I don’t feel like listening to the report again, but the article is a transcript of the report, and it doesn’t say he was up for an athletic scholarship —just a normal one. It was just that they mentioned his high school football career in the same breath. The confusion is understandable, though.
I find this case very interesting, because it seems to me that in fact there are many people in the US who are above the law. This case may provide that there are even more people who are above the law (at least some of the time).
I found page 5, section 2 (and continuing on to page 6 & 7) very interesting.
So prosecutors are free, according to this argument, to make up whatever they want, to plant evidence, muck about with physical evidence, tamper with whatever they wish, at the investigatory stage? Am I reading that correctly?
Then, once the trial begins, they so have absolute immunity, since now they are at trial. Do I understand that argument correctly?
Another question: what prevents the plaintiffs from suing the county office of the prosecutor? I mean, as the employer, they knew or should have known what their employees were up to. If they did, they were complicit (thus it becomes a conspiracy), and if they didn’t know what their employees were up to, they become negligent.
Count me as another who would like to know if criminal charges have been brought against Hrvol and/or Richter, and if not, why not.
If the inference is that Ms. Lithwick’s Slate column prompted my post, it did not. I hadn’t read it before now.
Without checking, I’m sure I could find three or four bloggers who have also commented on this case. I didn’t link to them, either, because none of them prompted my post.
Let me make clear that this is a required assumption.
The point of a trial is to determine issues of fact. “What events actually happened?” is a question for the jury to answer.
A motion for summary judgment says, “We don’t even need to have a trial, because even if every single thing the other side says is absolutely true, they STILL don’t have a case.”
So when you’re deciding a motion for summary judgment, you assume all the facts alleged by the other side are true, and resolve all reasonable inferences from those facts in their favor. And then you determine if they can win. if they can’t, then summary judgment is appropriate.
At a trial, the question of what the proseuctors actually did can be resolved. THIS motion is saying, “No matter what they did, they have immunity, so no need to have a trial. They didn’t do this bad stuff, but even if they did, so what? They still have immunity.”
One thing I’m not really getting is the distinction between the pre-trial phase and the trial phase. I imagine it has to do whether they are technically within the scope of their official duties. But I don’t think there should be any distinction. Anyone who is framing someone is already outside of their official duties. And if they’re not framing someone then it’s iffy in any event.
Or maybe not. Here’s a question for the legal scholars: can you sue a non-government official base on a “should have known” claim? For example, suppose a witness testifies that they are “pretty sure” they saw you at the scene, and you later (i.e. after you’re convicted) prove that you weren’t there. Can you sue the witness based on the claim that they should have realized it wasn’t you?
This appears to be an exagerated version of McGhee/Harrington’s claims.
I acknowledged that the govt appears to be making that argument, and noted that I disagree with it.
What I was quibbling with is whether the plaintiff in this case is claiming actual knowledge of framing or that it “effectively amounts to framing”, which to my mind might be different.
It would be more clear-cut if, for example, someone from the prosecutor’s office asserted knowledge of a plan to frame the guys.
I don’t see anything in your subsequent post that amounts to anything more than “they should have known better”.
FWIW it seems particularly egregious the way it’s presented here, but I would guess that most of these types of witnesses are constantly changing their stories and the cops browbeat them until they settle on a version that the cops believe to be true. But that’s not especially relevant, I think. The point is that no actual knowledge is being claimed of a frameup, only that they should have known better.
Here’s another example. Suppose the cops believe that so-and-so murdered someone at such-and-such place and they think some-other-guy witnessed it. Some-other-guy initially denies it but the cops interrogate him until he admits that yeah he saw so-and-so do the murder. Are the cops framing so-and-so by pressuring some-other-guy to lie?
Thinking on this more I do not see why a line cannot be drawn that would prevent this feared flood of litigation against prosecutors.
Simply make it that a convicted person needs to secure their freedom (i.e. throw the prison doors wide and let them walk out) via a court finding that determines prosecutorial misconduct got them convicted in the first place. In this case the withholding of exculpatory evidence (the court that set them free did not speak to the being “framed” issue it does not seem).
Now that guy would seem to have good cause to chase after the prosecutor. Let a court decide the issue.
That would keep every Tom, Dick, Harry & Jane cooling their heels in prison with nothing else to do from filing lawsuits against their prosecutor.
The notion of absolute immunity that is so absolute, as mentioned above, that a prosecutor can literally fabricate evidence, lie, cheat, whatever and be completely free of consequences is just…:eek:
ETA: I presume a prosecutor might get disbarred which is serious to them but hardly seems enough in a case like this…especially since this is so long afterwards those guys are likely close to retirement anyway.
Well, the fabricating evidence is pretty clearly with respect to the shotgun shell. Hughes obviously knew nothing about what the murder weapon was, after two wrong guesses was told there was a 12 gauge shell found at the scene, and then his testimony about the murder weapon being a 12-gauge was offered against the accused. That knowledge came from the investigators, nowhere else.
Again that’s not actual knowledge of fabricating evidence. That means he changed his story, which, again, undoubtedly happens all the time and frequently from false to true.
My understanding is that this is actually a common tactic used by interrogators - confronting reluctant witnesses with your own knowledge of parts of the case. From the prosecutor’s perspective, they may have been doing this here, thinking “this guy was trying to BS us with those earlier stories but now that he knows we know more than he thought, he’s finally coming clean”. Or not. Maybe they knew Hughes knew nothing. We can only guess.
Regardless, from reading a bit about the case it seems like withholding exculpatory evidence is included in the “framing” claim. If this is the case then my argument is not especially relevant, and I’m sorry for wasting people’s time with this issue.
The distinction between simply changing stories and the use of falsified testimony is this: Hughes didn’t change his story on his own. If they had kept telling him, “No, you’re lying,” as he cycled through various pistol, rifle, shotgun, hacksaw, and small artillery theories, you might have a point. But Hughes was fed the information by the investigators, who then presented his testimony as though he had come up with it on his own. The source for the knowledge was the investigators.
Good. That make me feel better about our court system.
But I can’t see how an administration that condemned the previous one for arresting and holding non-citizens without evidence can seriously argue that it’s OK to do the same to citizens, as long as you invent some evidence first. :dubious:
Again, I don’t know if this is relevant as above (can you confirm whether withholding or lying about evidence about other suspects counts as framing?) but FWIW I don’t see your point here. Did the prosecution use his “identification” of the murder weapon to bolster his credibility?