Detectives Not Guilty

A federal jury acquitted D.C. detectives Milagros Morales and Erick Brown last night of charges that they pressed witnesses in a murder investigation to lie to a prosecutor so that she would sign off on an arrest warrant for the wrong man, the WaPo reports today.

After a day of deliberation, the jury discarded the government’s claims that the detectives had asked witnesses to tailor their original statements about the 2005 stabbing death of Terrance Brown at a Washington, D.C., nightclub. (Read more about the case here.) The detectives have been on administrative leave since their indictment last year.

The two-week trial was extraordinary for its window into the justice system: Rarely are the disagreements between police and prosecutors so vividly – and publicly – expressed. (Check out our story on it from last week.) The cast of witnesses and lawyers included a sitting D.C. Superior Court judge and former assistant U.S. Attorney (Jennifer Anderson), a former homicide chief in the U.S. Attorney’s Office (David Schertler), and a special prosecutor from Virginia (William Gould). Schertler represented Morales, and Steptoe & Johnson partner Reid Weingarten, a former trial attorney in the Justice Department's Public Integrity Section, represented Brown.

Comments

[Daniel Quackenbush]

Sorry, here's the correct link to the top ten worst prosecutors:

http://bennettlawfirm.typepad.com/badprosecutors/2007/08/top-10-worst-us.html

[Daniel Quackenbush]

Your scenario is plausible, if any of the following prosecutors are any indication (top 10 worst prosecutors):
bennettlawfirm.typepad.com/badprosecutors/2007/08/top-10-worst-us.html

[ToTelltheTruth]

Or, maybe, just maybe, you have a sitting DC Superior Court Judge and former federal prosecutor who wanted to "shade the truth" to make her actions more palatable to the jury-Gosh! Federal prosecutors who mislead juries? Who want to shade the truth? Who want to state things that are not in evidence as fact?

THAT NEVER HAPPENS, DOES IT?

Fortunately, when presented with the facts of an issue, juries are pretty good at seeing through prevarications by witnesses, and reaching the right result. Even when, unfortunately, such prevaricating witness happens to be a DC Superior Court judge.

[Daniel Quackenbush]

Or--We may have another jury who is unwilling to hold the police accountable because of the "thin blue line." Jurors usually do give the testimony of police officer's greater weight than most other witnesses.

[ToTelltheTruth]

I think the fact that the jury so quickly found in favor of the two detectives, after a sitting Superior Court judge, and star government witness, Jennifer Anderson, testified for 6 hours in the case, is a DAMNING INDICTMENT of Jennifer Anderson's credibility, and indeed, defense attorneys in this case actually implied in the closing statements that Anderson was lying on the witness stand. For a former Homicide Chief in the U.S. Attorney's Office (Schertler) and a former DOJ lawyer in the Public Integrity Section (Weingarten) to make such statements about a sitting D.C. Superior Court Judge is nothing short of extraordinary.

But it must be said that if Anderson was self-righteously "shading the truth" in order to make her actions look more ethical and reasonable to the jury at the expense of these two detectives' lives and careers, then it should be serious enough to get the DOJ's Office of Public Integrity to take a look at Anderson's testimony to see if she WAS in fact consciously acting to mislead the jury.