The Trials of Walter Ogrod by Thomas Lowenstein

Author:Thomas Lowenstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2016-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

* * *

As Hall proceeded with his Mafia snitching in mid-1994 he was briefly transferred to Bucks County to resolve some outstanding parole violations, which he did by snitching. This time he created one of his more incredible documents: a signed, notarized affidavit that spells out how Hall read the defendant his Miranda rights and amounts to a description of the kinds of mental contortion Hall’s prosecutor allies went through in order to accept his stories.

Prosecutors were not allowed to move Hall or any other informant to target certain inmates. If a prosecutor did, Hall (or any other informant) would be considered an “agent of the state”—law enforcement—when he heard those confessions and would be required to read inmates their Miranda rights before talking to them, just as any other law enforcement officer would. Without a Miranda warning, those confessions would be worthless. The problem was, by that summer Hall’s pattern of showing up in the same cell block as high-profile defendants against whom prosecutors had weak cases and then miraculously producing “confessions” from those men was widely known among judges, prosecutors, and defense lawyers. Within a few years even newspaper columnists would speculate about Hall’s jail placements.

“I don’t want to go out on a limb here,” reporter Elmer Smith would write in the Philadelphia Daily News in 1997. “But I can’t help wondering how it is that Hall keeps turning up in the right cell at the right time. Because if he is being planted in these cells, it raises serious ethical questions.”

Smith quoted an unnamed prosecutor who agreed that if someone in authority placed Hall in position to get information from another inmate, Hall was arguably acting as an agent of police.54

On this issue, Hall’s 1994 snitch in Bucks County looked bad even by his standards. In Bucks, Hall was housed with an accused child molester named Raymond Lamoureaux. A few days later, Hall met with a prosecutor to tell her Lamoureaux would confess to him. The prosecutor put him back with Lamoureaux and soon enough Hall had the man’s confession—a confession Hall wrote out and attached to a signed document of Lamoureaux waiving his Miranda rights.

But it was so clear from the timing that Hall had been put back in the cell to get information from Lamoureaux that Hall knew he had to address the issue somehow. So he wrote an extraordinary affidavit and attached it to the Lamoureaux confession.

Hall opened it by acknowledging that if he had been put back in Lamoureaux’s cell to get information about Lamoureaux’s crime, the confession could be considered a state action. And, he wrote, he understood that his meeting with the DA just before being put back in with Lamoureaux might make it look like he’d been put there to get that confession. It wasn’t true, he insisted; his placement with Lamoureaux had been “by happenstance and chance and not design”; no agent of the state of Pennsylvania nor any of its agents or police nor any prosecutorial authority of

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.