July|August 2003

A CULTURE OF SNITCHES?

As a federal prisoner currently serving 11 1/2 years for multiple armed bank robberies, I must say I found Neal Kumar Katyal's "Danger in Numbers" (March | April) naive.

Like the majority of bank robberies in the United States, all of the robberies I committed were one-man jobs. Bank robberies are not easier when there is a group or crew involved. While Katyal, a law professor, can perhaps be excused for not knowing this, what I found disturbing about his article is how out of touch he seems to be with the way conspiracy charges are used by both state and federal prosecutors. Prosecutors make their careers playing a numbers game—how many convictions can they get and how many years in sentences can they convince the courts to dole out—and there's no better way to pad their stats than by relying on conspiracy charges.

In the world in which I'm living—federal prison—many convicted "conspirators" had little to do with any conspiracy that may have been committed. For example: John Doe buys small quantities of marijuana from Jane Q. Public, who is in turn buying larger quantities from Mr. Big, a major grower or importer of marijuana. Jane is arrested and she is compelled to flip on others. She is told that the more people she names, the shorter her sentence. Jane is as likely to flip on all of those people she sold to as she is to flip on Mr. Big. So what you end up with are a lot of men and women who are merely buyers of marijuana for personal use being pulled into a distribution conspiracy. Is Professor Katyal teaching his law students—the next generation of prosecutors—that American society will benefit from a culture of snitches?

Katyal grudgingly acknowledges that "conspiracy charges, like many other aspects of criminal law, can be used by powerful prosecutors to harm small fish unfairly. But that's a larger, systematic problem we should deal with by paying enough for public defenders." Katyal's cavalier suggestion is that we should use the taxes paid by the citizens of this country to hire more public defenders—to protect them from people that are supposed to be enforcing the law.

In the end, what really scares me about Katyal's argument is that I can see a time when because of the actions of a certain ethnic group from a certain geographical location, all members of that group will be perceived as possible conspirators in unknown plots to perpetrate unknown crimes and will be locked away pending evidence. Or has that happened already?

Christopher Beresford Reynolds
Federal Correctional Institution-McKean Bradford, Pa.

THE EXPERTISE RACKET

"Opinion for Sale" (Steven Moss, March | April) can only be damaging to every honest practitioner in the expert witness field. In more than 30 years of work, I have never tailored my examination of evidence or my testimony to please an attorney. I find what I find—sometimes it's what the lawyer wants to hear, sometimes it isn't, but as one able counselor once remarked, "Better to find it out now than in court."

Over the years, I have been a technical witness in nearly 300 cases—murder, suicide, product liability, patent law—and honesty has served me well. If you include advantageous settlements, my "win rate" is around 75 percent.

Moss has done all of us a disservice.

J.B. Wood
Corydon, Ky


Having read Patrick Keefe's article on how lawyers are redeemed in Hollywood movies ("Reversals of Fortune," March | April), I thought, upon starting Steven Moss's confession, that his would be a real-life transformation.

Instead, Moss concluded by explaining how he discovered that it is the system that is flawed. Perhaps it is unreasonable to hope for a Hollywood ending to Moss's true story. But is it reasonable for a person who blames his own failures on a failed system to bask in the glory of his discovery?

Bertram H. Rothschild
Aurora, Colo.