The Criminal Lawyer

The Bill of Rights, notably Amendments 4-6, protects accused individuals from improper action by the police. The typical remedy for police violation of these rights is suppression of the evidence that would not have been gathered but for the violation. This Exclusionary Rule protects the justice system, by ensuring that the maximum lawfully-gathered evidence is available, while ensuring that defendants aren’t prosecuted with unlawfully-gathered evidence. Police officers and departments are not punished for violations, because that would create an incentive to avoid borderline situations where evidence could have been obtained lawfully. Rather than do that, the Exclusionary Rule lets officers go right up to the line of what they’re allowed to do, and only takes away what they shouldn’t have been allowed to get.

The Exclusionary Rule is not an individual right, but is rather a remedy that has been crafted over generations of thoughtful jurisprudence. It simultaneously maximizes protection of the individual’s rights, and society’s interest in law enforcement. It balances two powerful and competing interests, and it does the job elegantly. As such, it is a beautiful rule, but one that is nevertheless criticized — both by law-and-order types and by defendant-rights types — when its role is misunderstood. Unfortunately, it is misunderstood all the time.

So it was no surprise to see plenty of misunderstanding of the Exclusionary Rule in yesterday’s Supreme Court decision in Herring v. United States (No. 07-513). Split 5-4 (and with delightful sniping in the footnotes), the justices on either side of the ruling tried to clarify what the Exclusionary Rule means, but only demonstrated that they’re missing the point. All of them. In their attempt to clarify the rule, all they did was muddy the waters.

That’s right, we just said that we understand the Exclusionary Rule better than the Supreme Court. Modesty is not our strong suit.

The Herring case arose in Coffee County, Alabama. Bennie Dean Herring was someone who’d had his share of run-ins with law enforcement over the years. His truck was impounded, and he went to the Sheriff’s Department to get something out of it. When one of the Sheriff’s investigators found out, he had the Coffee County warrant clerk check to see if Herring had any outstanding warrants. There weren’t any in Coffee County. Then they called neighboring Dale County to check. The Dale County computers showed an active arrest warrant for failing to show up in court on a felony charge. Based on that information, the Coffee County officer pulled Herring over as he left the impound lot, arrested him, and recovered methamphetamines and an illegal gun.

In the meantime, the Dale County warrant clerk went to get a copy of the warrant, to send to the Coffee County officer. But there wasn’t one in the file. So the clerk checked with the court, and found out that the warrant had been recalled. For whatever reason, the information never got from the Dale County court to the Dale County warrant database. The warrant clerk called the Coffee County warrant clerk immediately, and the warrant clerk immediately called the officer, but the arrest and search had already taken place.

At trial, Herring moved to suppress the evidence on the ground that the arrest was illegal, as the warrant it was based on no longer existed. The trial court said the evidence was admissible, because the officer did nothing wrong, and acted in good faith on information that the warrant was still outstanding.

On appeal, the Eleventh Circuit agreed that the Coffee County officer did nothing wrong. Any error was independent of that officer. The error was the result of negligence on someone else’s part, and was moreover a negligent inaction rather than some government action. The Circuit therefore held that the negligence was so attenuated from the officer’s actions that any benefit to be gained by suppression, and so the evidence was admissible under the “good faith” rule of U.S. v. Leon, 468 U.S. 897 (1984).

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Roberts pointed out that, even if the search or arrest was unreasonable, the Exclusionary Rule doesn’t always apply. It’s a last resort only. He reiterated that exclusion is not a right of the individual, but is instead a deterrent. The benefits of a deterrent must be weighed against its costs.

Thus, when police have acted in “objectively reasonable” reliance on a warrant that was later held to be invalid, or on a statute that was later declared unconstitutional, or on a court (not police) database that mistakenly stated that an arrest warrant was outstanding, the Supreme Court has held that the evidence was admissible under the “good faith” rule. The Court had held that evidence should be suppressed only when the officer knew or should have known that the search was unconstitutional. Illinois v. Krull, 480 U.S. 340 (1987).

“Objectively reasonable” (or “good faith”) means “a reasonably well-trained officer would have known that the search was illegal, in light of all the circumstances.” It’s not a subjective test of what the officer actually intended, but rather a test of what he should have known. Here, there was no reason to believe that the Coffee County officer wasn’t being objectively reasonable in relying on the information from Dale County’s warrant clerk. So the officer did nothing requiring suppression.

The underlying error didn’t require suppression, either. Here, the clerical error wasn’t the result of a recklessly-maintained system. Nor was it the result of the police planting false information for the purpose of justifying false arrests later on. The kind of clerical error here is not something that the Exclusionary Rule could affect or deter meaningfully.

Roberts concluded by saying “we conclude that when police mistakes are the result of negligence such as that described here, rather than a systemic error or reckless disregard of constitutional requirements, any marginal deterrence does not ‘pay its way.’ In such a case, the criminal should not ‘go free because the constable has blundered.’”

In this opinion, Roberts’ reasoning was certainly sound. However, he amplified the erroneous viewpoint that the proper policy purpose of the Exclusionary Rule is to deter future misconduct. The policy is categorically not to deter. Deterrence is a purpose of punishment, and this is not a rule of punishment. Deterrence gives the police an incentive not to approach the line of impermissibility. That is precisely what the Rule is designed to avoid.

The Exclusionary Rule is not a rule of deterrence or of punishment, but is instead a rule of balancing — balancing individual rights with society’s interests in law enforcement. Roberts does get the concept, as in his discussions of balancing marginal utility against cost. But his repetition of the “deterrence” fallacy just confuses an otherwise clear argument.

Justice Ginsberg similarly the Exclusionary Rule in her dissent (joined by Justices Stevens, Souter and Breyer). Like Roberts, Ginsberg says the purpose is deterrence. But she goes even further to say that the Rule should be used to deter practically all police error.

This is a much more expansive purpose for the Exclusionary Rule (or as Ginsberg puts it, “a more majestic conception”). She goes so far as to say that any arrest based on carelessly-maintained database information would be unlawful, and would require suppression.

If the Rule were to be used as a deterrent, Ginsberg does make an argument that its marginal utility even in cases of carelessness, like this one, is sufficient to justify its use. Suppressing evidence could very well lead to reforms in the data management, to ensure that the same mistake doesn’t happen again. But exclusion is not the only means to that end, and is not even a very suitable means, as there is no actual pressure on the record-keepers to change their ways. The more effective means would be pressure from police leadership and political superiors to fix the process. Also, exclusion of evidence in County A is hardly likely to influence behavior in County B.

Justice Breyer issued his own dissent, joined by Justice Souter. In it, he makes the same error of ascribing deterrent purposes to the Exclusionary Rule, rather than the purpose of balancing interests. And as a result, he falls into the same trap of reasoning as Ginsberg.

Breyer wants a bright-line rule. Because of his focus on deterrence, he would draw the line between the police and the courts — if the error was made by court personnel, then they are not going to be deterred by suppression, so the Exclusionary Rule should not apply. But if the error was made by any police personnel, then the Rule should apply. Breyer fails to explain, however, how police database clerics are in any way deterred from negligent error by the suppression of evidence seized as a result of such error. He similarly fails to explain how court clerks are somehow different, so that they could not have been so deterred by suppression.

Ginsberg and Breyer’s arguments fall apart because they’re looking at suppression as a punishment, a deterrent, rather than as the result of a balancing of competing interests. Roberts gets it, but he too makes the same mistake to some degree. This decision seems to have muddied the waters, instead of clarifying the rule.

Oh well, better luck next time guys!

On Tuesday, the Fifth Circuit ruled on Jeff Skilling’s appeal from his conviction in the Enron case, upholding the conviction, but sending the case back for re-sentencing. Skilling may be able to raise a Brady issue on remand, as well, so the case doesn’t seem to be over. The opinion is 106 pages long, so we will summarize the ruling and its meaning for you here.

Skilling challenged his conviction, on the grounds that the government’s theory of “honest services” fraud was wrong. The government’s case let the jury decide on three purposes of Skilling’s conspiracy, one of which was to deprive Enron of the honest services of its employees. Because the jury returned a general verdict, if any one of those legal theories was insufficient, then the verdict must be reversed.

Skilling focused on the honest services theory, arguing that it was insufficient because his actions were done to give Enron a higher stock price, so it was in the corporate interest. He didn’t act in secret, and wasn’t self-dealing.

In making this argument, Skilling relied on the Circuit’s previous Enron case, United States v. Brown, 459 F.3d 509. In that case, a loan secured by Nigerian barges was fraudulently booked as revenue. The defendants in that case were specifically ordered by their CFO, Andy Fastow, to carry out the deal. Not only did they believe that Enron had a corporate interest in the scheme, and was a willing beneficiary of it, but their superiors ordered and approved their actions. Furthermore, they were paid more depending on whether they successfully achieved the goal.

The Court held that Skilling’s reliance on Brown was misplaced. The Brown rule absolves low-level employees of liability for honest-services fraud when:

1) the employer creates a particular goal,
2) the employer aligns the employees’ interests with the employer’s interest in achieving that goal, and
3) higher-level management authorizes or orders improper conduct in order to reach the goal.

Here, the first two conditions were met, but the third was not. Condition 1 was met when Enron created a goal of meeting Wall Street earnings projections. Condition 2 was met as Skilling got paid more if Enron met those projections. But condition 3 was not met, as there was no evidence that anyone besides Skilling authorized his conduct. The Board tacitly approved several of the underlying transactions, but never authorized him to engage in fraudulent conduct.

Because the third condition was not met, the Brown rule does not absolve Skilling of his liability. His conviction was therefore upheld.

—

With respect to sentencing, Skilling argued that the district court got the Guidelines calculation wrong, and that the sentence is unreasonable under §3553. The Court didn’t get to the §3553 issue, because it held that the Guidelines calculation was indeed incorrect, and a court has to do the Guidelines right before the §3553 factors come into play.

Skilling appealed a §3C1.1 two-level enhancement for obstruction of justice, and a §2F1.1(b)(8)(A) four-level enhancement for jeopardizing a financial institution.

The §3C1.1 enhancement was based on a determination that Skilling perjured himself as to his sale of Enron stock right after he resigned from the company. He’d tried to sell his stock while still CEO, but it would have had to be reported. So he resigned, then tried to sell his stock. But then September 11 happened, and he wasn’t able to sell until September 17. Skilling testified to the SEC that his order to sell on September 17 was due to his concerns over the market’s reaction to 9/11. The judge decided that was perjury.

On appeal, skilling didn’t argue that it wasn’t perjury. Instead, he argued that the court should have suppressed his SEC testimony in the first place, because the SEC misled him as to the fact that the investigation was criminal in nature.

The Circuit, however, pointed out that suppressible evidence can still be used at sentencing, and none of the exceptions to that rule apply here. The Court also found no justification for the original perjury. So the two-level enhancement was proper.

The §2F1.1(b)(8)(A) enhancement was based on the finding that Enron’s retirement plans were “financial institutions” for the purposes of that Guideline. Retirement plans aren’t specifically mentioned in the Guideline’s definition, which enumerates a long list of included entities. Various kinds of pension funds are included, however. And the list does include a catch-all “any similar entity.”

With respect to “pension funds,” the Guidelines don’t define the term. But a pension requires more than just employee investment for later payout — a pension has definitely determined payouts. Here, the retirement funds didn’t have specific benefits, they were just there as a pool for funding any benefits that might be given. So the Court decided they didn’t count.

With respect to the catch-all, apart from pension funds, the Guideline definition lists classic financial institutions like banks, investment houses, and the like. The Court did not want to expand the definition to declare every corporate retirement plan to be a financial institution.

Because the retirement plans weren’t financial institutions, the four-level enhancement was improper. So Skilling’s sentence was vacated, and the case was remanded for resentencing.

—

In addition to these main issues, the Court also rejected Skilling’s other challenges to his trial. Giving a “deliberate ignorance” instruction was at worst harmless error. None of the other jury instructions were problematic. The venue was proper. There was no prosecutorial misconduct.

Interestingly, however, the Court specifically stated that Skilling can raise Brady issues on remand. An FBI interview note showed that Andy Fastow didn’t think he had discussed a certain list with Skilling. This was omitted from the formal “302” report provided to the defense. Skilling claims that Fastow was talking about a list of talking points that Fastow had testified at trial he actually had discussed with Skilling.

The Circuit found this troubling, but the trial court never saw the notes or ruled on this claim, so nothing could be decided on appeal. But the Court instructed that “Skilling must bring this claim to the district court before we can address it.”

Therefore, Skilling might be able to get a new trial! If Skilling can show that there was a Brady violation, this case could be far from over. The government claims that the list in question is unrelated to the case, however, so we’re just going to have to wait and see.

In 1963, the first year of comparable recordkeeping, 91% of murders were solved. In 2007, the number was only 61%.

At the same time, the technological ability to solve murders increased dramatically. Scientific crime scene investigation significantly increases the amount of useful evidence that can be found. Digital crime labs and computerized analysis make it easier to interpret that evidence. And of course, modern DNA techniques enable police to make unbelievably accurate identifications from the smallest particle of hair or fluid. Today’s reality would have been a science fiction fantasy twenty years ago.

So what gives?

For one thing, the kinds of murders have changed. In previous generations, murder was almost always a personal matter. The victim and the killer knew each other, had a relationship. Husbands killed wives. Friends killed friends. Rivals killed each other. To begin a successful investigation, a detective would paint a bull’s-eye on the victim. The closer a suspect was to that bull’s-eye, the more likely they were to be the killer. Cases were solved not so much by technology and physical evidence, as by getting people to talk or confess. Acquaintance homicides were, and still are, often solved because the killer contacted the police or surrendered himself.

But now, a significant number of murders are committed by gang members. Gang members and drug dealers get killed by their own groups, who aren’t likely to talk lest they be killed themselves. They get killed by members of rival gangs, and may not even know their killers. Killers may even kill completely unrelated, innocent people, through mistaken identity or reckless “drive-by” shootings. Witnesses are intimidated by the threat of being killed themselves if they come forward. So relying on people to talk or confess is not as likely to solve these crimes.

For another thing, technology only gets you so far. DNA only identifies someone if you have a sample of their DNA to compare. Gunshot residue only helps if you have the suspect’s fingers in the first place. Fingerprints are harder to find than people think, and even then can only be compared to known fingerprints. In other words, technology helps you confirm that you have the right suspect, but first you have to get that suspect. And getting the suspect in the first place often means an old-fashioned investment of shoe leather — hitting the streets, talking to possible witnesses, and conducting skilled interrogations.

Because of the advances in technology, acquaintance homicides are truly being solved at a greater rate than they were in previous decades. The suspects are known, or easily found, so the DNA and other scientific tests make identifying the killer much more certain. The scientific identification also helps get confessions.

But stranger-to-stranger homicides have increased dramatically. And despite the technological advances, these continue to have a high probability of never being solved. Motive is hard to figure out. The killings are often part of a planned crime, so that less evidence will be left behind for law enforcement to find. And any connection between killer and victim is going to be hard or impossible to identify.

-=-=-

So what can be done?

Studies find no correlation between the number of available police officers, or the amount of their budget, and the ability to clear homicide cases. So shoving more officers on the street, or shoveling more money at the problem, is not a solution.

Studies do show, however, that cases get cleared when detectives are ambitious and they are held accountable for the success or failure of their investigations. Cases get cleared more often when the detectives have the necessary time to devote to the investigation, and when they are part of a specialized unit where everybody is focusing on the same kind of crime.

How do you get ambitious detectives? Study after study shows this to be a huge factor. Media attention can help, when there is a lot of pressure to solve a high-profile case. But in urban areas the media is often antagonistic, media praise of police rare, and so is an underdeveloped tool. Better P.R. by the police could improve ambition. Increased internal attention, status and reward for greater clearance rates would help, as well.

Solving stranger or gang-related murders requires witnesses to come forward. They fear retribution, or being punished themselves for their own crimes. Most murders, even stranger murders, are witnessed. So a critical need is to overcome witness fears.

Studies have found that most witnesses were actually involved with the crime. They either took part in some way, they brought the killer and victim together, or they tried to stop the murder from taking place. “Innocent bystanders” only make up 9% of witnesses.

Civic pride is not likely to cause the majority of witnesses to come forward. Gang culture, and the culture of the communities where such gangs flourish, teaches witnesses to do the opposite. Cash rewards sometimes help, but the amounts commonly offered are simply too small to justify the risks a witness would run if he came forward.

Ensured anonymity is a must. But in a judicial system that properly allows the accused to see and confront his accusers, anonymity cannot be ensures. Witnesses know this. Only a real and system-wide practice of concealing the appearance and identity of witnesses to violent crimes is likely to inspire the necessary confidence. And in our legal culture, we as Americans simply value the confrontation rights of the accused more than we value the evidence we might gain by limiting those rights. That’s just the way it is.

-=-=-

Reducing gangs themselves, and changing the culture in which they flourish, is the long-term solution.

Gangs arise within subcultures where there is little other societal bonding and community for young males, where those young males lack (or do not see) the ability to gain status and women otherwise, and where there is a general lack of control over one’s life. Entertainment media have a huge impact on perceptions of the world. These factors create perverse incentives, so that gang membership and codes of behavior can seem to be the right choice to make.

Common factors of such communities are a lack of value placed on education, a reliance on government or others, a lack of ownership, and a xenophobic relationship with the larger community. Undervalued education minimizes earnings and options in adulthood, as the lack of parental involvement kills schools and a thou-shalt-not-do-better-than-us attitude among peers kills student ambition. Reliance on welfare, the police, programs and others to take care of life’s needs leads to an endemic lack of personal responsibility, which kills family ties and any bond to a larger civic society. Illiteracy, immersion in the skewed reality of television and musical entertainments, and a perception that the rest of society is foreign and irrelevant, further impact perceptions of how the world works.

These problems have often been many generations in the making, and are not susceptible to overnight changes. Policy changes would be required that strengthen the family bond, rather than giving incentives to father children from multiple mothers without requiring any long-term ties and responsibilities. Policy changes would be required that lead community members to see themselves as part of the larger society, and not separate from it, subject to separate rules. Policy changes would be required that create incentives for parental involvement in schools, and pave the way for cultural views of education as the means to success.

Guilt or innocence, one might say, is all in the mind. After all, there are very few crimes that can be committed without the requisite mens rea, or mental state. If we’re going to punish someone, their acts cannot have been mere accident. We want to know that they had some knowledge that their actions could cause harm, and we want that awareness to be sufficiently high as to require punishment.

The standard criminal levels of mens rea are “negligence” (you ought to have known bad things could happen), “recklessness” (you had good reason to believe that bad things would probably happen), “knowledge” (bad things were probably going to happen), and “intent” or “purpose” (you wanted bad things to happen). If your foot kicks someone in the ribs while you’re falling downstairs, you’re not a criminal. But if you kick someone in the ribs because you don’t like them, then society probably wants to punish you.

We cannot know what anyone was thinking when they did something, however. So we rely on jurors to use their common sense to figure out what an accused must have been thinking at the time.

In recent years, however, there have been enormous advances in neuroscience. Brain scans, the software that processes the data, and good science have approached levels that would have been considered science fiction as recently as the Clinton years. Experts in the field can see not only how the brain is put together, but also what an individual brain is doing in real time. Experimental data show which parts of the brain are active when people are thinking certain things, with good detail.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), in particular, can act as a super lie-detector. Instead of measuring someone’s perspiration and heart rate while they answer questions during a polygraph exam, fMRI looks at actual real-time brain activity in areas having to do with logic, making decisions, perhaps even lying. Experimental data of large groups is pretty good at identifying what parts of the brain are associated with different kinds of thinking.

Every brain is slightly different, of course. Brain surgeons have to learn the individual brain they’re operating on before they start cutting. So general group data don’t translate to an individual person 100%. So any lie-detector use for fMRI would have to require some baseline analysis before proceeding to the important questions.

The issue is whether it will be admissible in court. Polygraph tests generally aren’t admissible, because they’re more an art than a science. But fMRI is all science. In addition, brain scans are already widely admissible for the purpose of reducing a sentence because the defendant had damage to his brain. As forensic neuroscience expert Daniell Martell told the New York Times in 2007, brain scans are now de rigeur in capital cases. In Roper v. Simmons, the Supreme Court, ruling that adolescents cannot be executed, allowed brain scan evidence for the purpose of showing adolescent brains really are different.

Outside the United States, brain scans have already begun to be used by the prosecution to show guilt. In India, a woman was recently convicted of murdering her ex-boyfriend with the admission of brainwave-based lie detection. There was other evidence of guilt as well, including the fact that she admitted buying the poison that killed him. But the brainwave analysis was admitted.

There are deeper policy issues here. Is reading someone’s brain activity more like taking a blood sample, or more like taking a statement? The Miranda rule is there, at heart, because we do not want the government to override people’s free will, and force them to incriminate themselves out of their own mouths against their will. That’s why the fruits of a custodial interrogation are presumed inadmissible, unless the defendant first knowingly waives his rights against self-incrimination. And because the DNA in your blood isn’t something you make of your own free will, by taking a blood sample against your will the government has not forced you to incriminate yourself against your will.

So is a brain scan more like a blood sample? Is it simply taking evidence of what is there, without you consciously providing testimony against yourself? Or will it require the knowing waiver of your Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights before it can be applied?

We’re interested in your thoughts. Feel free to comment.

This morning, the New York State Court of Appeals rejected the appeal of former Tyco executives Dennis Kozlowski and Mark Swartz.

The court held that testimony of an attorney who had investigated the case was not unduly prejudicial, nor was the prosecutor’s comments about that testimony on summation. With respect to subpoenaed Tyco director statements, although the defendants did properly lay the groundwork for the subpoena, and although the statements were not privileged, the judge still acted within his discretion in quashing the subpoena.

The former CEO and CFO were convicted in 2005 of nearly two dozen counts of first degree grand larceny, falsifying business records, conspiracy and securities fraud. The convictions stemmed from the improper use of Tyco funds for their own personal use.

They used a company loan program called KELP (“Key Employee Loan Program”) to buy $12.75 million worth of paintings by famous artists, millions of dollars of jewelry, and an $8.3 million stake in a sports partnership. Another loan program intended for normal relocation costs was used to buy a $7.2 million home on Park Avenue. Millions of dollars of elaborate personal expenses were covered by these “loans.” By the summer of 1999, the two executives owed more than $70 million to Tyco.

To pay that back, they gave themselves huge “loan forgiveness” bonuses, without using Tyco’s procedures for determining the amounts of such bonuses. Despite the great size of these bonuses, the entire debt was not eliminated. They then ordered more than $25 million in cash payments to themselves, plus over $12 million in stock. Tyco’s compensation committee did not receive necessary documentation, and every committee member who testified denied approving the bonuses.

After conviction, Koslowski and Swartz argued that they were entitled to a new trial. A lawyer who had taken part in the civil investigation testified that he’d had conversations with Swartz, who essentially admitted that what was done was improper. The lawyer also testified as to his own recommendations and advice to the Board during his investigation. In summation, the prosecution commented on the lawyer’s testimony, to the effect that the Board only found out about the embezzlement after the lawyers did their investigation. The defendants claimed that the lawyer’s testimony was essentially opinion, telling the jury how to decide the case, and the People’s summation bolstered that effect, creating impermissible prejudice.

The Court of Appeals disagreed, and found that “the testimony and summation complained of merely set forth facts enabling the jury to draw an inference of defendants’ guilt.” The lawyer did not present an opinion on guilt, but merely reported facts from first-hand knowledge. Facts that hurt the defendant are of course prejudicial, but prejudice is not necessarily improper. Prejudicial testimony here would only improper if the witness gave a personal opinion as to guilt.

The government’s comments, likewise, were not impermissible expressions of the prosecutor’s personal belief or opinion as to guilt, but rather “quite properly concentrated, in argument, on proved facts and circumstances and the inferences to be drawn therefrom.”

There was a second claim that a subpoena issued by the defendants had been impermissibly quashed. The court held that the defendants actually had met their burden to identify specific items and show that they were reasonably likely to contradict the People’s evidence. However, the documents sought were still privileged, and thus were not subject to production.

The privilege was not absolute, however. The materials were statements by director-witnesses, which the court held to be trial preparation materials. As such, they were not subject to the attorney-client privilege (as Tyco had argued). Nor were they subject to the absolute work-product privilege (as the government here argued). Instead, disclosure is entirely up to the trial court’s discretion.

The discretionary determination rests, oddly enough, on civil procedure: CPLR 3101(d)(2). That rule required the defendants to show that they could not get the underlying facts another way, without undue hardship. The defendants didn’t do so here, and so the judge properly exercised his discretion.

Clearly, a lot of creative thought went into the litigation and appeal of this case on both sides. There are still five years or so to go in the defendants’ sentence, so one might expect further creativity down the road.

The Supreme Court has denied cert. to a Pennsylvania high court ruling that severely limits what counts as probable cause in that state.

The dissent of Chief Justice Roberts succinctly, and creatively, sets forth the relevant facts:

North Philly, May 4, 2001. Officer Sean Devlin, Narcotics Strike Force, was working the morning shift. Undercover surveillance. The neighborhood? Tough as a threedollar steak. Devlin knew. Five years on the beat, nine months with the Strike Force. He’d made fifteen, twenty drug busts in the neighborhood.

Devlin spotted him: a lone man on the corner. Another approached. Quick exchange of words. Cash handed over; small objects handed back. Each man then quickly on his own way. Devlin knew the guy wasn’t buying bus tokens. He radioed a description and Officer Stein picked up thebuyer. Sure enough: three bags of crack in the guy’s pocket. Head downtown and book him. Just another day at the office.

Pennsylvania v. Dunlap, No. 07-1486 (Oct. 14, 2008)(Roberts, C.J., dissenting).

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court held that Devlin lacked probable cause, because what he saw was a single transaction, he didn’t actually see the drugs, there was no tip from an informant, and the defendant did not try to flee. Therefore, there might have been an innocent explanation. Because there might have been an innocent explanation, there was no probable cause.

This is one for our Fractal Weirdness files. The defendant’s transaction may have several explanations, but the most likely one under the circumstances is that it was a drug sale. As Roberts said in his dissent yesterday, “that is by far the most reasonable conclusion, even though our cases only require it to be a reasonable conclusion.” (Italics in original.) Yet the Pennsylvania court has ruled, essentially, that it must be the only possible conclusion.

One might expect a spike in successful Fourth Amendment challenges in Pennsylvania now, and a decrease in street-level drug arrests, as the common sense of ordinary law enforcement is trumped by mere speculation into whether an observed transaction might possibly have been innocent. Officers are going to be compelled to ask themselves “but what if?” when seeing an act that screams probable cause to trained eyes. And if they can conceive of an innocent explanation, they’re going to be less likely to make an arrest.

This rule may even cause officers to decide not to arrest people when even this rule would have permitted it. The rule thereby defeats the purpose of the general Exclusionary Rule, by causing law enforcement to shy away from arrests and searches that the law actually allows.

The purpose of the Exclusionary Rule is to prevent the government from using evidence it should not have had, without preventing it from gathering all the evidence it is allowed to. That is why we do not penalize individual officers when they conduct an improper search — if there was a threat of personal penalty, then far from crossing the line most officers wouldn’t go anywhere near it, and evidence that they would have been perfectly entitled to gather would be lost. Society doesn’t want law enforcement to shy away from evidence it ought to have. Likewise, that is why the Exclusionary Rule does not exclude all evidence in a case, but only the evidence that is solely attributable to crossing the line. Society wants law enforcement to be able to go right up to the line, and even dance on the line.

This holding, however, is an incentive to law enforcement to shy away from the line. There is no guidance for what sort of speculation falls within the realm of possibility. There is a huge gray area of speculative plausibility that officers must now consider. The new law compels law enforcement to err on the side of not making an arrest based on speculative possibilities, even if far less likely than trained common-sense conclusions, and perhaps even less likely than what the court would have considered plausible. Arrests and seizures that would have been appropriate are going to be avoided, lower courts may over-apply this new rule, and Pennsylvania will then suffer less law enforcement than its judges probably intended to allow.

United States v. Mejia, et al., No. 05-2856-cr (2nd Cir., Oct. 6, 2008)

In a decision that was more than a year in the making, the Second Circuit today limited the use of expert testimony by police officers. The court ruled that law enforcement experts should not be used to introduce direct evidence in the case, but rather should be limited to helping the jury understand the direct evidence. Also, the expert cannot be used for the purpose of introducing hearsay statements.

Two MS-13 members were tried for gang-related shootings. The prosecution sought to prove a critical element — acts and threats of murder, as an element of racketeering — almost entirely through expert testimony of a police officer. Apart from the expert’s testimony, there was no other evidence of murder, and only indirect evidence of threats.

There was no problem with permitting a law-enforcement officer to testify as an expert. The problem was that his testimony went beyond the permissible scope of expert testimony, and that hearsay he offered violated the Confrontation Clause.

Instead of providing background information and explanations that would help the jury understand the direct evidence, the expert gave factual direct testimony as a “case agent” summarizing the ongoing investigation of which this case was a part. The witness was offered solely as an expert, but then gave factual testimony of facts in this case. When case agents testify as experts, their credibility is given an unfair boost with the jury.

Summarizing the ongoing investigation essentially turned the trial into a grand jury proceeding, by letting the witness introduce evidence of other witnesses not part of the record. Letting the expert-only witness testify about this case gave him unmerited extra credibility. The testimony thus exceeded the bounds of expert testimony, in violation of Fed. R. Evid. 702.

The testimony also violated the Confrontation Clause by its reliance and repetition of out-of-court statements made by others during interrogations. Custodial statements are testimonial. Summarizing the hearsay from other people’s investigations that were not part of the record, and presenting it in the guise of an expert opinion, does not make the hearsay statements any less inadmissible. This violates the rule of Crawford and Fed. R. Evid. 703.

The error was not harmless, and so all of the convictions were vacated, and the case remanded for new trial.

Because this decision is based largely on Crawford, it will probably have an impact on State prosecutions as well. For example, it is common in New York drug trials for the arresting officer or undercover to testify in part as eyewitnesses and in part as experts explaining what their testimony means to the jury. State courts might start limiting such testimony with decisions like this one.