Mistrial Declared In Backpage Founders' Trial; After DOJ Ignores Judge's Rules Regarding What It Could Present

from the poisoning-the-well dept

As we noted recently, the trial of Backpage's founders finally started after years of legal wrangling. However, the judge has already declared a mistrial after the DOJ, in typical DOJ fashion, tried to ignore the judge's warnings against focusing too specifically on the specifics of sex trafficking alleged to have occurred on the site. Specifically, prosecutors repeatedly referred to child sex trafficking, despite the fact that there are no sex trafficking charges in the case (let alone child sex trafficking):

U.S. District Judge Susan Brnovich said that the cumulative effect of the child sex trafficking references made by prosecutors in opening statements and by witnesses for the government “is something that I can’t overlook and will not overlook.”

Before the trial, the judge concluded she would allow evidence showing that people were trafficked using the site, but would not allow prosecutors to linger on the details of the abuse suffered by victims.

“It seemed the government abused that leeway,” Brnovich said. The judge said one government witness testified about being raped more than once, which raises a “whole new emotional response from people.”

This is the thing that always seems to happen with Backpage. People insist that if they just demonstrate some of the (very real and very terrible) examples of bad stuff that happened, in part, via the platform, they don't have to meet the burden of actually proving the crime at issue happened. We've seen that repeatedly -- including in the comments to our last post about Backpage and in years of coverage about the company. People highlight bad (really awful) stuff that happened because people abused the platform, and then assume they can just skip all of the important steps regarding pinning the liability on the company (and its founders).

It's depressing, if not surprising, that it was apparently the DOJ's plan to try the same strategy in court, and it's good to see the judge put a stop to it.

Filed Under: doj, james larkin, michael lacey, mistrial
Companies: backpage

DOJ's First Attempt To Prosecute Accused Vault 7 Leaker Ends In A Mistrial

from the if-at-first-you-fuck-things-up... dept

The DOJ has taken an open-and-shut espionage case and managed to somehow misplace the back cover. Does this say something about the unintended consequences of charge-stacking? Maybe. Whatever it is, it isn't pretty.

The case against alleged Vault 7 leaker Joshua Schulte seemed pretty air tight, especially when Schulte continued to leak sensitive documents while behind bars, as well as attempting to rope his family into committing contempt of court violations on his behalf.

He also, as Marcy Wheeler pointed out, gave the government pretty much everything it wanted or needed, but the DOJ's prosecutors failed to present evidence in a coherent way, resulting in a whole lot of juror confusion.

According to InnerCity Press (virtually the only press covering the Schulte verdict watch), by end of day today the jurors had sent out 25 notes, most questions but also problems with two of the jurors. At the end of the day they told the Court they “aligned” on two of the charges, but were at an impasse on the other. Given that there’s slam dunk evidence that he committed the least serious crimes (false statements and contempt), that suggests at least some members of the jury have reasonable doubt that the guy who wrote a virtual signed confession to committing the most damaging leak in CIA history actually did so.

The verdict is now in, what there is of it. The case initially involved charges ranging from false statements to CFAA violations to copyright infringement (!) to child porn possession (!!!). Barely any of those charges have survived. A mistrial has been declared with jurors only finding Schulte guilty on the two least serious charges: false statements and contempt. Those won't be enough to keep him in jail since he'll likely be credited with time served. Schulte has been in jail since December of 2018.

This doesn't mean it's over. Marcy Wheeler says the government will very likely take another stab at presenting a coherent case.

The two sides will have a conference on March 26 to decide what to do. The government will certainly push to retry Schulte; Sabrina Shroff [Schulte's lawyer] asked for an extended deadline to file motions. She may try to do something further about the government’s late notice that Michael, a key witness, got put on paid leave last August (though the government has argued compellingly that Michael’s underlying lack of candor has been noticed to the defense throughout). She also may make yet another bid to get more access to the forensics, something I’ve argued that the government should have permitted in the first place.

The mistrial declaration is a credit to Shroff, who performed the unenviable task of shepherding an extremely unhelpful client through a federal espionage prosecution. Facing espionage charges drastically reduces a defendant's options. Drawing additional judicial scrutiny by attempting to leak sensitive material while incarcerated and spending your free time openly insulting the FBI and federal prosecutors isn't a course of action recommended by anyone.

Prosecutors needed to present a case containing a wealth of technical detail to jurors with clarity and conciseness. The twenty questions given to the judge by jurors a few days before the mistrial declaration showed the jury still remained confused about the facts of the case and, in a couple of instances, focused on information that had little to do with the criminal charges they were deliberating.

The government may get more charges to stick the second time around. But this initial failure is an indictment of the prosecution and its apparently misplaced confidence that the evidence spoke for itself. When you have to prove something beyond a reasonable doubt, quantity is no replacement for quality. As for Schulte, he's still at the DOJ's mercy until it exhausts its prosecutorial options. This isn't going to work out well for Schulte who's shown he's unable to quietly bide his time and capitalize on the government's missteps. He seems compelled to make things worse for himself during his unfortunately ample downtime.

Filed Under: doj, espionage, hacking tools, joshua schulte, leaks, mistrial, vault 7

No Surprise Here: PFF Blasts Jammie Thomas Judge For His Mistrial Call

from the shocking dept

We've written plenty of times about the so-called "think tank" the Progress & Freedom Foundation. The group, which has called itself a "free market" think tank appears to be anything but free market when it comes to intellectual property issues. For years, it's been a huge supporter of increasingly strengthening gov't granted monopolies, often resorting to highly questionable arguments, such as suggesting that fair use harms innovation and that the DMCA shouldn't be changed because that would be gov't meddling in the free market -- ignoring, of course, that the DMCA itself is actually meddling in the free market. For years, the face of PFF's twisted claims on copyright was Patrick Ross, who then moved on to become a lobbyist for the entertainment industry (basically cementing what he was already doing at PFF with a more direct relationship). We thought it would be difficult to find someone who could twist arguments quite as much as Ross did, but PFF surprised us and went one step further.

It hired Tom Sydnor, who made quite a splash by writing one of the most ridiculous attack dog papers we've seen, taking a bunch of Larry Lessig comments completely out of context to accuse him of being a communist sympathizer. It was pure McCarthyism. The worst was when a variety of others pointed out Sydnor's out of context comments and put them back in context -- and Sydnor still stood by the paper, refusing to admit he took a single comment out of context. The truth was that it was difficult to find a single comment that was accurately portrayed.

Based on this, I tend to be immediately extra skeptical of anything that comes out of PFF (Adam Thierer's work is usually good, but that seems the exception). Sydnor's latest is an attack on the judge in the Jammie Thomas trial for declaring a mistrial in her case for wrongly instructing the jury that simply making a file available should be considered infringement. As the judge realized (correctly, in our opinion, and the opinion of plenty of legal experts) this was a "manifest error of law." For copyright infringement to occur a copy needs to be made. Simply making something available is not making an infringing copy. In typical Sydnor fashion, not only does he claim that the judge was wrong, he makes the judge out to be totally off the reservation in making such a ruling, claiming that the judge "misread or disobeyed precedents, federal treaties, scholarly reviews and the three branches of government."

Sydnor, of course, conveniently ignores pretty much everything on the other side, including precedents, scholarly reviews and the three branches of government (not international treaties for the most part, since the relevant ones have all been written by the legacy industry -- so indeed, they agree with Sydnor's assessment, but that's hardly compelling). The fact is that there have been folks who have weighed in on both sides, and there have been widespread legal rulings on both sides of the "making available" issue, as well as scholarly reviews. In fact, William Patry, a much more widely recognized and respected copyright expert than Sydnor, has written extensively on the issue, and seems to disagree with what Sydnor repeatedly claims is "inarguable."

More importantly, the recent trend has been quite clear: most of the courts recently taking up the issue have realized how little sense it is to accuse someone of copyright infringement when no copy has been shown to have been made. There are some exceptions, certainly, but most of the cases these days seem to be going against Sydnor's interpretation, which hardly makes it "inarguable" or as crazy as the paper makes out. Sydnor's decision to take some comments out of context, and then ignore the weight of the arguments on the other side, in order to paint the judge in this case as some sort of clueless rogue, is, tragically, fitting with PFF's reputation for throwing truth, reason and logic out the window in order to support the entertainment industry's position at all costs.

Filed Under: copyright, jammie thomas, making available, mistrial, thomas sydnor
Companies: progress and freedom foundation

RIAA Appeals Mistrial Ruling In The Jammie Thomas Trial

from the i-object! dept

The RIAA seems so positively offended that its "making available" theory keeps getting rejected by courts that it's willing to object to just about anything. As you probably know, the RIAA's only "win" in a full trial was declared a mistrial, after the judge realized he had made a "manifest error of law" in incorrectly instructing the jury that simply making a file available in a shared folder was the equivalent of "distribution" under copyright law. The judge then ordered a new trial.

It probably shouldn't come as a surprise that the RIAA is appealing this decision, asking an appeals court to overturn the mistrial ruling and let the original ruling stand. While it may not be a surprise that the RIAA would be upset at the ruling, filing an appeal on a mistrial ruling is highly unusual. Normally, appeals are focused on actual rulings, not a decision that a trial was a mistrial. It seems like a long shot that the appeals court would agree to review the mistrial ruling.

Filed Under: copyright, jammie thomas, making available, mistrial, trial
Companies: riaa

Judge Declares Mistrial In RIAA's Only Court Victory

from the jammie-thomas-gets-a-second-chance dept

The RIAA's only court victory in its years-long legal battle against individuals who engage in unauthorized file sharing has been declared a mistrial, and the $222,000 fine against Jammie Thomas has been thrown out. Jammie Thomas may now face a new trial, but this time, the jury will be instructed that the record labels need to have shown actual infringement -- and that simply making files available is not infringement. This is a pretty huge loss for the RIAA, who had been running around like crazy using the Thomas verdict to (a) claim that the courts recognize that "making available" is infringement and (b) that this case somehow proves that file sharers will get huge fines. Yet, now the RIAA is back to having no actual court victories against file sharers, and its "making available = infringement" argument is once again rejected.

Perhaps equally as interesting, in declaring the mistrial, Judge Davis also called upon Congress to change the ridiculous fines that can be levied on file sharers, noting that they seem to be way, way out of proportion to the seriousness of the act:

The Court would be remiss if it did not take this opportunity to implore Congress to amend the Copyright Act to address liability and damages in peer-to-peer network cases such as the one currently before this Court. . . . While the Court does not discount Plaintiffs' claim that, cumulatively, illegal downloading has far-reaching effects on their businesses, the damages awarded in this case are wholly disproportionate to the damages suffered by Plaintiffs.

Filed Under: copyright, jammie thomas, making available, mistrial, trial

Judge In Jammie Thomas Trial Seems Likely To Declare A Mistrial

from the appeals-on-the-way dept

In the ongoing saga of the Jammie Thomas trial, where the RIAA tried to get its first serious victory in court against an alleged file sharer, things may be looking a bit grim for the RIAA's argument. While it initially gloated after winning the case, the judge later admitted that he may have made a "manifest error of law" in saying that the RIAA did not need to prove actual infringement -- but that showing Thomas had "made available" content was good enough. While both the MPAA and the RIAA tried to explain why actual proof of infringement shouldn't be necessary because it's just too difficult (the gist of their arguments), it appears that the judge is not at all persuaded by their arguments and seems quite likely to declare a mistrial.

In the hearing today, the RIAA's lawyer basically argued the same point: that because it's too difficult to obtain evidence, evidence shouldn't be necessary. The judge responded by pointing out that if Congress really intended for that to be the case, then it would have written the law to make it clear that "making available" was infringement. Since it did not, it seemed likely that Congress did not intend for the law to be read as the RIAA wants it to be read (have no fear, of course, because as we speak you can rest assured that RIAA/MPAA lobbyists are working to get the law changed on this point).

Of course, whoever loses this ruling will appeal, this case is far from over. It will go through a series of appeals to determine whether or not the whole "making available" aspect is distribution, and then even after that's settled there are numerous other points that Thomas is likely to appeal (assuming the case is still going). What I don't understand is why Thomas and her lawyer haven't also appealed over the fact that the RIAA later admitted that a key witness lied on the stand concerning a key point over the legality of making personal copies of music you bought. That would seem to also be an important point.

Filed Under: copyright, jammie thomas, making available, mistrial, trial
Companies: mpaa, riaa