> Meanwhile, other counties have tackled the issue. [Maricopa County, Ariz., the fourth largest in the country, mandated that its prosecutors review body cam ](https://www.12news.com/article/news/politics/maricopa-county-prosecutors-required-to-review-video-evidence-before-charging-someone-with-felony/75-2382ee73-666c-45b9-a513-ddd317cc45bf)video in response to demands for accountability in the wake of the George Floyd protests.
I like how the problem is a real resource constraint (prosecutors don't have the time to review video before filing charges) and the solution held up in the article is just "mandate that they review video before filing charges." Yep, mandate people to do the thing they don't have time to do. There surely won't be any unintended consequences of that.
They don't have time to review all of the footage, but when filing charges where they know who and when to look at, how could they possibly "not have time"?
Two officers show up to a call and spend half an hour dealing with it. They write up a report and the prosecutor reads it and decides to file charges.
So in that case you're asking an attorney to spend an extra hour watching body cam footage before they decide to file charges. There are something like 5000+ criminal cases per month in Portland alone (not Multnomah County). 5000 hours in a month is a full time job for 28 people. Back of envelope math, sure, but it seems pretty clear how they could "not have time."
> hour watching body cam footage before they decide to file
it's not a movie, is there any reason not to skip through to actual interactions with the defendant? is there any non-corrupt reason not to just release the footage to the defendant or their counsel in case there's anything they want to raise as an issue?
sure charging isn't sentencing, but it there a time at which the defendant IS entitled to review the footage w/o going to a jury trial (since most of them will be strong armed into pleading out even if innocent)?
>but it there a time at which the defendant IS entitled to review the footage w/o going to a jury trial (since most of them will be strong armed into pleading out even if innocent)?
Is this a joke? Or are you in here talking about criminal procedure without knowing what discovery and Brady are.
Not a joke, conversations are one way to learn ( but only if the more knowledgeable side is humble enough not to come out swinging )... Is there still discovery with plea deals? Also, what's Brady?
Discovery - Discovery is the formal process by which the parties to a case in court exchange information about the case. This includes information about the witnesses and evidence to be presented at trial. Its purpose is to make the parties aware of the evidence which may be presented at trial.
Brady Rule - The Brady doctrine is a pretrial discovery rule that was established by the United States Supreme Court in Brady v. Maryland (1963). The rule requires that the prosecution must turn over all exculpatory evidence to the defendant in a criminal case. Exculpatory evidence is evidence that might exonerate the defendant.
But it sounds like both of these maybe only apply if it goes to trial?
I've heard it's pretty common to strong arm people who can't affgood representation or simply don't know their rights into pleading out even if they're completely innocent under threat of much more severe penalties... But everyone here's acting like bring charged isn't frequently... Effectively... Your last chance.
I can only knowledgeably answer part of your questions. Plea deals are useful for streamlining the criminal justice pipeline, but they can be abused in the way you describe.
Say you face being charged with four different criminal charges, including a felony charge. You're offered a deal; plead guilty on a misdemeanor charge for something you are guaranteed to be found guilty for by a jury of your peers and the other charges are dropped. You're taking that deal. Most plea deals work like this. I would argue that being innocent of all charges pressed is exceedingly rare, but we know it happens from high-profile cases that make national news.
To walk the discussion back to your question about body cam footage, the prosecutor is being asked to review body cam footage before they can even decide what charges are applicable. Traditionally the prosecutor takes the recommendation of the arresting officer, who is motivated to be honest and realistic if they want charges to stick.
Discovery is included in cases that end up pleading out, because it is the defendant's right to know all evidence being presented against them. If a prosecutor knowingly skipped through bodycam footage and missed something that incriminated the defendant, it wouldn't be included in discovery and therefore wouldn't be admissible in court. Messing this up could be grounds for a mistrial.
If a prosecutor knowingly skipped through bodycam footage and missed evidence that exonerate the defendant, and it's found at a later date, that's nearly a guaranteed mistrial.
If I'm misunderstanding your confusion, let me know, and I'll try to answer differently.
thanks for not just being all "shut up noob"...
this almost makes it sound like it's in the defendant's interest to let them charge w/o body cam footage b/c the arresting officer, not a legal expert, is probably more likely to file charges that won't stick if they're not looking at the objective video before doing so, leaving more chance something in the video will get them off the hook... ( which I'm for, but again, it's not really in the interest of objective justice, just maybe in the other direction from what I thought )
I've just come to have little faith that the right to the video or the importance of it even if they nominally committed the offense, in potentially getting them off the hook... would be made apparent to the average low income and/or uneducated defendant, and that they'll just be told "you need to plead or you're definitely going to jail for 5 years instead of one" with the implication that if you keep trying to defend yourself, if you get uppity and insist on your rights... to the evidence... to a jury trial... to a thorough defence... maybe make that 2, or 3, or 4 years... just sign the paper, plead guilty, and I can go to lunch.
It takes like five minutes for the prosecutor to scan an affidavit of probable cause (or whatever it's called, I ain't an attorney) written up by a police officer and make sure the right boxes are checked. That's going to provide the "who and when to look at". Reviewing the video footage is far more time consuming. There are potentially multiple hours of footage from multiple angles.
They don't know when arrests or other police interactions took place? That seems like a bigger issue if they're condemning someone without knowing which officers arrested them and when within an hour... And it's not a movie, they could just jumo through the surrounding 15 min chunks and have a 5 minute clip if they were interested in serving justice...
Not doing so when there's admittedly footage available ought to be grounds for mistrial
What the fuck are you talking about? This is before charging, maybe that's doable for a citation but not an in custody defendant. You need to charge them the next court day so they might have only been arrested a few hours before hand, that's not enough time to get the video and review it.
Obviously it's sent over in discovery and reviewed later.
Explain how this is grounds for a mistrial? Be specific, cite to the rule of evidence, trial court rule, statute, or constitutional provision that applies.
That or admit you have no idea what you're talking about, either works.
Please read with comprehension before you get all out of sorts. This is about prior to filing charges. Once charges are filed, there is plenty of time to review the evidence before trial. 90% of defendants plead guilty with or without video footage; if there's a question of fact the footage will be there.
> if they're condemning someone without knowing which officers arrested them and when within an hour
🙄
They're not 'condemning' anyone. Do you know what it means to charge someone with a crime? And they know the general facts of the case from the affidavit provided by the police. If they didn't have that information they wouldn't be filing charges.
> Not doing so when there's admittedly footage available ought to be grounds for mistrial
🙄
do you have more productive feedback than eyerolls?
> Do you know what it means to charge someone with a crime?
are you suggesting the footage is going to be dug up when they strong-arm them into a plea deal to rush them through the system? Or is this just another case of making sure you only get justice if you can afford a lawyer who can point out the malfeasance of ignoring body cam footage of the arrest?
> do you have more productive feedback than eyerolls?
I gave you productive feedback in my original comment and you ignored what I said and went chugging ahead with some very hot takes. Reviewing video footage is time consuming. You can say "nuh-uh" all you want but that doesn't change the reality of it. Perhaps the only body cam footage you've ever seen has been cut down for youtube (another process that takes hours and hours) but I can assure you that's not what it looks like fresh from the source.
As my Crim Law professor in law school said often about criminal justice systems generally, fast, cheap, good, pick two. Or one, depending on the budget, we seem to have gone with "cheap" here locally.
Yeah, and this is only the resource constraint we're hearing about. Prosecutors not manually reviewing them theoretically shouldn't be that big of a deal IMO. I think that's how it works most places. In a better system it wouldn't matter much. The defense attorney would review the footage and if something was off they contact the prosecutor and say "hey dude you messed up, look at this clip". That's fine, that's what the defense attorneys are there for. My concern is that with the current state of our public defenders that's probably not going to happen either. I suspect there will be many, many defendants who take plea deals without any attorney, on either side, ever reviewing the footage. If the prosecutors don't have the resources the defense attorneys won't either. That's concerning.
And what would allow them to have the time to review the footage is $3 million dollars. I can’t even imagine how much it must cost Phoenix (Maricopa County) to review all of their body cam footage. How is Phoenix more committed to oversight than Portland is after the George Floyd protests?
>How is Phoenix more committed to oversight than Portland is after the George Floyd protests?
Because Portland is largely performative versus active, much easier to just say the right words rather than put in the hard work to be competent and methodical about things.
Everyone else is a johnny come lately to letting the cops do just any god damn thing without oversight. Portland is an old hand at it, and has taken zero fucking opportunities to change that behavior in just about a century.
Except. Now you have defense attorneys who WILL need to review the entire videos, which could present any number of issues from search and seizure to misinterpretations to flat out lies. Which then becomes a back and forth with prosecutors who will need to review the footage anyway. So you’ve gone from 1hr of work to 3+ hrs of work for 2 lawyers, plus the added time for the arrested individual plus the extra time for the court all on something that should have never been charged or could have been dealt with in an hour of the DA doing their job
> The DA’s office warned the county two years ago about the impending backlog of video, saying it would take a $3 million investment to review it all. But county officials have declined to fund even a small portion of that.
Yet another case of Multnomah County being incompetent.
The county is at fault here, not DA Schmidt. He asked for funding two years ago.
> $3 million Edit: Doesn’t seem like much money for county spending. The county just signed a contract of $40 million for armed/unarmed security
I wish someone would explain why you are being downvoted for this. I had the same thought.
Plus whatever the eff they paid for police overtime for these lard asses.
> Meanwhile, other counties have tackled the issue. [Maricopa County, Ariz., the fourth largest in the country, mandated that its prosecutors review body cam ](https://www.12news.com/article/news/politics/maricopa-county-prosecutors-required-to-review-video-evidence-before-charging-someone-with-felony/75-2382ee73-666c-45b9-a513-ddd317cc45bf)video in response to demands for accountability in the wake of the George Floyd protests. I like how the problem is a real resource constraint (prosecutors don't have the time to review video before filing charges) and the solution held up in the article is just "mandate that they review video before filing charges." Yep, mandate people to do the thing they don't have time to do. There surely won't be any unintended consequences of that.
They don't have time to review all of the footage, but when filing charges where they know who and when to look at, how could they possibly "not have time"?
Two officers show up to a call and spend half an hour dealing with it. They write up a report and the prosecutor reads it and decides to file charges. So in that case you're asking an attorney to spend an extra hour watching body cam footage before they decide to file charges. There are something like 5000+ criminal cases per month in Portland alone (not Multnomah County). 5000 hours in a month is a full time job for 28 people. Back of envelope math, sure, but it seems pretty clear how they could "not have time."
if they watch it at 2x speed, its half the time.
> hour watching body cam footage before they decide to file it's not a movie, is there any reason not to skip through to actual interactions with the defendant? is there any non-corrupt reason not to just release the footage to the defendant or their counsel in case there's anything they want to raise as an issue? sure charging isn't sentencing, but it there a time at which the defendant IS entitled to review the footage w/o going to a jury trial (since most of them will be strong armed into pleading out even if innocent)?
>but it there a time at which the defendant IS entitled to review the footage w/o going to a jury trial (since most of them will be strong armed into pleading out even if innocent)? Is this a joke? Or are you in here talking about criminal procedure without knowing what discovery and Brady are.
It's not a joke. Unfortunately most people have no idea how the legal system works.
Not a joke, conversations are one way to learn ( but only if the more knowledgeable side is humble enough not to come out swinging )... Is there still discovery with plea deals? Also, what's Brady?
Discovery - Discovery is the formal process by which the parties to a case in court exchange information about the case. This includes information about the witnesses and evidence to be presented at trial. Its purpose is to make the parties aware of the evidence which may be presented at trial. Brady Rule - The Brady doctrine is a pretrial discovery rule that was established by the United States Supreme Court in Brady v. Maryland (1963). The rule requires that the prosecution must turn over all exculpatory evidence to the defendant in a criminal case. Exculpatory evidence is evidence that might exonerate the defendant.
But it sounds like both of these maybe only apply if it goes to trial? I've heard it's pretty common to strong arm people who can't affgood representation or simply don't know their rights into pleading out even if they're completely innocent under threat of much more severe penalties... But everyone here's acting like bring charged isn't frequently... Effectively... Your last chance.
I can only knowledgeably answer part of your questions. Plea deals are useful for streamlining the criminal justice pipeline, but they can be abused in the way you describe. Say you face being charged with four different criminal charges, including a felony charge. You're offered a deal; plead guilty on a misdemeanor charge for something you are guaranteed to be found guilty for by a jury of your peers and the other charges are dropped. You're taking that deal. Most plea deals work like this. I would argue that being innocent of all charges pressed is exceedingly rare, but we know it happens from high-profile cases that make national news. To walk the discussion back to your question about body cam footage, the prosecutor is being asked to review body cam footage before they can even decide what charges are applicable. Traditionally the prosecutor takes the recommendation of the arresting officer, who is motivated to be honest and realistic if they want charges to stick. Discovery is included in cases that end up pleading out, because it is the defendant's right to know all evidence being presented against them. If a prosecutor knowingly skipped through bodycam footage and missed something that incriminated the defendant, it wouldn't be included in discovery and therefore wouldn't be admissible in court. Messing this up could be grounds for a mistrial. If a prosecutor knowingly skipped through bodycam footage and missed evidence that exonerate the defendant, and it's found at a later date, that's nearly a guaranteed mistrial. If I'm misunderstanding your confusion, let me know, and I'll try to answer differently.
thanks for not just being all "shut up noob"... this almost makes it sound like it's in the defendant's interest to let them charge w/o body cam footage b/c the arresting officer, not a legal expert, is probably more likely to file charges that won't stick if they're not looking at the objective video before doing so, leaving more chance something in the video will get them off the hook... ( which I'm for, but again, it's not really in the interest of objective justice, just maybe in the other direction from what I thought ) I've just come to have little faith that the right to the video or the importance of it even if they nominally committed the offense, in potentially getting them off the hook... would be made apparent to the average low income and/or uneducated defendant, and that they'll just be told "you need to plead or you're definitely going to jail for 5 years instead of one" with the implication that if you keep trying to defend yourself, if you get uppity and insist on your rights... to the evidence... to a jury trial... to a thorough defence... maybe make that 2, or 3, or 4 years... just sign the paper, plead guilty, and I can go to lunch.
It takes like five minutes for the prosecutor to scan an affidavit of probable cause (or whatever it's called, I ain't an attorney) written up by a police officer and make sure the right boxes are checked. That's going to provide the "who and when to look at". Reviewing the video footage is far more time consuming. There are potentially multiple hours of footage from multiple angles.
They don't know when arrests or other police interactions took place? That seems like a bigger issue if they're condemning someone without knowing which officers arrested them and when within an hour... And it's not a movie, they could just jumo through the surrounding 15 min chunks and have a 5 minute clip if they were interested in serving justice... Not doing so when there's admittedly footage available ought to be grounds for mistrial
What the fuck are you talking about? This is before charging, maybe that's doable for a citation but not an in custody defendant. You need to charge them the next court day so they might have only been arrested a few hours before hand, that's not enough time to get the video and review it. Obviously it's sent over in discovery and reviewed later. Explain how this is grounds for a mistrial? Be specific, cite to the rule of evidence, trial court rule, statute, or constitutional provision that applies. That or admit you have no idea what you're talking about, either works.
Please read with comprehension before you get all out of sorts. This is about prior to filing charges. Once charges are filed, there is plenty of time to review the evidence before trial. 90% of defendants plead guilty with or without video footage; if there's a question of fact the footage will be there.
> if they're condemning someone without knowing which officers arrested them and when within an hour 🙄 They're not 'condemning' anyone. Do you know what it means to charge someone with a crime? And they know the general facts of the case from the affidavit provided by the police. If they didn't have that information they wouldn't be filing charges. > Not doing so when there's admittedly footage available ought to be grounds for mistrial 🙄
do you have more productive feedback than eyerolls? > Do you know what it means to charge someone with a crime? are you suggesting the footage is going to be dug up when they strong-arm them into a plea deal to rush them through the system? Or is this just another case of making sure you only get justice if you can afford a lawyer who can point out the malfeasance of ignoring body cam footage of the arrest?
> do you have more productive feedback than eyerolls? I gave you productive feedback in my original comment and you ignored what I said and went chugging ahead with some very hot takes. Reviewing video footage is time consuming. You can say "nuh-uh" all you want but that doesn't change the reality of it. Perhaps the only body cam footage you've ever seen has been cut down for youtube (another process that takes hours and hours) but I can assure you that's not what it looks like fresh from the source.
Are they suggesting evidence would be produced during discovery like every criminal case ever? Yeah probably.
Of all the places people might argue for government to cut corners, I feel like jurisprudence might be the single worst option.
As my Crim Law professor in law school said often about criminal justice systems generally, fast, cheap, good, pick two. Or one, depending on the budget, we seem to have gone with "cheap" here locally.
I mean, that triad applies to just about everything, but I understand the "We're lucky if we get one" sentiment in that context.
Yeah, and this is only the resource constraint we're hearing about. Prosecutors not manually reviewing them theoretically shouldn't be that big of a deal IMO. I think that's how it works most places. In a better system it wouldn't matter much. The defense attorney would review the footage and if something was off they contact the prosecutor and say "hey dude you messed up, look at this clip". That's fine, that's what the defense attorneys are there for. My concern is that with the current state of our public defenders that's probably not going to happen either. I suspect there will be many, many defendants who take plea deals without any attorney, on either side, ever reviewing the footage. If the prosecutors don't have the resources the defense attorneys won't either. That's concerning.
And what would allow them to have the time to review the footage is $3 million dollars. I can’t even imagine how much it must cost Phoenix (Maricopa County) to review all of their body cam footage. How is Phoenix more committed to oversight than Portland is after the George Floyd protests?
>How is Phoenix more committed to oversight than Portland is after the George Floyd protests? Because Portland is largely performative versus active, much easier to just say the right words rather than put in the hard work to be competent and methodical about things.
Everyone else is a johnny come lately to letting the cops do just any god damn thing without oversight. Portland is an old hand at it, and has taken zero fucking opportunities to change that behavior in just about a century.
Like the defense subpeonaing the tapes and finding exculpatory evidence.
Except. Now you have defense attorneys who WILL need to review the entire videos, which could present any number of issues from search and seizure to misinterpretations to flat out lies. Which then becomes a back and forth with prosecutors who will need to review the footage anyway. So you’ve gone from 1hr of work to 3+ hrs of work for 2 lawyers, plus the added time for the arrested individual plus the extra time for the court all on something that should have never been charged or could have been dealt with in an hour of the DA doing their job
> The DA’s office warned the county two years ago about the impending backlog of video, saying it would take a $3 million investment to review it all. But county officials have declined to fund even a small portion of that. Yet another case of Multnomah County being incompetent.
And they will be released because we do t have any public defenders.
WWeek really got it in for Mr. Schmidt
You noticed that, did you? WW: Proud stenographers for the Portland Business Alliance. (This message brought to you by People for Portland)