May/June 1996
Michael Levine, Prison Life
But as I mulled this over, I recalled the murder of my son Keith by a man who had two prior murder convictions in New York State, a man who was on the street--according to our political leaders--because there is just not enough money to put everyone in jail who belongs there. Yet I had in front of me a file that spoke of federal law enforcement spending many hundreds of thousands of dollars to arrest and convict a parking lot attendant as a Class One drug dealer.
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'I'll do it,' I heard myself say the next morning. 'I went over all your stuff. You've got a better entrapment defense here than John DeLorean had.'
There was a long silence on the phone. 'I didn't claim entrapment as my defense theory,' said the attorney.
I started to ask him why and stopped myself. It no longer mattered. The attorney's opening statement claimed Miguel was innocent of all charges--not that he had been entrapped into committing the crime by a government rat working on commission. Miguel, on camera, had done his best to play the role of Chama King of Cocaine; he had accepted money and promised to deliver drugs, which was all the government needed to prove conspiracy. If a judge didn't explain to a jury what entrapment was, not even Johnnie Cochran could get him off. And once the trial had begun, no judge would allow a change in the defense theory--it was a simple matter of law.
But Miguel's guilt or innocence no longer mattered to me. I wanted to make the issue of the growing power of rats--those with and without badges--as public as I could. They weren't only hurting people who had failed an honesty test, they were spending billions in taxpayer dollars for nothing but phony show trials, and they were filling the jails with people who were, at worst, nonviolent dupes while our nation's streets were crowded with violent offenders.
My testimony for the defense lasted all day Monday and into Tuesday morning. I pointed out dozens of places in the tapes where Tony and Miguel's actions indicated that neither of them knew what a real drug deal was like and stated that the crime never would have happened had it not been for the CI's actions and the agents' failure to control him and investigate his allegations properly.
'If the federal government is going to use suitcases full of taxpayer dollars to test the honesty of American citizens,' I added finally, 'instead of working the parking lots of America, they ought to be running their tests in the halls of Congress, where it might do us some good.'
As soon as I got off the witness stand I headed back to New York, feeling shitty. The judge had refused to instruct the jury that they could find the defendant innocent by reason of entrapment, but the attorney was still hopeful. He said he'd call to let me know the verdict.
In New York a message was waiting for me--from another California attorney--that would quickly take my mind off what I had begun calling 'the Beavis and Butt-head case.'
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