How The Florida Bar Let Down Crosley Green And Everyone

I believe Crosley Green murdered Chip Flynn and raped Kim Hallock. I believe the jury figured out Chip went to the baseball park to buy weed, someone saw Chip had money in his wallet, and so Crosley robbed him. But my opinion on guilt is irrelevant to whether Crosley should be in prison. Crosley can only be condemned by a jury through a strict process. But instead of addressing the problems in that process to help Crosley, members of the Florida Bar further damaged that process, to hurt everyone.

The problems in the process involve the right to a jury trial, that it be a jury of peers, that there be due process with a generally honest process, and that the defense be allowed to confront all witnesses and present all information to the jury. That process is designed to protect the innocent, and err on the side of releasing the guilty. But given more than half their clients are guilty, members of the Florida Bar have a different set of habits, other than enforcing this process designed to protect the innocent. They instead use lies.

The typical strategy of a member of the Florida Bar is 1) come up with a crazy narrative to fit the evidence, 2) fix the case with lies, usually by having their own felon clients lie in court in exchange for reduced sentences. More generally, get people to lie and say someone else did it, or their client has an alibi. Notice this strategy is politically advantageous to a lawyer, because it does not attack any police or prosecutors who produced the evidence, and it often helps those elected officials convict other people, often innocent people.

The standard for appeals, is would any faults in what was presented to the jury, have changed the outcome of the trial if they were fixed. The answer in Crosley’s case is no. A firsthand witness gave a very long and detailed account. Other witnesses corroborated and reinforced that account. The first thing a lawyer might attack, is how this appeals standard shifts the examination of the evidence to an appeals judge, rather than a jury. But it will never be practical to have a new trial every time some witness misspeaks about something, so this cannot be fixed.

Under the existing standard, the fact that any individual piece of evidence was egregiously bad or misleading is irrelevant, because there is plenty of other evidence against Crosley. But that does not stop Florida lawyers from going to their standard strategy, of saying some of the evidence is so bad, or all the evidence has a different explanation, so the jury could not have convicted Crosley and he is “actually innocent”. But by returning habitually to this standard tool, these lawyers may have missed a chance to address an actual problem facing the innocent, specifically a sloppy and flawed process which ticks all the legal boxes, but is generally a railroad.

Under the existing standard, discrediting a single piece of evidence is a useless exercise if there is other evidence which the lawyer cannot cleverly argue away. But there is a new standard Crosley’s lawyers could have argued for, which may or may not already be locked down in the Supreme Court. That is if a single piece of evidence is so egregiously bad, it calls into question the good faith and integrity of the person who presented it, and therefore of all evidence presented by that person. This is basically Brady information on the prosecutor.

I am not sure if there is such a piece of evidence in Crosley’s case. But let’s say the dog track evidence is so egregiously bad, that no honest prosecutor could have presented it. Again, I have not looked at the dog track evidence to see if this is the case. But if so, or if the testimony of one of the coerced witnesses is so bad, then even the testimony of the firsthand witness, Kim Hallock, who testified from her own mouth about her own experience, cannot be trusted as not having been tainted by the prosecutor.

This legal argument would be basically changing one word in the standard from Kyles v. Whitley, to say the dog track evidence or the coerced witnesses “revealed a remarkably uncritical attitude on the part of the prosecutor (police)”. And then they would say Crosley’s lawyers were ineffective for not having brought this up, or the whole process was suspect, and violated due process, or whatever.

Crosley’s lawyers did try to hang the appeal on the Kyles standard involving biased investigations. But rather than attacking the bulwarks of their profession, liars and specifically the lies of coerced felons, Crosley’s lawyers tried to use and elevate liars. They said the straight perjury 20 years later by two cops Diane Clarke and Mark Rixey, showed that their lack of knowledge about the investigation at the time it happened, prove the police investigation was biased and uncritical.

Crosley’s lawyers also could have said coerced witnesses were used uncritically, or their nature was not fully examined in front of the jury, either because they are misclassified as normal witnesses rather than hearsay, or because new information about their nature has become available. They could have simply said Crosley’s lawyers were ineffective, or Crosley did not get a trial by jury, to the extent true facts or new research about the nature of coerced witnesses or dog trackers, were not presented to the jury.

I would argue the fact all these witnesses changed their sworn stories, does not prove what they say today is true, but proves they were unreliable perjurers at the outset. The fact they are all proven perjurers and face no threat of punishment, proves the prosecutor and court itself has an uncritical attitude towards perjury. Not their new statements, but the simple fact they would change their stories decades later without sanction, proves their statements were presented to the jury as being more reliable than they actually were.

It is not up to the jury to decide if witnesses are credible. The judge stops unreliable witnesses, whether expert witnesses or hearsay, before they get to the jury. The jury assumes the state will serve them credibility fully cooked, simply by punishing anyone who lies. This assumption is bolstered by the oath being administered in front of the jury. Crosley’s jury should have been provided the full information that there is no sanction for lies. Crosley’s jury should have been shown research and publicly accepted statements on the reliability of various types of witnesses, not tricked.

The appeals courts cannot allow all cases to be overturned with new lies decades later. The scam hits a wall, usually after the innocent have been convicted, and the lawyers paid and reelected. But due process and the right to a jury trial, instead demand that the defense be allowed to accurately educate the jury, that witnesses lie more often than a layman would know. This would fly in the face of everything defense attorneys have achieved. Defense attorneys have worked for years to prevent their own felon witnesses from being called liars, and to enable their felon clients to cut deals to lie in court, often to convict the innocent.

But instead of saying the prosecutor himself was tainted for using these types of dangerous felons as witnesses, Crosley’s lawyers did the same thing the lawyers did 30 years earlier: They tried to weaponize the lies of felons, to say Crosley had an alibi, or Crosley did not actually say the things they claimed he said 30 years ago. This is of course an embarrassing charade. But members of The Florida Bar are accustomed to and comfortable with being reduced to such embarrassing charades, when trying to fix the cases of their guilty clients, to avoid trials which would prevent them paying off their student debt. Or prevent judges and prosecutors clearing cases.

This is how student debt gets paid off, BMW’s get leased, and office rent gets paid, for the 90% of mediocre attorneys. It was members of the Florida Bar, not some police conspiracy, who arranged for Crosley’s sister to testify against him. They again seek to swindle the public with lies decades later, over and over. They disgrace their profession, destroy their own reputations, and damage faith in police and the courts, pro bono.

Finally Crosley’s lawyers tried to say Kim Hallock was racist, or the photo lineup, or the cops and the general process was racist. This is a great tactic for impeaching individual cops, or for presenting a narrative to the public. But it ultimately is weak in the appeals setting, because they don’t have any evidence of it. Quite the opposite, all the witnesses whom Crosley’s lawyers can claim lied are on their own side, including two lying cops, but mostly black people who now say they lied about Crosley, including Crosley’s own sister.

In my opinion, this misses the actual chance to address racism, by examining the active definition of “a jury of peers”. I imagine what a jury of peers means, is long settled law. But I also believe the definition has been settled incorrectly, and not in the spirit intended by the Founders. This right was intended to prevent the accused from being convicted for who they are, rather than what they did. It is a bigger subject than I can bring up here. But my understanding is Crosley’s attorneys did not bring it up at all. If they did, it might have helped everyone, not just one guilty person. But this strategy is expensive, suborning perjury is cheap.

Finally, the media comes in and says this proves the need for conviction integrity units. Their solution does not fix the jury trial process at all. It in fact preserves the ability of the media to corrupt the whole process, by influencing investigators, witnesses, and even jurors for clicks, and subverting and discouraging real public oversight, with immunity no matter how many lies they spread at the time of the original trial. Now the media asks let us do the same thing at both ends, trying cases in the media to convict the innocent for clicks, and then 15 years later again give us influence to release whatever popular convict has a press secretary.

So again, the media goes to their standard process which does not help the innocent: Use their influence to weaponize gossip and agitate, without any consequences for reckless and malicious defamation. And then decades later do it again for clicks and to sell ads, this time agitating against a private citizen Kim Hallock. So in summary, they ask us to hand the key to the prison doors to lying felons and the media, to lock up and let out whom they want when they want, without regard to jurors or due process or random people like Kim Hallock. Blaming someone else is the best strategy Mark Dean Schwab can hope for, not so much Crosley Green. Even worse if it is successful, and corrupts the process forever.

So there are real issues that could be addressed in the Crosley Green case, the definition of peers, how coerced witnesses are presented to juries, whether single pieces of grossly dishonest evidence can discredit an entire case, and even whether cops and felons who commit egregious perjury, or the lawyers who supervise them, will ever be punished. But rather than address these important issues, members of The Florida Bar went to their standard strategies of casting facts in distorted ways to tell crazy stories, and weaponizing liars. I hope Crosley Green goes back to prison, and they try to do better next time.