TheAgitator.com
More on Ryan Frederick
Wednesday, September 24th, 2008Let me add a little color commentary for Agitator readers to the post below:
I think special prosecutor Paul Ebert really shot himself in the foot on this.
I don’t know how he thought he could admit evidence from these two “burglars” without having to explain who they were, how the police came to know them, or without anyone noticing the obvious similarities between the “burglars’” stories and the information in the police affidavit for the search warrant. I was speculating that the informant was also the burglar within a week of the raid.
When I first reported all of this back in June, no one seemed all that interested (which I guess is a rather humbling account of my influence!). Not Ebert’s office, not Chesapeake PD, not the U.S. attorneys office. The Virginian-Pilot knew about these accusations (I can now say that their reporter is the one who initially tipped me off), but their editors decided to sit on the story unless and until they could get more confirmation for Renaldo Turnbull’s story.
I even sent my article to Frederick attorney James Broccoletti, who replied through his secretary that he had “heard some rumors” but didn’t put much validity in them. (I’d add here that I don’t know Broccoletti’s strategy–he may have simply been playing me off because he didn’t want to tip his hand, or didn’t want to consort with a reporter. What’s clear is that he wasn’t actively pursuing the informants-as-burglars angle at that time.)
In any case, if Paul Ebert had tried to make his case simply on the fact that Frederick had a small amount of pot in his house and shot and killed a cop, he could have avoided all of this. It certainly worked for the prosecutors in Cory Maye’s case.
Instead, Ebert wanted to tack on the felony drug charges. And the only way he could do that was to introduce the evidence the informants claim to have found when they burglarized Frederick’s home. The kicker was the phone call from Frederick to one of the informants police found in Frederick’s cell phone records (the burlgars rather stupidly called Frederick ahead of time to see if he was home–another pretty good indication that they were working for the police). That call opened the door for the unlikley threat Turnbull is now saying Frederick made against the police, which I’m sure had Ebert salivating.
Unfortunately for Ebert, his admission of the existence of these “burglars” was enough to persuade editors at the Virginian-Pilot to run their own reporter’s interview with Turnbull from last February, in which Turnbull was quite a bit more candid than he was with me (by the time I got to him, the cops had already added new charges to his rap sheet, in what he says was clear retaliation for his talking to the other reporter). When that article ran, Broccoletti got interested, as did much of the rest of the community in Chesapeake.
My upcoming piece for reason will call for a federal investigation into all of this. Ebert is a longtime Commonwealth’s Attorney, so anything coming from the Virginia Attorney General’s Office won’t do.
These two “burglars” aren’t going to tell the truth unless they have immunity and no longer fear Ebert and local authorities. What they know is not only critical to ensuring a fair trial for Ryan Frederick, it will also likely impact a great many more narcotics cases in Chesapeake.
I don’t know how he thought he could admit evidence from these two “burglars” without having to explain who they were, how the police came to know them, or without anyone noticing the obvious similarities between the “burglars’” stories and the information in the police affidavit for the search warrant. I was speculating that the informant was also the burglar within a week of the raid.
He probably didn’t even think that he would have to bother trying to get away with it, since he likely HAS gotten away with it 99 per cent of the time. If Frederick was killed, instead of Schivers, this wouldn’t be an issue to the public at large. OOOOPS! Good thing people like you were paying attention! Keep up the great reporting on this!
All this…to ‘protect’ us from inanimate objects (drugs). How stupid…
I’m not sure I’m buying into this. If the cops are willing to lie and break the law to get a warrant to search a place, why not just “make up”" an informant aka Atlanta PD? Why get an actual scumbag to break into a house to find evidence for probable cause, and then lie about how they came upon the probable cause. Seems an unnecessary and risky step.
Why get an actual scumbag to break into a house to find evidence for probable cause, and then lie about how they came upon the probable cause
Because they need to know who to raid. They can’t go raiding randomly, so they have burglars break in and then tell them if they see something they can use as a reason for a raid.
How about “we don’t want to get caught like our colleagues in Atlanta, so since we’re smarter let’s use the tactic of having CIs, who usually know other “criminals”, break in and get us some evidence on people so we can make arrests to pad our record, shoot people, and feel like rock stars”?
Episiarch is right. More importantly
1. If the cops use burglars to do the raid, there is “plausible deniability.”
2. The cops aren’t at risk of being shot by the homeowner
3. On a warrant, the police can stretch the truth and call the burglar “an informant,” and protect all sorts of behavior under the umbrella of “confidential informant.” If a police officer does the breaking in, its pretty clear criminal perjury when they seek a warrant.
If drug case prosecutors don’t already know the name Radley Balko, I’d bet they will soon.
If Ebert had read this blog (or Hit&Run, for that matter) he would have known that you knew the truth about his “informants” and he might have avoided deep-sixing his case with this error. Not that helping prosecutors make their cases stronger is the sort of influence you’d enjoy having…
Ryan Frederick’s case really shows how fundamentally the war on drugs has corrupted U.S. law enforcement.
The state has conspired to commit murder.
Getting the feds to investigate is an optimistic gesture, and worth a try to help Mr. Frederick.
But really, considering the feds (and numb-nut, gutless politicians) are the root of this insanity, I don’t really expect much lasting change to come of it.
They’ll go through the motions, waste some of our money, and end up calling it an “isolated incident” and then proceed to repeat the same insane procedures again and again.
I hope I’m wrong, but hey… It’s the government. It’s what they do.
Turnbull’s claims if threats against the police by Frederick do not make sense. Since he is obviously lying in this matter do we need to believe him about anything? Could his claims of working for the poilce be lies too? There is nothing unbeivable about what he has said inthis matter but can we trust him? Is he one of the actual informants? Or has he made up these claims, possibly from what he has from the actual informants or someone who knows them?
I think that he probably was saying the truth when he said he was working for the police. It is the simplest explanation. But we have to treat everything he has said with caution.
Lloyd, because the guy is in police custody, part of evaluating the truthfulness of his claims is considering what he has to gain. If he isn’t the informant, he has nothing to gain by claiming that he is, except for some notoriety. Being in custody and facing charges, he has little to gain, and I’d think something to lose, by embarassing the police. And he has a lot to gain by saying the Frederick claimed he was planning to shoot police, because that lets them charge Frederick with premeditated murder.
And remember that the testimony from the cop in charge of the raid, I think it was Roberts, corroborates Turnbull’s claim that the burglars (whether one of them was Turnbull or not) had been “working with” the police.
It’s a stinkin’ shame that prosecutors have almost nothing to fear when they pull stuff like this. They can destroy people’s lives with impunity.
On the other hand, it surprises me that people give any credibility to witnesses who testify in exchange for a reduced sentence. When I imagine myself in that position I seriously doubt that my own integrity would survive an offer for less jail time.
And this cuts both ways. The burglars/witnesses could just as easily be coaxed into lying by the feds or the local prosecutor. The fact that testifying for the feds against the local prosecutor is much more to my liking doesn’t make the testimony any more credible if it’s paid for with a reduced sentence. But, one could presume that a federal investigation would at least be less prone to a predetermined outcome.
I know. I’m rambling.