Prosecutor to Cop: “Please Help Me Hide Evidence”

July 6, 2016 (Fault Lines) — Colleen Janssen[1] was a prosecutor with a secret. In her zeal for victory, she may have backed the wrong victim. And she didn’t want the jury to know.

The jury was faced with two stories. In the first, Marcus Smith was an innocent club promoter who, as part of his job, happened to carry large amounts of cash around. Barshiri Sandy and Henry Surpris came to his home and robbed him of his jewelry and over a thousand dollars in cash. Acting in self-defense after being shot in the arm, Smith returned fire and wounded both men, who then fled. Their getaway driver testified against them at trial.

In the second, Marcus Smith was a drug dealer. He had accepted payment from Sandy and Surpris for marijuana, but had never gotten around to giving it to them. In the absence of a customer service rep, the two men came over, negotiated with Smith, and agreed to accept $1153.00 and a ring to settle the debt. Then, once Smith handed the money over, he started shooting, figuring that he could kill three birds with one stone by canceling the debt and eliminating the witnesses.

On the face of it, this was a pretty tough call. As the prosecutor, Colleen Janssen repeatedly pointed out to the jury, there was nothing but the defendants’ “self-serving” testimony to establish that Smith was even involved in the drug trade. Maybe the two men were just lying about their interaction to smear the victim and make their own home invasion more palatable.

As Janssen put it:

There has been absolutely no evidence from the witness stand outside the Defendants’ testimony that this has anything to do with drugs . . . . The Defendants are the only people who’ve been talking about drugs . . . . From that, the defense wants to make you believe that Marcus Smith is apparently a drug kingpin. But while Janssen was basking in the defense’s lack of evidence that Smith was involved in the drug trade, she was desperately trying to hold back the evidence that might sink her case. Here’s one e-mail from her to a detective with the Raleigh Police Department: I am . . . reaching out to you because Marcus Smith is the victim in a fairly nasty home-invasion case of mine that is set to go to trial in the very near future, so I’d like to talk to you a bit about it, as well as educate myself on what your investigation entails, before anything too much further happens.

She kept the detective up to date on when trial was set, hoping he would delay raiding Smith’s stash house until after the trial:

Please don’t hate me, but we’ve set the trial date for 10/6. Good news is that I will do all three of my defendants [Defendants and Mr. Baldwin], so once we’re done, we’ll be really done! I’m sorry – but I really appreciate your understanding and willingness to work with me on this .

The detective started to get impatient:

I have located the stash house for Mr. Smith and have obtained P.C. [probable cause] to apply for a search warrant for it. I would like to execute the search warrant on the home this week when Smith is not there. It is not Smith’s house. He does not maintain any utilities there. I would not be charging Smith with any crimes. Please get back to me when you have time.

Fortunately for Janssen, the detective apparently held off until after she secured her convictions. Unfortunately for Ms. Janssen, the feds were not quite so accommodating. After the defendants’ convictions, their lawyers learned that Smith had been indicted, and that Janssen may have sent e-mails to the detective to forestall the raid. They asked for anything she had sent him, but she informed that she’d never spoken to the man.

Then, darn the luck, she “remembered” something. All of her e-mails to the detective had been through her private Yahoo account. A cynic might suggest that she was trying to evade detection, but she assured the attorneys that it had just suddenly “dawned on her” that she didn’t use her official e-mail to conduct official business.

The Court of Appeals of North Carolina didn’t waste time. It held that Janssen violated Brady and Napue, and that her misconduct was obviously prejudicial enough that they wouldn’t even need to look into the additional evidence that she had deliberately hidden the truth from the jury to secure a conviction.

In earth-shattering news, Janssen’s boss does seem to care that she did this. She did not contest the authenticity of the e-mails in the appeal. She placed Janssen on paid administrative leave which, yes, is kind of like a vacation, but is far more serious than the usual half-hearted public statement by a District Attorney. It is possible that someone from the State Bar could consider the ethical ramifications of deliberately lying to a jury and opposing counsel for the sake of winning a conviction. Amazing stuff.

Only time will tell whether Janssen will face any professional consequences for her misconduct. If she does, it will likely be at a hearing that provides her with far more transparency and due process than she was willing to provide to others.

[1] This is the same Colleen Janssen whose father was kidnapped in retaliation for her successful prosecution of Kevin Melton.

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