By David Oscar Markus
The Eleventh Circuit affirmed a life sentence and a no-hearing suppression denial this week in United States v. Spearman, No. 24-10300, a dark-web child-exploitation case out of West Palm Beach (Judge Cannon below). The panel was Rosenbaum, Branch, and Kidd. Judge Branch wrote for the court.
The court affirmed Judge Cannon's decision not to hold a suppression hearing.
You gotta read Judge Kidd's dissent, which opens like this: "A two-hour suppression hearing. That is all Spearman requested."
Judge Kidd then criticized criminal discovery and explained that in a civil case you can serve interrogatories, requests for admission, and take depositions. "Not so in the criminal context." He continues: "if a government agent's knowledge is not reduced to writing, then a hearing often is the only mechanism a criminal defendant can use to probe that person's knowledge."
The district court faulted Spearman for not offering declarations or affidavits from people with knowledge of a joint venture. Kidd's response is the question that answers itself: who, exactly, would those witnesses be? "The only 'witnesses or persons with knowledge' of a joint venture between the U.S. government and the foreign law enforcement agency would be the very people Spearman sought to examine at a hearing: the government agents who worked on the case." The court could have compelled those agents to say more. It did not. And Spearman, in Kidd's words, was "powerless under our criminal justice system" to do it himself.
"It places those defendants in a classic catch-22 situation: To establish entitlement to a hearing, a defendant must present evidence that only a hearing would uncover." And the close of that paragraph is the line I would put on the board: "If Spearman had the information that he sought to uncover, then he would not need a hearing.... But Spearman did not have this information that only a hearing could uncover. So he gets no hearing."
Judge Kidd concludes: "A suppression hearing is one of the few tools available to criminal defendants to probe the extent of the government's intrusion upon their 'persons, houses, papers, and effects.'"
Good for Judge Kidd.
3 comments:
Former AUSA Kidd
In a case involving what the case agent described as the "Osama Bin Laden" of child pornography and most wanted child pornography offender in the world
"Next, the government presented the testimony of FBI data scientist John-Robert Lee Marsh. Marsh described the content of some of the pornography recovered from Spearman’s devices, including, among other examples, a video in which an 18-month-old female is hung upside down while a woman beats the child and burns her with candle wax, several videos of the sexual torture of children 8 years old or younger, and an image of a topless child with blood across her body who appears to be dead."
@10:54AM here’s the thing. You inflame emotions to justify denying fairness in the criminal process, but guess what? The rule then applies across the board. Either we live in a system with rules designed to ensure fairness or we allow the most horrific cases to justify an unfair process that hurts us all.
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