Gangsters in Blue

The Reason.tv video Mississippi Drug War Blues: The Case of Cory Maye took top prize in the Best Documentary Short category at the Oxford Film Fest. Congratulations to Paul Feine, Roger Richards, and Dan Hayes for their hard work. And of course, props to Drew Carey for making the video possible. You can watch it below.

Ten years.

In this passage of John Wilburn’s summary of Paul Ebert’s closing, Ebert is recalling the testimony of an alleged marijuana expert. Ebert’s trying to make the case that Frederick is a big-time pot dealer.

Meinhart says 1 plant produces 1 pound of salable marijuana. 1 pound is 16 ounces, and at $400.00 per ounce is $6400.00 times 10 plants is $64000.00.

Which of course would explain why Ryan Frederick got up at 4am each morning to deliver soft drinks.

Yesterday, both sides in the Ryan Frederick trial made their closing arguments. This morning, the jury will begin their deliberations.

Ryan Frederick is the 28-year-old Chesapeake, Virginia man facing murder charges for killing a police officer during a drug raid (see this wiki for more on Frederick’s case). Prior coverage of his trial here.

If you’ve been following the case, I’d encourage you read coverage from the Virginian-Pilot, and from the local Tidewater Liberty blog.

Some wrap-up odds and ends from the last few days of the trial:

• Last week, the defense called seven of Frederick’s neighbors, one of whom was outside the night of the raid. All said they heard no police announcement, though neighbors did testify about hearing the battering ram.

• There’s more significance to the neighbors’ testimony than merely whether or not Frederick should have heard an announcement, though that’s obviously important. The state made Frederick out to be a big-time drug dealer. Police informant Steven Wright said he bought marijuana from Frederick dozens of times over just a few months. That’s dozens of drug deals from just one guy. Yet the police affidavit notes that surveillance on Frederick’s home showed no unusual activity. And Frederick’s neighbors—people who you’d think would want a hardened, drug-dealing, cop-killing neighbor out of their community—have not only defended him in the media, they’ve testified in his defense at his trial.

• The Virginian-Pilot’s John Hopkins has done a splendid job covering this case. I’ve rarely seen a local reporter cover a botched raid so well. Hopkins refused to take police statements about the raid at face value. He did his own reporting, and uncovered some significant flaws in the case. At the start of the trial, Special Prosecutor Paul Ebert put Hopkins on his witness list, which effectively barred Hopkins from the courtroom, which meant he could no longer report on the case. But Ebert never called Hopkins to testify. Sneaky way to get a good reporter off your butt.

• The person who could shed the most light on the truth in this case never testified. That would be Renaldo Turnbull, the informant/burglar that Hopkins and I interviewed. That he didn’t testify isn’t surprising. He wouldn’t have been helpful to either side. The state would have to deal with his revelations to Hopkins and I that the police were encouraging their informants to illegally break into homes to collect probable cause. Once the judge ruled before the trial that the search warrant for Frederick’s home was valid, Frederikc’s attorneys no longer had much of a reason to bring up Turnbull’s allegations. They would have had to deal with a guy who’s still facing a host of his own criminal charges, and is at the mercy of the state. There’s also obviously a huge risk to the defense in going after the integrity of the police, particularly the integrity of the cop your client admits to shooting.

If there’s ever an outside investigation of the issues that have surfaced in this case (and there really should be), Turnbull ought to be the first person investigators speak to, and the first to whom they grant immunity.

• Frederick’s biggest problem is that in the interviews he gave with police shortly after the raid, he misled them about growing marijuana. I could be mistaken, but from what I can tell, he didn’t out and out lie—he said there were no marijuana plants in his home at the time fo the raid, and there weren’t. But he neglected to say he had plants before the break-in by the police informant three nights earlier.

It’s not difficult to believe that Frederick both legitimately feared for his life the night of the raid (fearing, perhaps, that informant Steven Wright and friends had come to harm him), and realized that if he admitted in those interrogations to both killing a cop and growing marijuana, his days were numbered.

Of course, Frederick wasn’t obligated to talk to the police at all that night. And he certainly wasn’t obligated to implicate himself. But that he did talk but then wasn’t forthcoming about growing marijuana will almost certainly hurt his credibility with the jury.

• Oddly, at the same time, the recordings of those police interrogations could also save Frederick. They clearly show a frightened, nervous, confused man, who weeps and vomits when he contemplates that he’s just taken another life. They don’t depict the enraged, calculating cop killer prosecutors tried to make Frederick out to be.

• Yesterday, the judge decided to allow the jury to consider lesser charges for Frederick, including first and second degree murder, and voluntary and involuntary manslaughter. The prosecution consented to adding the lesser charges.

On the one hand, this would seem to show that the prosecution isn’t all that confident in its case (which, if true, would be one of the few signs of intelligence they’ve shown in two weeks). On the other hand, allowing for lesser charges also gives the jury the option of holding Frederick culpable for (a) growing marijuana, and (b) killing a law enforcement officer who had come to his home because of that marijuana, while at the same time giving them the sense that they’re punishing the police for poor procedure, and the prosecutors for their insulting performance in court.

If I had to make a prediction, I’d say the jury convicts on both the drug and gun charge, and convicts Frederick of some sort of manslaughter. The state didn’t prove distribution (their only evidence that Frederick grew the marijuana for anything other than personal use was testimony from their lying informant), but I could see the jury wanting to punish Frederick for lying to the police. A murder charge in Virginia requires proof of malice, and the only evidence the state offered of malice, again, came from informants with criminal records who were shown at trial to be repeated liars. Frederick’s taped interrogations, on the other hand, clearly show remorse.

Whatever the jury decides, this is an ugly tragedy all around. And entirely preventable. Amazing how paternalism can so quickly manifest itself as bloodshed. The last couple of weeks have embodied so many of the insidious elements of the drug war, from the home invasions to the informant tips and shoddy police investigations to the jailhouse snitch testimony and the chilling, horrifying feeling that with one life ended and another effectively ruined, we’ve been through all of this before. And it’s just a matter of time before we go through it all again.

Virginian-Pilot columnist Kerry Dougherty (who has thus far proven to be a reliable (if not always accurate) defender of the Chesapeake Police Department) today outdoes herself, cracking jokes fat jokes because Ryan Frederick has gained 60 pounds while isolated in jail for the past year:

What’s cooking at the Chesapeake city jail?

Spectators couldn’t help but wonder about that last week as they gawked at Ryan Frederick during his capital murder trial.

I mean, how often does an inmate pack on about 60 pounds behind bars?

Comparing photos of the skinny soft-drink delivery guy who was arrested a year ago to the chipmunk-cheeked defendant in the too-small suit was a lot like looking at before-and-after photos from a Jenny Craig ad.

Ha! A dead cop, crappy police work, prosecutorial misconduct, and a likely innocent man putting on weight because he’s been confined to a small jail cell for more than a year while waiting to see if he’ll be spending the rest of his life in prison–that’s comedy gold!

There is apparently a point behind Dougherty’s fat jokes, though it’s a pretty ridiculous one.

On Thursday, prosecutors tried to focus attention on Frederick’s weight, hinting that the beefy 29-year-old might have kept thin in the past by abusing drugs that cause weight loss. The prosecution posed hypothetical questions to an expert witness about whether cessation of methamphetamines or cocaine might result in rapid weight gain.

You know what else could cause weight gain? Spending 23 hours per day in 9 by 12 foot cell–for more than a year.

Dougherty’s next sentence assumes her readers are absolute idiots:

He said his overeating is stress-related, yet conceded that stress on the night of the shooting caused him to vomit several times.

Yes, that’s quite the contradiction, Ms. Dougherty. Clearly, Frederick isn’t lying about gaining weight. And as we saw and heard in yesterday’s videos, he isn’t lying about vomiting during his police interrogations on the night of the raid. So I guess Dougherty’s implication here is that Frederick is lying about why he gained wait–that he wasn’t stressed about spending the rest of life in prison or remorse for ending Shivers’ life. Rather, he was just feasting on vending machine food in celebration and satisfaction at his kill. Oh, and he can’t help but himself now that his appetite is no longer suppressed by all the cocaine and/or meth he was taking (an accusation for which there is zero evidence, other than the preposterous link to Frederick’s weight gain).

I hate to waste words explaining the obvious, but Dougherty apparently requires it. We react differently to different stressors. It’s not at all difficult to see how the immediate stress and adrenalin rush that would come with having just having your home raided and realizing you’d just killed a cop might cause one to vomit while, later, the stress and monotony of wasting away in a jail cell for a year while awaiting your fate might cause one to seek comfort in food that tastes good.

I actually hadn’t read about this line of questioning from the prosecution in the trial coverage, but it’s typically galling and outrageous.

“You’re not exactly wasting away from regret and remorse now, are you?” snapped prosecutor James Willett, who then flashed an image of skinny Frederick in an orange jumpsuit on a screen. With the thin Frederick towering over the chubby one, Willett told Frederick to rise, open his jacket and turn sideways.

It’s not enough that they’re trying to railroad the guy, they have to embarrass and insult him, too.

I guess if there’s an upside to this insanity, it’s that if the law-and-order crowd has nothing left but fat jokes, they must be starting to realize just how shabby the state’s case against Frederick really is.

Here’s hoping the jury does, too.

This is the audio of the police interview with Ryan Frederick taken 30 minutes after the raid. It was played at Frederick’s trial yesterday.

Shouldn’t a prosecutor required to do even a bare bones investigation into the reliability of his witnesses?

More from Chesapeake this afternoon:

Jailhouse informant Jamal Skeeter’s credibility took more hits at the Ryan Frederick murder trial this morning, as a defense attorney introduced about 30 letters Skeeter wrote to various authorities offering his assistance in homicides, police shootings and even the Michael Vick dogfighting investigation.

Called back to the witness stand, Skeeter didn’t deny that he’s a “professional witness.” But he denied writing some of the letters, even though acknowledging they were in his handwriting with his name on the envelope…

When Skeeter entered the courtroom, he initially refused to answer any questions, saying his safety was in jeopardy. He also tried to order the removal of the media. The judge refused and ordered him to testify.