Specter: Witness intimidation should be a federal crime
Nancy Phillips and Craig McCoy
Philadelphia Inquirer
Jan 8, 2010
Calling witness intimidation "a gigantic problem," U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter said today that he would support legislation to make it a federal crime in state cases.
When murder cases fall apart because of the loss of a witness, "that's a total breakdown of the rule of law, and it's appropriate for the federal government to come and help out," said Specter, who convened a Senate subcommittee hearing on the subject at the National Constitution Center.
He called the hearing in response to a series of stories in The Inquirer that highlighted problems in the city's troubled courts.
The stories documented an epidemic of witness intimidation in Philadelphia, where criminal cases routinely collapse because of witnesses had been frightened or harmed.
"If law enforcement breaks down because of some misguided notion of not being a snitch, something has to do done," said Specter, a Pennsylvania Democrat who is up for re-election this year.
He stopped short of saying flatly that he would introduce such a bill, but endorsed the idea and said he would talk to his colleagues to line up support for a measure.
Witnesses at the hearing included two people whose tragic stories were highighted in The Inquirer series.
Ted Canada spoke of how his son, Lamar, 17, was shot to death in 2005. He detailed for Specter how one witness in the murder case was killed after he testified at a court hearing, and how another witness disavowed his earlier statement to police because he had been threatened.
Barbara Clowden spoke of the death of her son, Eric Hayes, 16. He was killed in 2006, days before he was to testify as a witness in an attempted arson case.
In other testimony, veteran defense laweyer Michael Coard criticized The Inquirer's articles, calling them "frightfully imflammatory."
Coard said the newspaper, in highlighting the collapse of a majority of violent-crime cases each year, failed to realize that defendants were presumed innocent.
Read the story at the Philadelphia Inquirer.
