Report Alleges Police Use Secret Evidence Collected By Feds To Make Arrests - Eric Westervelt

Branches of America's federal law enforcement and intelligence services may be secretly helping state and local police arrest suspects every day in ways that raise fundamental questions about defendants' civil and due process rights, according to a recent Human Rights Watch report.

The report makes the case that federal law enforcers, police and local prosecutors are concealing the origins of evidence and intelligence in scores of criminal cases, especially drug arrests. The intelligence may include National Security Agency mass surveillance programs, wiretaps, computer and phone surveillance, and physical surveillance.

Defendants, the report says, often have no idea about the underlying investigative tactics and constitutionally dubious methods, including warrantless searches, that may have been used in gathering evidence against them.

The report's lead author, Sarah St. Vincent, says hiding the evidentiary trail opens the door to law enforcement abuse and misconduct.

"You could have interactions between the prosecution and the intelligence community that are preventing this stuff from coming to light," St. Vincent says. "People may be imprisoned without ever knowing enough to challenge the potentially rights-violating origins of the cases against them.".

That is because police and prosecutors routinely create alternative or parallel stories for how they discovered the information to hide the intelligence-gathering techniques from wider courtroom or legal scrutiny. This concealment practice, known as "parallel construction," most often involves traffic stops and car searches.

Civil libertarians won a potentially important victory on the issue this week when the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the government will need to reveal more via the Freedom of Information Act about location-tracking surveillance technology used in criminal investigations.

In a statement, the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, which filed the suit, called the ruling "a victory for democratic accountability and government transparency" because it "prevents the government from cloaking its surveillance policies in secrecy simply because they were written by lawyers or because they implicate potential criminal prosecutions. The public now has a right to know basic information about some of the government's surveillance techniques."

But one problematic area the Human Rights Watch report mentions — the legal analyses and specific arguments U.S. attorneys make in response to suppression motions — was ruled exempt from disclosure as privileged "attorney work product." - Read More

Report Alleges Police Use Secret Evidence Collected By Feds To Make Arrests

US: Secret Evidence Erodes Fair Trial Rights | Human Rights Watch

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