Five Years After His Arrest, Prosecutors Try To Push Back Justin Carter's 'Terroristic Threat' Trial

from the pointless-move-meant-to-extend-the-defendant's-misery dept

Way back in the summer of 2013, Justin Carter, a teen living in Texas, made a joke on Facebook while chatting with other League of Legends players. Responding to facetious comments he was insane, Carter sarcastically agreed, using a very regrettable choice of words.

Oh yeah, I'm real messed up in the head, I'm going to go shoot up a school full of kids and eat their still, beating hearts…

This was followed with "lol" and "jk," which would indicate Carter wasn't taking his words seriously and neither should anyone else. Unfortunately, someone in Canada took his words seriously and reported him to law enforcement. Prosecutors decided to bring terroristic threat charges against the 18-year-old, taking his comments both seriously and out of context.

Things went from stupid to insane quickly. Prosecutors got the judge to agree to set bail at $500,000. Carter's family was unable to get him released while he awaited trial. During the time he was locked up, Carter reported being beaten frequently by other inmates and placed on "suicide watch" by jailers. "Suicide watch" basically translates to being stripped of all belongings and most of your clothing and being sent to solitary confinement.

Fortunately, an anonymous donor paid Carter's insane bail to spring him from jail. If this person hadn't, there's a good chance Carter would still be locked up, if not actually dead. Carter isn't a hardened criminal with a long juvenile rap sheet. He's a young gamer who said something stupid online and has since been subjected to the full force of prosecutorial discretion.

Five years later, he's still waiting to go to trial. The trial was due to start February 20 but prosecutors filed a motion asking the judge to push the trial date out even further.

The motion, filed Feb. 13 by Assistant District Attorney Clayten Hearrell in Comal County’s 247th District Court, argues that the state needs more time to pursue a Canadian witness who first reported Carter’s comments to authorities in 2013.

This sounds like prosecutors simply want to make Carter's life hell for as long as possible. This isn't the move of an attorney who feels he has a strong case to pursue. For most of the last half-decade, Carter has been technically free, but his movements limited due to his pending trial. On top of that, Carter has been forbidden from using any online services without the prior written consent of the corrections department.

Carter's lawyer is justifiably angry.

Flanary said Monday that he was caught off guard by the state’s motion. “What have they been doing for the past five years?” he asked of Hearrell and his fellow prosecutors. Flanary also noted how the witness the state is trying to secure would not add much to the prosecution’s case, because Carter is not denying he posted the comments in question. Rather, Carter asserts that he posted the comments sarcastically, and thus should not be considered a serious threat.

This is a damn good question: what exactly would this person add to the state's case, considering her testimony would be completely redundant. Does the state think the key to securing a conviction is a jury hearing firsthand how one person took Carter's comments seriously enough to report them to law enforcement? As his lawyer points out, Carter isn't disputing the fact he posted the comments, so there's nothing this Canadian "witness" could possibly add, other than an unfamiliar accent.

Fortunately for Carter, the presiding judge is no more impressed by the prosecution's last-minute attempt to push Carter's trial even further down the road.

“There’s no continuance on a 5-year-old case,” [Judge Jack Robison] said, setting the trial for May 14.

[...]

Robison said in court Tuesday that Carter’s trial would have been held right then and there if a settlement had been reached in the only case ahead of him on the court’s docket — for which a large jury pool was assembled in the courtroom.

This is better but it still allows the state to control Carter's life for a couple more months. His original trial date was supposed to be February 20th. Prosecutors didn't get the indefinite extension they wanted, but they do get to keep Carter on ice for another 60 days.

I'm sure prosecutors feel jurors won't take Carter's comments as seriously as they do. They seem intent on locking Carter up for a long time, even though context makes it clear the post was joke. The state offered a plea deal -- eight years in prison -- but this has been rejected by Carter and his counsel. Juries can sometimes be unpredictable, but this last-ditch continuance request reeks of desperation -- an attempt to put off an inevitable acquittal for as long as possible. It's almost as though the prosecution has bought into the Sunk Cost Fallacy and can't stop throwing resources at its lemon of a case.

Filed Under: first amendment, free speech, jokes, justin carter, never joke, sarcasm, speedy trial, terrorist threat
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Prosecutor Incredibly Unhappy He's Being Forced To Respect That Whole 'Speedy Trial' Thing

from the accused-criminals-apparently-have-no-rights dept

There's general prosecutorial dissatisfaction with the founders' decision to implement due process rights for accused criminals. Flowing from the "limits" of the Fourth Amendment into the Fifth and Sixth, it seems the system is set up for prosecutorial failure. At least, that's the impression you get when you hear prosecutors actively arguing against enshrined rights.

Albuquerque, New Mexico is in the middle of a two-year experiment in case management. Far too often, accused were allowed to languish behind bars until the state decided to begin prosecuting their cases. The right to a speedy trial doesn't seem to be so much a right as an easily-ignored guideline. People lose parts of their lives and, often, their employment for having done nothing more than be accused of committing a crime.

The order [PDF] says prosecutors have 10 days to work from arrest to arraignment and the rest of the schedule is sped up for both prosecutors and defendants. Most productions of evidence (from either side) must be handled in five days and preparing for trial (including providing lists of witnesses expected to testify) is limited to 25 days.

There have been few complaints from public defenders as defendants are being cut loose more frequently thanks to the state's inability to meet this order's definition of a speedy trial. All the complaints are coming from the prosecution's side, which is the side with a greater amount of resources at its disposal.

Maddening, absurd and unjust.

Those are just some of the words Bernalillo County District Attorney Raul Torrez is using to describe a special set of court rules said to have created a backlog of 8,000 unindicted felony cases in the Albuquerque-area.

The critique is aimed at Bernalillo County District Court’s two-year experiment, known as the “Case Management Order.” The CMO was designed and implemented as a way to clear out the county’s notoriously jammed up district court calendar that caused overcrowding at the jail and left defendants waiting years for a resolution to their case.

"Maddening, absurd and unjust" could just as easily describe the system before the fixes were implemented. Defendants waiting years for their cases to be resolved is both absurd and unjust -- which is exactly what state Supreme Court Justice Charles Daniel pointed out when instituting the order.

“When the CMO was issued, the Second Judicial District had a backlog of approximately 6,000 untried cases,” wrote Daniels. “Cases often took two to three years to resolve, creating serious speedy trial problems.”

The order simply pushes prosecutors to hew closer to the Constitutional ideal. There is a right to a speedy trial. There is no right to prosecute. And there's nothing in the Constitution that even suggests rights should be suspended simply because the government has a backlog to work through.

DA Torrez claims the order has directly resulted in increased crime in the Albuquerque area. He also claims prosecutors don't have enough resources to tackle cases in the limited timeframe the order demands. At this point, you might think Torrez would develop some empathy with the public defense side, which is chronically underfunded pretty much everywhere in the US because most voters and taxpayers have problems with paying to represent "guilty" people.

Torrez is one of those people. At no point does he recognize the order also cuts loose those falsely-accused or those who the state wouldn't be able to successfully convict. Instead, he portrays this attempt to adhere to the "speedy trial" right as a revolving door for criminals.

Torrez says judges are throwing out cases based on the CMO’s strict rules, giving accused criminals a free pass until their case gets refiled, if ever.

“We’re dismissing cases and throwing cases out on technical grounds,” said Torrez. “We’re not making the criminal justice system function the way it should.”

Uh, you weren't "making the criminal justice system function the way it should" before. That's why you got hit with a judicial order forcing you to speed up your prosecutorial process.

And Torrez is definitely overstating the problem. CMO dismissals are the exception, not the rule, making his claim of a link between the CMO and crime rate spikes highly suspect.

On Thursday, Bernalillo district court officials came up with statistics on the number of case dismissals that have happened so far this year. Out of the 900 dismissed cases, only 13 percent were related to the CMO, according to the statistics.

There are few things uglier than an arm of the state complaining about the Constitution, even indirectly. It sounds like the DA's office simply needs to learn to prioritize, starting with the rights of the citizens it puts behind bars.

Filed Under: albuquerue, due process, guilty, innocent, raul torrez, speedy trial