I attended the class court observation trip on Thursday April 17th at the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York.
The first case we observed was USA v. Belliotti, a drug trafficking case. It appeared as though the prosecution was going through the process of admitting evidence (JFK airport records) into the court record by having a witness on the stand explain what each record meant and confirming that they looked accurate. It was unclear what the witness’s relation to the case was, other than that he had knowledge about how information is recoded at the JFK airport. From just the snapshot of what we observed, it wasn’t clear what the case was about. We witnessed one of the more sterile and tedious aspects of a trial.
The second case we observed was USA v. Acevedo, a murder case. One of the first things I heard the prosecution mention was something about how the case was related to drill music. To be honest, this immediately soured me on the prosecution because I personally believe that artistic expression including music lyrics should be protected from being used as evidence in court cases. From what we observed, it wasn’t clear if either party was going to attempt to use song lyrics as evidence. However, I did feel that the prosecution was attempting to use the defendant’s drill music career to diminish his character and call to mind in the Jury how popular media has portrayed drill music as extraordinarily violent and how New York City’s Mayor, Eric Adams, has gone as far to declare war on drill rap.
In the USA v. Acevedo case, the prosecution was questioning a witness who appeared to be in a rival gang of the defendant. The scope of the questioning seemed to be very wide, and it was unclear how all the facts being established were relevant to the murder case. It was also unclear how the witness had been compelled to testify. The witness was clearly unhappy about testifying. The questions and answers seemed to incriminate the witness himself as well as the witness’s family members and fellow gang members rather than establishing much that would incriminate the defendant. This to me reflected poorly on the prosecution who it seemed had been the party that compelled the witness to testify. I personally feel that if you have presented a witness who has agreed in some way to help your case, you have a duty (even if its not a legal duty) to demonstrate goodwill to that witness and to do otherwise reflects poorly on your character.
