How police harassment, jailhouse snitches, and a runaway war on drugs imprisoned an innocent family
Radley Balko says:
My Reason feature on the wrongful imprisonment of an entire family is now available online.It's the long, sordid story of an the Colomb family in Louisiana, wrongly convicted on federal drug conspiracy charges.
The family was eventually released after several federal prisoners came forwarded alleging a massive perjury and information sharing network in the federal prison system.
Problem is, many of the same jailhouse snitches who lied in the Colomb case are still being used in other federal cases.
And nothing has been done about the underlying incentive structure that gives rise to these problems in the first place.
LinkThe Colombs live on a mostly black street in a mostly white section of this mostly segregated town of 4,700 in Acadia Parish—the heart of Cajun country. James Colomb spent the bulk of his career working in an oil field, then was injured. The family’s sole source of income now is his disability check. Ann Colomb—“Miss Ann” to those who know her—is a homemaker.
It was from this unlikely setting, the United States alleged, that Ann Colomb and three of her four sons ran one of the largest crack cocaine operations in Louisiana. Over the course of a decade, prosecutors said, the Colombs bought $15 million in illicit drugs with a street value of more than $70 million. Judging solely from the indictments, the government’s case seemed formidable: a trail of police reports throughout the 1990s accusing the Colomb boys of possessing or selling drugs; a 2001 raid on the Colomb home that turned up 72 grams of crack, a Titan .25-caliber pistol, and a rifle; and more than 30 prison informants who were prepared to testify that they had sold crack to one or more members of the Colomb family. In 2006 a jury in Lafayette, Louisiana, convicted the African-American family on federal drug conspiracy charges. Ann and her sons served almost four months in a federal prison while awaiting their sentences, which would likely have ranged from 10 years to life.
But in the ensuing months, the government’s case unraveled, exposing some unsettling truths about the way jailhouse informants are used in America’s courtrooms. In December 2006, all charges against the family were dismissed. The federal judge who presided over the trial was so upset about what happened in his courtroom that he has since taken the rare step of speaking out about it publicly.
The legal fiasco was partly attributable to familiar themes of racism and overly aggressive prosecution. ButAnn and James Colomb the Colomb story is mostly about the war on drugs. It shows how the absurd incentives created by the unaccountable use of shady drug informants by police and prosecutors can quickly make innocent people look very guilty.
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this part says it all:
"Judge James Gray, a drug war critic who sits on the Superior Court of Orange County, California, and also has served as an assistant U.S. attorney, says courts need to give more scrutiny to snitch testimony, and prosecutors need to verify it. “This is a game,” Gray says. “You have lots of people sitting in prison who will do virtually anything to get out. They’ll sell you out in a minute to get out of there. They have nothing to lose and everything to gain. And every guy that guy gives up is going to get his own mandatory minimum sentence. And he then becomes another source of potentially bad information for prosecutors. You can quickly rack up a lot of convictions. But it shouldn’t be surprising if, in the process, you create some cottage industries.”
Lard*: "Drug Raid at 4AM"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UuQEkh6m6c
"Whoops, sorry -- wrong house."
*Lard = Ministry + Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra
The use of jailhouse informants is common in Canada too - with similar results. It's a common theme when someone is found to have been wrongfully convicted.
One perp even earned the nickname "Father Confession". The police, when they would catch him committing whatever crime, knew they could stick him in a jail cell with anyone they wanted convicted, and the next morning he'd report a "confession". He and his police handlers were responsible for the wrongful conviction of Thomas Sophonow and other notable miscarriages of justice.
Those who say that "with the new rules regarding jailhouse informants, it couldn't possibly happen now", will no doubt they'll be saying the same thing 20 years from now when it happens agian.
So, was the drugs planted? The begining seems to indicate false information led to the arrest, but then it mentions physical evidence (cocaine at the house.)
The drugs and guns found at the house belonged to the boyfriend of one of the daughters. 72 grams of crack is a LOT and the guns didn't help their image any.
I have a hard time believing anyone in this situation is 100% right or wrong. The cops had a legit drug bust but were determined to bribe informants to make it look even bigger. In the end, they blew their case after causing much heartache for everyone. The family sheltered a crack dealer under their roof. If they had turned him in they would have saved themselves a lot of trouble. Everyone seems racist, everyone seems dirty, and Reason seems biased.
As for the war on drugs... it's out of control, but if people are getting coked up and crashing into random cars, something still has to be done.
The only physical evidence that was found belonged to a boyfriend, and when he told the police that it was his, they flat out ignored him. They were only going after the family, and they had carried out a past raid with no evidence but still tried to coerce them to plead guilty.
And in the very same raid, they pushed a crippled woman to the ground and caused a heart attack. And before this,
From the article:
"Brandy Hanks, 30, is a white woman who dated Danny Davis during and shortly after high school. “I was pulled over just about every time I left Miss Ann’s house,” Hanks says. “They’d ask me, ‘Why are you hanging out with those niggers, those drug dealers?’ Or they’d ask, ‘What’s someone like you doing over at the Colomb house?’ And they’d always ask who I was dating.”
It wasn’t just law enforcement. Hanks says the Ku Klux Klan once left a card on her windshield with threats about interracial dating. “People don’t know what it was like—what we went through,” Ann Colomb says. “You don’t know what it’s like to get a phone call in the middle of the night from somebody, saying if my boy Edward don’t stop dating white girls, I’m going to find him hanging from a tree.”
Colomb wipes a tear into her cheek, then grows defiant. “I told him to leave a branch open for me, because if he killed my boy, I was going to string his white ass up right alongside,” she says. “Then I disconnected our phone.”"
the Warondrugs Industry runs on human blood. Here are a few "donors"
http://www.november.org/thewall/women/women01.html
According to the article, they didn't just ignore the son-in-law when he said that the drugs and gun were his, they threatened him with perjury charges if he kept saying that they were his. Even when the gun was shown to belong to his mother, they still didn't believe him. They also never charged him with anything. So you can't even really call it a legit bust when the person who was dealing was never charged and the people who weren't dealing were prosecuted.
Oh yes, the good old fashioned American gulag in action! It is only these obvious and egregious cases which receive any attention even though countless lives are harmed and even ruined everyday by our so-called criminal justice systems moral and conceptual underpinnings of which come straight out of the 11th century. Punish, punish, punish!
Even though it is mainly the middle class and below which are victimized, there is scant public outcry. My guess is that deprived of so much else, members of the middle class (and lesser classes) at least desire to preserve their moral superiority by being an "upstanding, law abiding citizen".
not punish,punish,punish - rather profit,profit,profit. What do you imagine the DEA budget to be?
The worst part is that the Colombs were not in fact charged with dealing drugs, they were charged, tried and convicted of conspiracy to deal drugs. The topper is that only one of the "overt acts" used to prove this conspiracy even resulted in a conviction.
Which just goes to show, The Man doesn't need secret courts and prisons. They openly convict people of "conspiracy" to commit crimes that they couldn't even have been indicted for all the time.
The use of federal conspiracy statutes in this way needs to stop. Now.
"How do you know she is a witch?"
"Because she looks like one"
"Burn the witch, burn the witch!"
We need to end this bogus War on (some) Drugs before its the end of our Republic.
The Colombs are coloured??? you could have fooled me...