When Ryan Smith’s tasing into compliance with a court-ordered subpoena for his DNA was approved by Niagara County Judge Sara Sheldon Sperrazza, the blogosphere was shocked. Mind you, this news was broken here (via our hinterlands correspondent, Kathleen Casey, who took the trouble to get her hands on the decision) and then repeated across the blogosphere by worthless miscreants who wrote about it as if they had discovered it all by themselves, without so much as a hat tip.
But unlike those bottom feeders, our hinterlands correspondent remains on top of the Smith case, bringing the next piece of this ugly puzzle from the Smith trial, via the Buffalo News :
But Delorise Garner couldn’t identify any of the attackers, including Ryan S. Smith, 21, who is on trial in the home invasion, a subsequent shooting and a separate gas station robbery.Not that eyewitness identifications have any great credibility, but they certainly serve to convey the victim’s trauma. On the other hand, DNA is scientific, and everybody knows that if science says so, then it has to be.
That failure to identify will be typical of this trial, co-defense counsel David C. Douglas said in his opening statement.
“You won’t hear any human being identify Ryan Smith as a person who was at any of the crime scenes,” Douglas told the jury of eight women and four men.
But DNA will place Smith at the scenes, Assistant District Attorney Susan B. Bjornholm said.
The upshot, however, is that the Smith trial without the DNA seized by taser would be . . . over. Without a means of identifying the perpetrator of a crime, there’s no case. When the issue arose as to the use of a taser to obtain Smith’s submission to the police, or his willing consent as the police might frame it, there was no indication that the DNA wasn’t just icing on the cake, with the cake being the testimony of eyewitnesses that Ryan Smith was the perp.
We now know differently. We now know that without the DNA, which the prosecution had obtained earlier but lost, the case was done. It’s now the critical link between a potential conviction and a trial order of dismissal. This obviously ups the stakes for both sides on trial, and for those observing who were appalled at the use of a taser to put a smile on Smith’s face. Do you feel strong enough about the impropriety of using a taser to obtain compliance with a subpoena to watch Ryan Smith walk?
As is so often the case, law is made like sausage. Ryan Smith is not a sympathetic fellow. He’s not a hero. While I don’t know him, my guess is that he’s not the sort of fellow you want dating your daughter. But this is where bad decisions happen, when dumb cops, over-zealous prosecutors, outcome-oriented judges, all meet.
It would have been far easier for Judge Sperrazza if the prosecution had a victim who could ID Smith as the assailant, so that she could suppress the DNA, chastise the cops for being boneheads, and issue a decision that wouldn’t have subjected her to blawgospheric ridicule. But she’s looking down the throat of a potential walk of the accused if she tosses the DNA, and Judge Sperrazza wasn’t about to take the risk. The risk of Ryan Smith walking. The risk of siding with the defense. If she’s going to get beaten up, better that it be for backing the good guys of law and order than the vicious, nasty Ryan Smith.
While the trial isn’t over yet, and the defense will challenge the DNA as flawed, experience teaches that overcoming scientific evidence like this is extremely difficult. Jurors don’t understand it and accept it at face value. Truth is, same with judges and lawyers. Even experts have problems trying to make anyone else understand its complexities and why things aren’t always as simple as people would like them to be.
But it would certainly make Judge Sperrazza’s life easier if the defense scores big on beating up the DNA evidence and gets an acquittal. Then, there will be no appeal of the DNA taser ruling, and she can forget that it ever happened. Until the next time, when some other judge cites to her decision approving the use of a taser as the friendly persuader.
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If there was no witness ID, how did they get probable cause to seize/taze Smith?
Probable cause is necessary for a search warrant. This, amigo, was merely an ex parte subpeona. They don’t need no stinkin’ PC.
Though one wonders how they obtained an indictment of this
ham sandwichdefendant without an ID.Do you feel strong enough about the impropriety of using a taser to obtain compliance with a subpoena to watch Ryan Smith walk?
Yeah, I do. But . . . among the things that pisses me off about this is that there really are ways to get DNA out of a guy who’s in friggin’ jail without any of the nonsense. I’m no law-talking guy, but it seems to me that by refusing to provide a little saliva — not exactly a precious bodily fluid — Smith was setting himself up to waive his right to a trial until he’d provided some, and if (somehow; I’m not sure how he could manage it) he managed to sit in jail under a contempt citation for, say, ten years before the whole show of which he was the guest of honor could get under way that could be made to be his problem.
But it wouldn’t need to come to that. With unlimited resources, it seems to this amateur that the forces of law and justice could have gotten a little spit out of the guy without going to the zapper, and the real delay would have been, at most, a couple of hours while they worked that out.
That said, if the forces of law and order (cue sound) really think that they need the zapper to get spit, let them have their tame legislators put forward a bill in the legislature authorizing it, and let it be subject to judicial review.
Which would pretty much bring us to where we are now, no?