Sure, criminal defense lawyers may post about cops lying on the witness stand, but we’re criminal defense lawyers.  What would you expect?

But it’s grabbed the attention of the New York Times.  Again.  And that counts for something.  Unfortunately, the story lurking behind the story is the one that is most disturbing.  No one who has a clue is surprised to find that cops exaggerate, fill in the blanks, tailor their testimony, whatever you prefer to call it.  This is just what they do in the name of “justice” (their brand, not mine) to put the bad guy away.

So what’s the ugly part.  Just read:

But the judge, John E. Sprizzo of United States District Court in Manhattan, concluded that the police had simply reached into the pack without cause, found the gun, then “tailored” testimony to justify the illegal search. “You can’t have open season on searches,” said Judge Sprizzo, who refused to allow the gun as evidence, prompting prosecutors to drop the case last May.

Yet for all his disapproval of what the police had done, the judge said he hated to make negative rulings about officers’ credibility. “I don’t like to jeopardize their career and all the rest of it,” he said.  (Emphasis added)

Let me spell this out for you:  a federal judge, and a tough one at that, finds that the cop lied on the witness stand.  What’s his primary concern?  Not to hurt the cop. 

One might think he would see his duty as making sure that a lying cop was drummed off the force.  Maybe make sure that no other person was ever mislead into believing that this was a cop who wouldn’t lie.  Perhaps even referring the matter to the United States Attorney for prosecution for perjury.  Remember, the judge just found that the cop lied!

Nope. None of the above.  Make sure he doesn’t hurt the cops career.  That is his concern.  That’s the duty of a federal judge, to protect lying cops from the consequences of their commission of a crime. 

You may recall the 9th Circuit decision in Chapman, about how two AUSAs deceived the district court.  No, didn’t just deceive, but engaged in “prosecutorial misconduct in its highest form.”  Remember how the Circuit condemned them by name?  Of course not, because the Circuit neglected to mention who these miscreants were.  I suspect they didn’t want to jeopardize their careers.

The Times story goes further:

But a closer look at those prosecutions reveals something that has not been trumpeted: more than 20 cases in which judges found police officers’ testimony to be unreliable, inconsistent, twisting the truth, or just plain false. The judges’ language was often withering: “patently incredible,” “riddled with exaggerations,” “unworthy of belief.”

The outrage usually stopped there. With few exceptions, judges did not ask prosecutors to determine whether the officers had broken the law, and prosecutors did not notify police authorities about the judges’ findings. The Police Department said it did not monitor the rulings and was aware of only one of them; after it learned about the cases recently from a reporter, a spokesman said the department would decide whether further review was needed.

The public thinks that wrongdoing flows downhill; that somebody somewhere does something about it.  Sorry, no.   If you broke the law, that’s a different story.  If you lie on the witness stand, that’s a crime.  If a defendant testifies and loses, that’s obstruction of justice.  But if it’s a cop, circle the wagons lest his career be harmed.

Tell it to all the people that cop’s put away before.  Tell it to all the judges who defaulted into finding the cop credible, because he’s a cop, or the juries who bought into the prosecutor’s argument that “there’s no reason why the cop would lie…”  There’s a very good reason; that’s just what they do.  It’s their job.  The courts are a big joke, and they say the magic words that put the bad guys in jail.  No big deal, just another day’s work.

What do the police have to say about all this?

Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, said that only one of the critical rulings had been reported to the police, by a federal prosecutor in Brooklyn who said he had no doubts about the officer’s truthfulness. The police took no action.

More broadly, Mr. Browne said an officer’s failure to convince a judge that his suspicions were justified “doesn’t necessarily mean the officer did something wrong.”

And what happens when the judge finds it so egregious that he actually names names and acts upon it?

Two officers had arrested a man and confiscated a gun in a Bronx apartment in 2002. But Judge Martin, then on the Manhattan federal court, was troubled that one officer had given the district attorney’s office an account of how she gained entry to the apartment, then largely contradicted it on the stand.

“This has to be one of the most blatant cases of perjury I’ve seen,” Judge Martin, a former United States attorney, said in his courtroom in September 2003. He said he doubted the officer, Kim Carillo, had “any use for the truth.”

“She will tell it, I think, whatever way it suits her to tell it,” he added.

The judge told the prosecutor to ask his superiors to review Officer Carillo’s testimony. They later replied that they had found no perjury, he said, and that the officer was not at fault.

Testilying is an intractable and pervasive problem. This is why.  If there were ramifications for getting caught lying, such as jeopardizing a cop’s career (or more importantly, his pension), they would stop.  No perp is worth losing a pension.  But cops testily with impunity, and everyone in the system, except the criminal defense lawyer, is there to protect that cop from the consequences of committing the crime of perjury. 

Welcome to the real world of criminal law.