Archive for the ‘Fifth Amendment’ Category

Who killed Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman? – CBS News

O.J. Simpson will serve the remainder of his prison time in protected custody. Officials changed his status for safety reasons after a parole board voted unanimously last week to approve his release.

Simpson could walk out as soon as October 1, after serving nine years for armed robbery in Nevada.

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From football fields to Hollywood to courtrooms, see O.J. through the years

In 1995, he was acquitted of the murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ron Goldman.

CBS News correspondent Jericka Duncan reports the case is still an open investigation for the Los Angeles Police Department.

A reported 13.5 million people tuned into Simpson's parole hearing last week. That's far fewer than the estimated 150 million people who watched his 1995 acquittal.

Still, it shows the O.J. obsession lives on, as well as the debate over who killed Nicole Brown and Goldman.

"I'd just like to get back to my family and friends and believe it or not, I do have some real friends," Simpson said in court last week.

It's unclear what life outside prison will look like for Simpson. But one thing is certain it'll be a world well acquainted with his past.

"People will always want to be a part of the O.J. case," Loyola Law School professor Laurie Levinson said. "They'll always be looking for evidence that the LAPD missed. That's because it's a mystery that to some has not been solved."

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On October 3, 1995 "The Trial of the Century" ended with the acquittal of former football star O.J. Simpson for double-murder - Where are all the...

A string of TV films this past year reignited America's fascination with Simpson's acquittal.

"The word 'open' for an investigation can mean so many things," Levinson said. "It may simply mean that because O.J. was acquitted, and they've never found another murderer, there's no reason to shut it down."

Immediately following the 1995 verdict, Simpson vowed to find justice for his ex-wife in a statement read by his son, Jason: "I will pursue as my primary goal in life, the killer or killer who slaughtered Nicole and Mr. Goldman."

But no additional arrests were made. Simpson went on to release what was called a fictional account of the crime entitled, "If I did it." That book caused former Simpson trial juror Lionel Cryer to have a change of heart.

"The book was the turning point for me to go to the feeling that he probably did kill those people," Cryer said.

Simpson has repeatedly maintained his innocence. Last year, there appeared to be a possible break in the case when a knife was reportedly discovered on the property Simpson once owned. But the tip led nowhere, leaving the case largely where it was in the 1990s.

"O.J. cannot be tried again because of double jeopardy, but he certainly can be questioned," Levinson said. "In fact, he doesn't have Fifth Amendment protection anymore."

The LAPD wouldn't provide any additional details in the case. Legal experts say there are plenty of challenges that go with investigating a crime that is more than 20 years old. Among them, the fact that prosecutors are dealing with decades-old evidence and memories.

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Who killed Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman? - CBS News

Hypocrisy on the Hill: Republicans testify while Democrats delay, deny – Washington Examiner

In the dictionary, "hypocrisy" is defined as "the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one's own behavior does not conform." It is also described as pretense or false virtue.

In the real world, it is defined as behaving like a Democrat.

That point is being proven this week as Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and other Republicans are dragged through the mud and paraded through "the swamp" while some Democrats are allowed to avoid testifying altogether.

Glenn Simpson, co-founder of Democratic opposition research firm Fusion GPS, refused to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week regarding what he knows about last summer's meeting involving the Trump family and a Russian lawyer. In fact, he now threatens that if called to testify he will invoke the Fifth Amendment.

In another example of justice delayed, Susan Rice, President Obama's national security adviser and ambassador to the United Nations, initially reportedly refused to testify, then delayed her testimony. It has now been revealed that she "quietly met behind closed doors Friday with Senate intelligence committee investigators." (Note that "quietly" was never an accommodation afforded to Kushner, nor Trump Jr.)

A woman thought to be at the center of the Democrats' "unmasking" scandal against Americans, Obama's United Nations Ambassador Samantha Power has also been wrangling with lawyers. She is expected to eventually testify, though no one can pinpoint if it will occur before the August recess or sometime later in the fall. (Hey, no rush.)

What's good for the GOP isn't always good for the gander. As Republicans have been willing to come forward and testify, Democrats continue to drag their feet.

Why the double standard?

It's how the Democratic playbook works in the "Russian collusion delusion."

Democrats are the party whose own consultant met with a Soviet-bloc government in an attempt to take down a political opponent, yet they're going after the president's family for a lesser offense (albeit a senseless one) that involved a 20-minute meeting after which no action was taken.

Democrats are the party that stood idly by as former President Bill Clinton gave a speech at the behest of a Russian bank for $500,000 while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sided with Russia on sanctions against the country on human rights abuses. Sure, no collusion or even a hint of impropriety there -- even though according to emails uncovered by Wikileaks, her own campaign was worried about the connection.

Democrats are the party that watched as Hillary Clinton also aided and abetted the Russian government to obtain one-fifth of the United States' uranium supply as Uranium One's chairman funneled a whopping $2.3 million to the Clinton Foundation.

And yes, it's the same party that still heralds the Clinton Foundation even though it was exposed numerous times for running a pay-for-play system out of the State Department to curry favor for donors including foreign donors who may have paid for Chelsea Clinton's wedding. But hey, we don't see members of the special counsel's office digging through Clinton's shoeboxes for wedding dress receipts.

Lastly, a new FBI document dump reveals that during last year's email investigation, after delaying as long as they could, Hillary Clinton's team handed over Blackberry phones that were missing SIM cards or Secure Digital (SD) cards. Not since Vince Foster's death have we been reminded so acutely that Washington is a dangerous town for hard drives.

Meanwhile, lawyers on a government-sponsored fishing expedition continue to comb through the emails, finances, and other information voluntarily provided by Trump Jr. and Kushner, while tens of thousands of Clinton's emails have already died and gone to BleachBit heaven.

Fair? Hardly.

Democrats' hypocrisy on the Hill exemplifies that they are the worst kind of swamp creatures ones who push others into the mud, then pretend they've never treaded in it themselves.

Jennifer Kerns (@JenKernsUSA) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog. A GOP communications strategist, she served as spokeswoman for the California Republican Party, recalls in Colorado, and California's Prop. 8. Previously, she served as a writer for the 2016 U.S. presidential debates for Fox News.

If you would like to write an op-ed for the Washington Examiner, please read our guidelines on submissions here.

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Hypocrisy on the Hill: Republicans testify while Democrats delay, deny - Washington Examiner

Co-founder of firm behind Trump-Russia dossier to plead the Fifth – Fox News

Glenn Simpson, whose Fusion GPS firm has been tied to anti-Trump efforts and pro-Russian lobbying, will not talk to lawmakers in response to a subpoena, the leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committe said Friday.

Committee chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and ranking member Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., confirmed in a statement that they subpoenaed Simpson to appear before the committee Wednesday as part of a hearing about the influence of foreign lobbying in last year's presidential election.

"Simpsons attorney has asserted that his client will invoke his Fifth Amendment rights in response to the subpoena," Grassley and Feinstein said.

Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson is seen at the Aspen Security Forum in Aspen, Colo. Friday (Pam Browne/Fox News)

During the campaign, Fusion GPS contracted former MI-6 agent Christopher Steele to look into rumors about Trump's financial and social connections in Russia. The resulting "dossier," which was leaked to the media following Trump's victory in November included a number of sordid allegations about the president's sexual proclivities.

Last week, Fox News reported that Fusion GPS had ties to Russian efforts to undermine U.S. sanctions that were led by attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya.

Investment manager Bill Browder claims Simpson was hired by one of Veselnitskaya's clients, Prevezon Holdings, as part of an effort to repeal the Magnitsky Act, named for Sergei Magnitsky an attorney for Browder who was beaten to death in a Moscow prison after accusing Russian authorities of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars through tax refunds and then laundering the money through New York banks.

Veselnitskaya became the center of a political storm earlier this month after Donald Trump Jr. made public emails indicating that he had taken a meeting with her on the promise of receiving damaging information about Hillary Clinton.

Grassley and Feinstein also noted that both Trump Jr., who met with Veselnitskaya in June of last year, and former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, who sat in on the meeting, are negotiating their appearances and the possibility of turning over documents, but left open the possibility that the pair would be subpoenaed.

Fusion GPS has said it had nothing to do with the Trump Jr.-Veselnitskaya meeting.

Fusion GPS learned about this meeting from news reports and had no prior knowledge of it. Any claim that Fusion GPS arranged or facilitated this meeting in any way is absolutely false, the company said in a statement.

Manafort had attracted scrutiny for months from congressional committees and Mueller. The Associated Press reported in June that Mueller's probe has incorporated a long-standing federal investigation into Manafort's financial dealings. That investigation is scrutinizing political consulting work he did for a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine and the country's former president, Viktor Yanukovych.

Manafort has denied any wrongdoing related to his Ukrainian work, saying through a spokesman that it "was totally open and appropriate."

Manafort also recently registered with the Justice Department as a foreign agent for parts of Ukrainian work that occurred in Washington. The filing under the Foreign Agents Registration Act came retroactively, a tacit acknowledgement that he operated in Washington in violation of the federal transparency law.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Co-founder of firm behind Trump-Russia dossier to plead the Fifth - Fox News

What The Heck? Man Who Runs Firm Behind Trump-Russia Dossier to Plead the Fifth – LawNewz

Heres a story that has gone completely under the radar, and raises some serious questions that the mainstream media largely seems to have ignored. Glenn Simpson, the co-founder of Fusion GPS, whose firm commissioned the salacious and mostly unsubstantiated Russia Trump dossier, plans to plead the Fifth after being subpoenaed by U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary.

According to documents obtained byLawNewz,attorneys for Fusion GPS Simpson sent a letter to Chairman Chuck Grassley expressing concern over the direction that the hearing was taking. The letter stated that Simpson would not voluntarily show up at the hearing due to a pre-planned vacation, and if subpoenaed he would exercise his First and Fifth Amendment rights not to testify before the committee examining the influence of foreign lobbying in the 2016 election.

Since March, the Senate Judiciary Committee has been seeking documents and information from Fusion GPS about the former M16 intelligence officer Christopher Steele who authored the research, and the dossier, which contained unverified salacious details of Trumps alleged escapades in Russia.The dossier was reportedly first commissioned by Republican opponents of Donald Trump, and then taken over by a Democratic client.

Every time committee investigators made requests, though, they were stonewalled by the Washington D.C. opposition research firm. The firm asserted that the information and documentation requested was protected by the First Amendment privilege of Fusion GPS and its clients, as well as confidentiality agreements and attorney client privilege. On Friday, Sen. Grassley slapped Simpson with a subpoena to appear before the committee.

Given the limitless scope of the hearing, as well as the privileges that Fusion GPS has already asserted, Mr. Simpson cannot risk a waiver of those privileges at the hearing. In the event of a subpoena, Mr. Simpson will assert applicable privileges, including but not limited to those under the First and Fifth Amendments, attorneys for Simpson wrote in a letter to the committee.

The Fifth amendment privilege, of course, allows witnesses to decline to answer questions that have the potential to incriminate them. So, the question remains, what exactly could Simpson, a former Wall Street Journal investigative reporter, say that he fears will put him in legally precarious territory?

It could mean various things, but the invocation on its own does not mean Simpson broke any laws. It could just as easily be a tactical move by his lawyers to try and secure a deal before he testifies, Bradly Moss, a national security expert and attorney toldLawNewz.com.

Questions about this to the communications firm representing Fusion GPS were not answered as off press time.

This article has been updated with legal commentary.

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What The Heck? Man Who Runs Firm Behind Trump-Russia Dossier to Plead the Fifth - LawNewz

Update on Fingerprints, Phones, and the Fifth Amendment …

Can a court order a suspect to use the suspects fingerprint to unlock his or her smartphone? Or would that violate the suspects Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination? I wrote about that issue here. This post updates the previous one with two new cases and some additional discussion.

Background. The Fifth Amendment provides in part that no person may be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself. This privilege against self-incrimination applies during the investigative phase of a case as well as at trial. And it applies to the disclosure of information that may lead to incriminating evidence even if the information is not itself directly indicative of guilt. However, it applies only to testimonial activity, not to nontestimonial actions like providing fingerprints, blood samples, or voice exemplars. The act of producing evidence that is not itself testimonial may have a compelled testimonial aspect, as when the act of producing the evidence constitutes an admission that the evidence was in the suspects possession or control. United States v. Hubbell, 530 U.S. 27 (2000) (ruling that tax fraud charges must be dismissed because the charges were based on documents the defendant produced in response to a grand jury subpoena; the defendants act of producing the documents was testimonial because the collection and production of the materials demanded was tantamount to answering a series of interrogatories asking a witness to disclose the existence and location of any incriminating documents; [t]he assembly of those documents was like telling an inquisitor the combination to a wall safe, not like being forced to surrender the key to a strongbox).

Smartphones are often secured by passcodes or fingerprint sensors. Ive written about computer passwords, which present the same Fifth Amendment issues as passcodes, here and here. In brief, some courts view compelling a suspect to provide a passcode as requiring a testimonial act because the passcode is contained in the suspects mind, and because providing the passcode may constitute an admission that the phone belongs to the suspect or is under the suspects control. That doesnt necessarily mean that a court can never order a suspect to provide a passcode. If the court concludes that it is obvious that the phone in question belongs to the suspect so that the act of providing the passcode wouldnt further incriminate the suspect, the court may rule that the suspects knowledge of the passcode is a foregone conclusion, rendering the Fifth Amendment inapplicable. Or the court might rule that the suspect may be required to provide the passcode if given immunity for the act of providing it. Both those possibilities involve complex legal questions that I hope to explore in a future post.

Although passcodes present thorny Fifth Amendment issues, the early authority on point regarding fingerprint sensors suggests that compelling a suspect to use his or her finger to unlock a phone is not testimonial. The suspect is required only to do a physical act placing his or her finger on a sensor and need not admit anything in his or her mind. My earlier post cited the authority available at that time, but we have some new case law now and it points in the same direction.

New cases. The most significant new case is State v. Diamond, __ N.W.2d __, 2017 WL 163710 (Minn. Ct. App. Jan. 17, 2017). The court ruled that a court order compelling a criminal defendant to provide a fingerprint to unlock the defendants cellphone does not violate the Fifth Amendment privilege against compelled self-incrimination.

In brief, the police arrested a burglary suspect and found that he was in possession of a cell phone. They obtained a search warrant for the phone and a court order requiring the suspect to provide a fingerprint to unlock the phone. On appeal, the defendant argued that this violated his Fifth Amendment right to be free from self-incrimination. The reviewing court disagreed because the order did not require the defendant to do anything that was testimonial. The court observed that the order did not require him to disclose any knowledge he might have and reasoned that it was no different than an order to provide a voice exemplar or a blood sample.

Less important but also worth noting is State v. Stahl, __ So. 3d __, 2016 WL 7118574 (Fla. Dist. Ct. App. Dec. 6, 2016). Stahl is a case about a courts authority to order a suspect to provide the passcode to a phone, not a fingerprint. But in the course of discussing the passcode issue, the court stated: Compelling an individual to place his finger on [an] iPhone would not be a protected act; it would be an exhibition of a physical characteristic, the forced production of physical evidence, not unlike being compelled to provide a blood sample or provide a handwriting exemplar.

Caveat. Although requiring a suspect to press the suspects finger to a phone may not require any testimonial activity, orders on this point must be crafted carefully to avoid infringing on a suspects constitutional rights. An order requiring a suspect to unlock a phone, or to provide officers with an impression from the finger that unlocks a phone, might implicate the Fifth Amendment because such an order would require the suspect to decide which finger to use and so to share the suspects knowledge of which finger operates the sensor. Unless the foregone conclusion doctrine applies or the Fifth Amendment issue can be removed through the provision of appropriate immunity, such an order might be improper.

Worthwhile secondary sources. I cited a couple of secondary sources in my previous post. Id like to add to the list two blog posts by Professor Orin Kerr, a leading scholar in this area. His principal post on the topic is here, and a shorter one discussing the Diamond case is here.

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Update on Fingerprints, Phones, and the Fifth Amendment ...