. Click on the link, dear reader, for a shocking civil rights case that the Seventh Circuit is absolutely sending to trial.” [Institute for Justice “Short Circuit” on Camm v. Faith]
  • In the new 2018-19 term Cato Supreme Court Review, Anthony J. Colangelo writes about Gamble v. U.S., the dual-sovereignty double jeopardy case;
  • “Baby’s Death in Mother’s Bed Leads To 5-Year Prison Term. But Was It Her Fault?” [Cassi Feldman, The Appeal]
  • Seattle: “King County Took Money From an Anti-Prostitution Organization. Then ‘Unprecedented’ Felony Prosecutions of Sex Buyers Began.” [Sydney Brownstone, The Stranger last year; more (judge rejects disqualification motion)]
  • So it does happen: court denies prosecutor absolute immunity for withholding exculpatory evidence [Penate v. Kaczmarek, First Circuit]

April 10 roundup

Our inside tips vs. your inside tips

Concurring in a Second Circuit opinion declining to overturn an insider trading conviction in the case of U.S. v. Walters, Judge Dennis Jacobs points out “egregious” FBI leaks and “notices the irony that Walters and the FBI agent both apparently misused confidential information, but that only one of them is going to jail.” [Ira Stoll, Future of Capitalism]

Orange County voters boot District Attorney Tony Rackauckas

Orange County, California voters have declined to re-elect District Attorney Tony Rackauckas, whose doings have provided repeated grist for this space. His successor and former protege sounds like a possible source of grist too: “A Wahoo’s employee told the deputy Spitzer decided to handcuff the preacher because he kept looking at Spitzer.” [Nick Gerda, Voice of OC; R. Scott Moxley, OC Weekly]

USG: whoops, that Mata Hari stuff was just banter over car insurance

Prosecutors can plant wrong, inflammatory, and damaging stories about defendants with no real consequence, part 24,873 [Sharon LaFraniere, New York Times]:

Federal prosecutors have admitted that they wrongly accused Maria Butina, a Russian citizen now in custody on charges of illegally acting as a foreign agent, of offering to trade sex for a job as part of a covert effort by Russian government officials to infiltrate Republican circles in the United States.

In a court filing late Friday, prosecutors in the United States attorney’s office in Washington acknowledged that they had been “mistaken” in interpreting what were apparently joking text messages between Ms. Butina and a friend who had helped her renew her car insurance.

For LabMD, the consolation of a big win in court

Readers who watched the Cato forum last November on prosecutorial fallibility and accountability, or my coverage at Overlawyered, may recall the story of how a Federal Trade Commission enforcement action devastated a thriving company, LabMD, following a push from a spurned vendor. Company founder and president Mike Daugherty, who took part on the Cato panel, wrote a book about the episode entitled The Devil Inside the Beltway: The Shocking Exposé of the U.S. Government’s Surveillance and Overreach into Cybersecurity, Medicine and Small Business.

Last month two separate federal appeals courts issued rulings offering, when combined, some consolation for Daugherty and his now-shuttered company. True, a panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, finding qualified immunity, disallowed the company’s claims that FTC staffers had violated its constitutional rights by acting in conscious retaliation for its criticism of the agency. On the other hand, an Eleventh Circuit panel sided with the company and (quoting TechFreedom) “decisively rejected the FTC’s use of broad, vague consent decrees, ruling that the Commission may only bar specific practices, and cannot require a company ‘to overhaul and replace its data-security program to meet an indeterminable standard of reasonableness.’” [More on the ruling here and here]

As usual, John Kenneth Ross’s coverage at the Institute for Justice’s Short Circuit newsletter is worth reading, both descriptions appearing in the same roundup since they were decided in such quick succession:

Allegation: Days after LabMD, a cancer-screening lab, publicly criticized the FTC’s yearslong investigation into a 2008 data breach at the lab, FTC staff recommend prosecuting the lab. Two staffers falsely represent to their superiors that sensitive patient data spread across the internet. (It hadn’t.) The FTC prosecutes; the lab lays off all workers and ceases operations. District court: Could be the staffers were unconstitutionally retaliating for the criticism. D.C. Circuit: Reversed. Qualified immunity. (Click here for some long-form journalism on the case.)…

Contrary to company policy, a billing manager at LabMD—a cancer-screening lab—installs music-sharing application on her work computer; a file containing patient data gets included in the music-sharing folder. In 2008 a cybersecurity firm finds it and tells LabMD the file has spread across the internet. (Which is false.) When LabMD declines to hire the cybersecurity firm, the firm reports the breach to the FTC, which prosecutes the case before its own FTC judge. LabMD does not settle; the expense of fighting forces the company to shutter. The FTC orders LabMD to adopt “reasonably designed” cybersecurity measures. Eleventh Circuit: The FTC’s vague order is unenforceable because it doesn’t tell LabMD how to improve its cybersecurity.

Our friend Berin Szóka of TechFreedom sums it up: “The court could hardly have been more clear: the FTC has been acting unlawfully for well over a decade.” He continues by calling this “a true David and Goliath story”:

Well over sixty companies, many of them America’s biggest corporations, have simply rolled over when the FTC threatened to sue them [over data security practices]. … Only Mike Daugherty, the entrepreneur who started and ran LabMD, had the temerity to see this case through all the way to a federal court. …After losing his business and a decade of his life, Daugherty is a hero to anyone who’s ever gotten the short end of the regulatory stick.

[cross-posted from Cato at Liberty]

Now unsealed: official report on Wisconsin John Doe probes

After the state’s high court ordered files of the politically charged Wisconsin John Doe II investigation destroyed, something else happened instead: “The Guardian published a leaked trove of documents from the John Doe II proceedings, including court filings, draft filings, and selected evidence prepared and kept by only some members of the prosecution team.” A just-unsealed report from the Wisconsin Department of Justice suggests a range of possible illegalities and rights violations, as well as political motivations, in the conduct of the investigators [“Warren Henry,” The Federalist]:

[Th]hree hard drives in particular contained nearly 500,000 unique emails (from Yahoo and Gmail accounts, for example) and other documents (email attachments, for example) totaling millions of pages. The hard drives included transcripts of Google Chat logs between several individuals, most of which were purely personal (and sometimes very private) conversations. GAB [a state agency involved in the investigations] placed a large portion of these emails into several folders entitled, ‘Opposition Research’ or ‘Senate Opposition Research.’

For example,

investigators obtained, categorized, and maintained over 150 personal emails between [state] Senator Leah Vukmir and her daughter, including emails containing private medical information and other highly personal information. [WIDoJ] was unable to determine why investigators ever obtained, let alone saved and labeled, over 150 very private and very personal emails between a Senator and her child, or why investigators placed those emails in a folder named ‘Opposition Research.’

Earlier here.

Watch today: when prosecutors go wrong

Live today (Tuesday) at 4 Eastern, and watchable online, a Cato forum with three authors of books on runaway prosecution: Rob Cary, partner at Williams & Connolly, and author of Not Guilty: The Unlawful Prosecution of U.S. Senator Ted Stevens; Howard Root, Former CEO, Vascular Solutions, and author of Cardiac Arrest: Five Heart-Stopping Years as a CEO on the Feds’ Hit-List; and Michael J. Daugherty, founder and president, LabMD, and author of The Devil Inside the Beltway: The Shocking Exposé of the U.S. Government’s Surveillance and Overreach into Cybersecurity, Medicine and Small Business; moderated by Clark Neily, Vice President for Criminal Justice, Cato Institute. More details:

Prosecutors and other government lawyers who enforce our nation’s laws wield vast power and exercise tremendous discretion with little oversight or accountability. For example, more than 95 percent of criminal convictions are now obtained through plea bargaining instead of jury trials. As a result, citizen participation in our criminal justice system has effectively been eliminated and with it much of the oversight that the Constitution’s framers intended. Even when cases do go to trial, it is possible — and, some have argued, disturbingly common — for prosecutors to further tilt the playing field in their favor by failing to disclose potentially exculpatory evidence, influencing witnesses with threats or inducements, and manipulating juries with improper arguments. Unfortunately, when government lawyers do commit misconduct, it is extremely rare for them to be punished or indeed even publicly identified. Finally, the U.S. Supreme Court has held that prosecutors are absolutely immune from civil lawsuits, even for willful violations of people’s rights, such as deliberately prosecuting someone they know to be innocent and suborning perjury to obtain an unjust conviction.

As a result, two important questions arise: (1) Are the existing checks on prosecutorial misconduct strong enough to ensure fairness in criminal and regulatory proceedings; and (2) are Americans well-served by our current system of near-zero accountability for prosecutors and other government lawyers? Our panelists have written powerful and often deeply shocking books about their firsthand experiences with that system and the damage it does to the cause of justice.