When Due Process Freezes Over – ICE Snatches a Defendant Mid-Trial

Today's guest is Murat Erkan, a defense attorney out of Massachusetts whose client was kidnapped by ICE in the middle of his own jury trial. I want to thank Hunter Parnell from the podcast Public Defense List for connecting us with Murat.

Also at this time, I'd like to give a shout out and thanks to Judy Jenkins and Jared Weiss, our newest members to the A&G Patreon program. Judy and Jared, I just wanted to say thank you for your recent donations to the podcast, which helps keeps the lights running over here at the A&G studios.

If you too would like to donate, then please visit our website at another not guilty pod.com and click on the Patreon link. Also, if you'd like to be a guest on the pod, then you can reach out to us through the website as well. And don't forget to like follow, subscribe and leave a rating and review wherever you get this podcast. All right, let's get the show going. And with that said, without further ado, here's this week's episode of another not guilty.

So I fire off an email to ADA Lucy because I'm pissed. I'm standing there on my two thumbs on the iPhone. ADA Lucy, I just observed a commotion outside of the courthouse.

My understanding is that ICE agents have captured my client. They refuse to identify themselves or indicate where they were taking him. I am instructing you now to sequester ICE agent Sullivan, the two troopers that are involved in the case, and any other ICE person that was present, and interview them in order to ascertain who was aware of an ICE plan to disappear my client in the middle of this ongoing jury trial.

Welcome to another not guilty. I'm David Moore, here, along with my fellow public defenders, presenting to you the untold stories of the criminal justice system.

Objection! That assumes there's justice in the system, which there ain't. I prefer calling it the American criminal system.

These stories are about the not guilty public defenders get on a daily basis.

In an unjust criminal system.

With the deck stacked against us.

Another not guilty.

And welcome back, everybody, to Another Not Guilty.

It's your boy, David D, here, bringing you the freshest not-guilties across these United States.

One not guilty at a time.

What can I say? That's how we do it here on Another Not Guilty.

Just to let you know that the people of this country will keep on fighting to the end, because that's what we do when we fight against an oppressive state.

Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Can you snap some fingers?

Something like that. That's what defense attorneys do. That's what we public defenders do every day, in and out of the trenches.

Am I right? Am I right, Lauren, my awesome co-host? Am I right?

That's right. Wow, you really nailed that intro today. I'm liking the energy.

We're all about due process here. Despite things that have been happening, we love the due process.

That's right. We keep it wet. Drip, drip, that due. Put the due in due process, right?

Oh, boy. Drip, drip, drip, baby. Yep. Drip, drip. Uh-huh.

All dripped out with that due process. That's right.

Edit. Edit. Whoa.

Man. And you wonder why you haven't been on the podcast in a while, honey. You wonder why you haven't been.

All right, guys. This is going to be fun. We also have another awesome co-host today. We have our...

The guys... Another Not Guilty Land has been missing you. They've been wondering where you're going to come back.

Some of our best episodes in our Rolodex is because of this awesome person, so I'm so happy to hear.

We have Allison Klein from the Public Defender's Office, my lovely wife here as well, co-hosting. What's up, Allison?

Hi, babe. Happy to be here today.

Yeah. Yeah. Happy to see you, too. I miss you.

Oh, my God. This is going to be really fun with you, too.

Edit.

Edit. Another edit.

You see, Lord, this is what I was talking about, you know?

I am very excited about this.

Allison is the leading expert in the state of California on crimmigration, where immigration and criminal law intersect, and she is here to join us today.

Allison, so happy to have you with us. Thank you for coming.

Thank you. Happy to be here.

I don't know if it's really unflappable.

All right, another Not Guilty Verse. We have a special guest today.

He's here to share an awesome case he has. It's in the news, actually, too, so it's even newsworthy, which is pretty dope.

So you can look it up if you want. But we have all the way from the state of Massachusetts, we have an awesome defense attorney named Murat Erkan.

Murat, how are you doing? Go ahead and introduce yourself to the A&G universe.

I'm great. Thanks for asking. I'm soaking in a lot of what this universe means, and I guess I'm looking forward to being on what seems to be a pretty wild ride.

It means drip. Didn't you hear?

I guess we should be doing something, so it might as well be process.

Uh-huh.

Speaking of wild rides, Murat, I heard you've been on a wild ride recently.

Yeah, yeah.

Tell us about, first off, just introduce yourself to the A&G world, like you're a defense attorney, and I know you have some background maybe as a prosecutor.

Like, oh, just tell us a little bit about your background, and then we'll get into your case, okay?

Yeah, thank you so much. So I've been practicing since January of 1998, so straight out of high school to college to law school to the DA's office.

And I worked, yeah, no, I know. That was when I was, you know, on the dark side, I guess is what we would say now.

But your brain wasn't fully developed by then. It's okay.

Well, I feel like we're going to talk to the development at this point at the age of 53, I think.

And I worked at the Essex DA's office, which covers a lot of northern Massachusetts, northeastern Massachusetts, the city of Lawrence, which is infamous in the northeast as being a city that has its fair share of cases and problems.

I think it's actually a great community. It's very ethnically diverse.

The prosecution thing wore off for me in maybe 2006, where I opened up my own small defense practice.

At the time, it was Arkon and Associates, I should say.

Recently partnered up with an attorney, a really great lawyer by the name of Ryan Sullivan, with a similar background, a reformed prosecutor on the criminal defense side.

And we, the one difference between what I do and what you folks do is I'm a, I've never worked as a public defender.

I haven't had that privilege. I've only done-

For that trauma.

Yeah, privilege slash trauma.

Although I feel like I have trauma by proxy, as well as through my own experiences on a fairly routine basis.

So I'm a pay lawyer, but I do align myself, I would say, fairly strongly with a lot of the same views and principles that public defenders have and find myself embroiled in some of the more cutting-edge issues that we're facing and now facing at a very rapidly escalating pace under the Trump 2.0 unleashed administration that we're dealing with.

You're just a bougie public defender. That's what you're saying.

Yeah, yeah, I would say so. And I will also say that in certain cases, I'm fairly confident I get paid substantially less than what public defenders get paid before they do.

What kind of car do you drive, Murat?

My attorney has recommended that I not reveal that. So I'm afraid I might get virtually bullied by you folks by telling you what car I actually drive.

I'll preface it by saying it was pre-2024.

And it is a Tesla.

But I got a sticker for it that says that it identifies as a Prius.

So, all right, guys, we're not about, it's not about the money. All right, we're all fighting the same fight.

Let's, we got, we.

So he goes to swastakar and he's been a bougie public defender.

He's a bougie public defender.

He's not, he's, guys, he's, he's, give him a chance. He's, he's, he's here for a reason.

Okay. We don't just have anybody on this show.

All right.

We got it. Okay.

I'll have you know that I, I, I provide reasonable doubt for a reasonable price.

Oh, I like it.

I like that.

I love it.

All right.

So, so Murat, you got, you got your own, you got your own private practice.

You're helping people out face the, who are facing charges from the oppressive state.

And you're here to share a recent case you had dealing with the government and, and it's in the media.

So let's just talk about it.

Tell us about this case of yours.

Who is your client and what was he charged with?

So the answer to that question is a bit more complicated simply because the nature of the charge was centered around who my client is.

The complaint filed against my client was Commonwealth versus Wilson, Wilson, Martel, LeBron.

And the allegation was that he obtained a license using false credentials and that he was not in fact, Wilson, Martel, LeBron.

What kind of license?

A driver's license.

And the allegation arose in November of 2019.

And yeah, so it's, it's, it's a, it's a really old case with a lot of gnarly history, I would say.

But the allegation by the commonwealth was that Wilson, Martel, LeBron was truly a Dominican national by the name of Juan Baez, who was undocumented and obtained the identity of Wilson, Martel, LeBron, who is truly another individual, a native of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.

And so because a person's born in Puerto Rico or U.S. citizens, he had a social security number and thus the credentials that would allow a person who presented his information to obtain a driver's license.

And, you know, things have changed recently in Massachusetts, where by voter referendum, there was a law that was passed that permits individuals to obtain driver's licenses, regardless of their immigration status, which allowed a lot of individuals to sort of come out of the shadows and be able to live and work under their, their true identity.

So Massachusetts, I think, I suspect, like a lot of states has a fairly large docket of individuals who were accused of having false driver's licenses, in so much as they posed as a person born in Puerto Rico.

So is this a misdemeanor or a felony?

It's a felony charge.

So like, which kind of blows my mind, because like the same offense conduct here is the offense conduct that I may or may not have, you know, been involved in as a youth trying to get the alcohol.

Alcohol.

Right.

So that same thing is a felony in Massachusetts, punishable for, I think, five years in a state's prison.

So I just want to be clear, he's, he's not accused of anything else, just trying to get this driver's license.

So it's not like a, a false identity where he's assuming the identity and, and engaging in other forms of fraud.

There's no DUI, vehicular manslaughter, anything that would make this more serious.

This is just a guy who's accused of trying to get a driver's license at a time when, if it's true that he was, um, an undocumented citizen from, did you say the Dominican Republic?

Correct.

He wouldn't have been eligible to get his driver's license because he wasn't a citizen.

That's, that's correct.

And, and, and I would say it's even less than what you just described because the, the circumstances under which he obtained the credential were sort of, um, uh, I think he was sort of like driven into doing it by, um, uh, by government action.

So just to lay a little bit more background here, um, uh, my client, uh, had, uh, been convicted in the mid two thousands of a serious drug trafficking case in Massachusetts and was subjected to the minimum mandatory drug laws here, which are just fucking off the hook draconian, um, Massachusetts, right.

Uh, uh, uh, and, and sentenced to, I think 15 years in, in state's prison.

And that conviction was one concurrent with a conviction in another case that arose sort of at that same time period.

The, the, um, the, what the other conviction I'm referencing now was subsumed into the larger sentence because it was more minor, uh, uh, drug offense.

But interestingly enough, that offense was tainted by the drug lab scandal in Massachusetts.

The now infamous, uh, chemist, Annie Dukin, uh, yeah, tested the drugs, uh, in, in that smaller drug case.

So that case was vacated by order of the Supreme judicial court of Massachusetts, uh, which was of no benefit to him because he already had a 15 year sentence that he was doing.

So he ultimately gets told.

Yep.

What was the name of the prior, uh, drug, uh, drug sales conviction?

What was the name convicted?

He was convicted under that one.

Wilson Martel LeBron.

Oh, he was, oh, so he was Wilson Martel LeBron in 2002, right?

He was Wilson Martel LeBron when he was first arrested on that, that first drug case.

He then goes on the run and he obtains fake credentials under two other names while he's on the run.

Okay.

So that's like shit that he did.

And like, there's no sort of apologizing for it or, or, uh, dancing around it.

That's, that's something that happened years in the past.

And then he was apprehended.

The names were linked up.

He was prosecuted as Wilson Martel LeBron convicted of two separate drug offenses.

Um, and then when it came time for him to be paroled, one of the conditions of parole is that he obtain, uh, employment.

Uh, and if he's not, not obtaining employment, uh, demonstrate earnest efforts to obtain employment.

I think that's kind of standard stuff for people on parole.

Um, and in, in doing so, all he has is his inmate ID card.

And so he's going to job fairs, he's going to job interviews, and he's repeatedly being rejected for lack of, um, uh, appropriate identification.

And his parole officer is now leaning on him.

You, you got to go get your license.

Okay.

So faced with the concern that if he fails to get his license, he's not going to be earnestly complying with the employment requirement.

He then applies for a Massachusetts driving credential under the name Wilson Martel LeBron.

I'm very confused.

Say again?

I'm very confused.

Okay.

So your client, the name that he tried to get the driver's license under is the name he's been using.

He's been living under this name.

Correct.

But your client is in fact undocumented?

I will not say that.

I mean, that is the government's allegation, uh, Lauren Marie.

Okay, well, let me ask it this way.

His parole officer, when his parole officer is telling him to get a driver's license, does his parole officer believe him to be a citizen or believe him to be undocumented?

That's, uh, that's a matter, uh, uh, that hasn't been established in my mind.

I don't have, you know, any statements from the parole officer, but what I do know is the parole officer is aware that there's an identity issue involving my client because he had been arrested using false names in the past.

Um, but he's being instructed to get a driver's license now under whatever credential he can get.

You understand?

So he goes and he gets the driver's license under the name that he has been using and the only government name that's known other than the two fake names that were provided.

Okay?

So, and so every case, every time he's been charged with a crime, he's used the same name that he applied to get his driver's license?

He gets arrested under Wilson Martell LeBron.

He goes on the run.

He obtains fake identities.

He gets arrested under those fake identities.

Those, uh, when he's fingerprinted, the Wilson Martell name comes up, and so he is now prosecuted.

Right, but he's been charged.

Like, when they, when we get to court and they say, is this your true and correct name, every, every legal proceeding, every record is under the same name that he applied for his driver's license.

That's correct.

Yep.

Yep.

So he goes and he gets his driver's license.

He's, and now he's like, he's on fire getting work.

I mean, he immediately gets a job at the Amazon warehouse.

He immediately gets a job for UPS as like a package assistant to set, essentially.

And he's doing awesome.

I mean, like, he's doing the right thing.

Uh, he's complying with parole.

And then he gets a letter from the Registry of Motor Vehicles in Lawry.

Uh, I'm sorry, in Massachusetts, stating, there's a fraud problem with your license.

You need to come to the Registry of Motor Vehicles central office in downtown Boston, um, and clear up this issue before a hearings officer.

And if you don't come in for this hearing, uh, your license is going to be automatically suspended.

So Wilson is thinking to himself, okay, they know about, like everybody does, my past fake names.

And I need to clear that up with the Registry of Motor Vehicles.

Um, he goes in to the Registry, uh, office.

He hits a buzzer to go into a secure area where ostensibly this hearing is going to occur.

But instead of, like, some dude that is a bureaucrat for the Registry, um, he gets greeted by two undercover state police troopers.

So he essentially gets trapped into a police interrogation under the guise of fixing a driver's license problem.

Are you with me, Lauren Marie?

Yes, thank you.

Wait, he gets interrogated by two, who again?

Two state police troopers with a come up in Massachusetts.

Okay, and they, and this is on his, where do they interrogate him at?

At what was described to him in the letter as an RMV Registry of Motor Vehicles office in downtown Boston.

But in reality, he gets shuttled into this secure area where he's interrogated by two state police troopers.

And there was not a single driver's license Registry of Motor Vehicle person involved in this interrogation.

So, coming for a hearing is the ask, but the reality is, sit for an interrogation with two state troopers.

And what is the interrogation about?

Who the fuck are you?

Okay, so now Wilson is, like, taken aback as to what is happening because there's a dissonance between what he's expecting and what is happening.

And the troopers ask him to produce identification, supporting his claim to be Wilson Martel LeBron.

And he shows up with a birth certificate and a social security card and bills in his name delivered to his own address verifying his residence.

Did you just say a birth certificate and a social security card?

Correct.

All bearing the same name that he has on his license.

Correct.

Okay.

And so, he puts the documents down on the table.

The troopers don't look at the documents and they say, those are fake.

Okay.

And then they confront him with the previous names that he had used in the past.

And he says, yep, that's true.

I used those previous names in the past because I hit a problem and I went on the run.

And I used those names to facilitate my flight.

You know, using fake names and identifications is not – that's – many American citizens do that all the time.

It's not an uncommon thing.

Everyone – you're not automatically undocumented if you use those types of tactics, I guess.

Right.

To be clear, I mean, Wilson is not an angel.

He's made his mistakes and he's fucking paid so much for the mistakes that he's made.

And now, at this RMV meeting where he's being interrogated, is at a place where he is doing everything right.

But they're trying to – they're trying to bring him back into the prison system at this point.

So, they then present documentation from the Puerto Rico Police Department essentially saying, these documents show us who the real Wilson Martel LeBron is.

And those documents include a photograph of another individual who is not my client.

And they say, this is the real Wilson.

Stop lying.

And my client insists I am, in fact, Wilson Martel LeBron.

And they say, you know, fuck you.

You're under arrest.

They can't charge him with the two prior names that he gave in, what, 2006 because it's actual limitations, right?

He's not using those names.

So, all they can go on is the theory that he's not, in fact, Wilson Martel LeBron.

Now, they confront him with the Puerto Rico stuff, which shows that there are at least two people who are claiming to be Wilson Martel LeBron by client and somebody else.

And they say, you're the one who's lying.

They choose that.

They say, he's the one that's lying.

And so –

Sorry to interrupt.

So, is the person that they are claiming is the real Wilson LeBron supposedly in Puerto Rico or also here in the United States?

In Puerto Rico, yes.

Because it wouldn't be possible for someone to have the same name?

The same name and social security number.

Oh, same social security number.

That would be problematic.

Yeah.

Obviously, somebody is using somebody's credentials.

And the question is, can the government prove that it's my client?

That's the –

I mean, your client at this point could very well be the victim of identity theft, but instead is being held in a room by state troopers and being interrogated and told that he's a criminal.

Correct.

I mean, conceivably –

Probably largely in part because of his past.

Yep.

Yep.

Yep.

And conceivably, you know, one might draw an inference as a prosecutor that it is Wilson who is using the fraudulent name because he's done it in the past.

And he had a motive to do so because of the drug history that he had to conceal, you know, his drug history and the existence of a warrant back in 2006.

So he stands by his story.

I'm Wilson, I tell LeBron.

They say, you're lying.

And they arrest him.

And then they notify his parole officer and his parole gets revoked.

And now he's got this ongoing prosecution, okay, in the Boston Municipal Court.

So in Massachusetts, you can prosecute certain felonies at the district court level, any felony punishable for five years in prison or less.

Did you say his parole was revoked?

His parole was revoked.

So he was put into custody?

Correct.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So he's arraigned on new charges.

He shows up for his arraignment.

A parole detainer is filed.

He's released on personal recognizance from the trial court proceeding.

Remanded to the custody of the Massachusetts prison system where his parole is violated.

He has to serve more time.

May I miss this?

What flag?

How did this get flagged?

Why all of a sudden did they zero in on him?

Because if he had a driver's license, what caused the government or whoever to look into him and say this is fraudulent?

So according to the police report, the case came up as a facial recognition hit, tying him to the two fake IDs that I've already mentioned for which he had obtained credentials in the past.

So they have an image, they have three images of Wilson Martel LeBron associated with three different names.

Oh, okay.

Because of his prior unlawful driver's license.

Okay.

Okay.

And then they're like, oh, we can't prosecute him for that.

Let's see if we can build a case that he's not Wilson Martel LeBron either.

Does that make sense?

It's a complex history year, but.

So Marat, you get this case.

Tell us about when you first got the case and you meet the client.

Can you talk about that?

So that, um, now we're talking about five years ago.

So the, the, the details of my initial meeting with him are lost in, in, in, in, in time, but, but what I can, but what I can, um, reconstruct is that he had been assigned a, uh, a public defender in the Boston municipal court.

Uh, that public defender, uh, that public defender represented him for a period of time, filed a motion to suppress the defendant's statements, uh, that he gave to the RNB asserting who he was and what, what not.

Um, that motion to suppress was denied.

Um, and then, um, yeah.

Wow.

That was such a loud one.

Um, yeah.

The motion to suppress, I think I might've jumped the motion.

Yeah.

I was surprised too.

I know.

Um, but, but, um, you know, we all do our best to litigate our cases to the best, uh, uh, uh, of our ability and, and marshal the best facts.

In, in, in, in my, uh, estimation, I don't think that the motion to suppress was like top tier litigation because, um, the, uh.

Wait, wait, wait, what were they seeking to suppress?

Wasn't it just your client saying he actually is Wilson LeBron?

Uh, essentially that my client admitted to using false names in the past and then saying that he was Wilson Martel LeBron.

Now, I want to add some, some facts to the mix here to, to, to fill in some blanks.

After the arrest and after the arraignment, an ICE agent by the name of Brian Sullivan is contacted by one of the two troopers that's involved in the case.

Okay.

And that ICE agent gives information that, um, the individual Wilson Martel LeBron was connected to identity information tied to a Dominican national by the name of Juan Baez.

And he pulls the, the, uh, a really old passport of, uh, uh, of Juan Baez.

And he pulls the sedula, which is the Dominican Republic identity, citizenship identification for Juan Baez.

And he says, this is the true Wilson Martel LeBron.

And so, uh, in part, the client statements that he's Wilson Martel LeBron are now feeding into a theory that he's lying about not being Juan Baez from the Dominican Republic.

Okay.

Uh, so at any rate, the statements are evidence of him making statements about who he is, which can be argued, um, uh, to suggest that his statements are false at one point or another.

And the motion to suppress is like, the motion to suppress is they like didn't read his rights because they, they, they, they detained him essentially and questioned him.

They interrogated him and they didn't read him his rights.

Is that what?

That's exactly what the motion to suppress was.

Yeah.

I mean, I don't like saying they detained him.

They, they kidnapped him by luring him under false pretenses.

It's more like it.

Yeah.

So, uh, you know, I think that's a smart way to look at it.

Uh, Lon Marie, because, um, so the, um, the motion that was filed by the previous attorney was premised only on like what the police said happened.

Okay.

And so she doesn't call any witnesses or present any evidence.

She cross examines the police officers at the hearing who say, Oh, you're mistaken, ma'am.

Uh, there was nothing custodial about this interrogation.

Uh, he was invited to come to this meeting.

He was free to leave.

It was a really sort of neutral and laid back conversation.

Um, which we all definitely believe, you know, well, we all believe, um, in air quotes, but which judges believe in fact is true almost universally.

So now, I mean, so the, the, the, the defense strategy is let me cross examine the cops who are going to deny that this was custodial and hope that the judge disbelieves them.

So motion is suppressed, denied.

Okay.

But the reality is that Wilson obviously was a witness to what happened, but more importantly, his partner, Charlotte, Charlotte, Charlotte D'Alello was present for the entire thing.

Okay.

And so she was a witness to the letter that, that the client received.

She was a witness to the trap at the Boston building being greeted by these troopers.

And unlike she had a very, very different version of what happened.

And it was fucking awesome because the troopers are testifying and they're admitting that Charlotte is present for this meeting.

And they're like, she's not really not sure why she was there.

Um, I think just for moral support and we were happy to give him the moral support that he needed.

But the reality was, if you were to credit with Charlotte D'Alello's testimony was, uh, that, um, when, when they rang the buzzer, the two troopers came, they kind of whisked, what does the Martel LeBron in?

I gave her the Heisman, like, who the fuck are you?

You're not coming in.

She asserted herself because she's awesome and she's a strong woman and said, he doesn't speak English.

And so I need to be here to make sure that he understands what's happening and sort of asserts herself.

And they very reluctantly allow her into this meeting.

And so she wasn't just there for moral support.

She was there to allow the defendant to understand what in fact was happening because contrary to the police claim that they spoke to Wilson, like the way that I would speak to you.

Wilson doesn't speak English other than some really bad, like bad, hard to understand words here and there that he can piece together.

Um, so, uh, her testimony would have both undermined the claim that this was, you know, she was like, uh, dressing, uh, for the stage, uh, uh, uh, and, and proved that she was there because he in fact didn't understand what was happening.

And she was in a position to testify to the truly coercive nature of the interrogation that occurred.

So sorry, if I'm understanding correctly, that means that all of his statements that they were seeking to have come in really came through his girlfriend.

That's correct.

But yeah, but in Massachusetts, it doesn't, it doesn't matter.

It would be, she would be considered not a declarant.

She would be considered a conduit to his statements.

Okay.

They don't have to be certified.

I mean, there's no hearsay objection there.

No, there's a, there's a hearsay objection that's been overruled by the Supreme Court of Massachusetts that says that if the interpreter is aligned with the interests of the declarant, then yeah.

Uh, she becomes just a mouthpiece or like, um, you know, like a recording.

I don't know, but it's, there's a, there's some logic, uh, that I don't agree with, uh, that suggests that because he doesn't have an incentive to fabricate, um, uh, it, that hearsay objection is overcome.

Um, so, okay, yes, it's fucked up, but that is the way that it is in Massachusetts.

So, you know, I, I, that's not where I can, the, the, the hill I can fight or die on.

Um, uh, but, but she, uh, asserts and establishes that it was custodial in nature and that he didn't understand what was happening.

Um, none of that is presented by the initial bar advocate, public defender, who was assigned to the case.

The motion to suppress gets denied and then in the interim, she withdraws from the case because she's moving out of state.

So now they're left without a lawyer and it is at that juncture that they retain my office based on a represent, uh, uh, a referral.

So my, uh, first order of business is to attempt to relitigate the motion to suppress.

So I filed a motion to renew the motion to suppress supported by Charlotte's affidavit, um, and, uh, um, juxtaposing what she said happened to the, the transcript of the testimony of the two troopers of the motion to suppress hearing.

And, and, and in my view, really handily showing that those troopers were full of shit and the judge in the case didn't give, you know, um, without granting an evidence to a hearing and even permitting to let alone to testify denies the motion to suppress.

So now we're moving toward trial in the case.

Okay. Um, let me, let me just interject a question here.

Um, so, so you get the case, you, you relitigate the motion to suppress the statements.

It's also denied.

Um, now you're moving towards trial, but before we get to trial, can you tell us a little bit about what you're doing to prepare for trial?

Yeah. So that's a, this is a great question because I still didn't know, like, and I'm saying I didn't know how the trial was going to go until it was happening because there was a, there was a degree of, um, insanity in my view.

In the way things go in the Boston municipal court where you, you, you, you cannot rely on any given judge agreeing to apply the rule of law or the rules of evidence.

And so like, there's some like bonkers shit happening in the pretrial run up in this case that like, I want to talk to you guys about, it's certainly not the headline of the story, but it's totally nuts.

So I am, um, marking the case for trial because I'm saying to myself, okay, I, there's no discovery that I've been provided that establishes that my client through competent evidence that my client is not who he claims to be.

So what they have is registry motor vehicle documents showing that he applied for a fake name in the past when he was on the run, remember?

Um, and that is the only evidence that I've been provided.

They say in the police report that they have records from Puerto Rico, the fusion center.

I don't know if you guys have a fusion center out there in California, but states are doing this now.

Uh, and the fusion center is really just like a law enforcement cooperation arm, uh, where they exchange information.

And the fusion center in Puerto Rico generates records from, uh, uh, the red shoe motor vehicles in Puerto Rico, uh, and, um, jail records from Puerto Rico.

And it takes all that stuff that they access through databases and then generates a report that says your client is not the real Wilson Martell Barnum.

I'm like, oh yeah, that's great because that's a police report and that's not coming into evidence.

It's like, it's like so many layers of hearsay.

So I'm like, the police report references evidence, but they don't have the evidence.

It just references it.

Exactly.

And they also have like a fingerprint match to, according to APHIS, right?

So a computer database is saying that Wilson Martell LeBron's fingerprint match Juan Baez, the Dominican dude that they're saying he is.

I'm like, that's also great.

Let me see how you're going to get that into evidence based on the computer telling you that, right?

Um, and then they have the passport, which they never produced.

And they have the Dominican Republic Cedula, which is like a Spanish language document produced by another country.

That is like a photocopy of a photocopy.

They don't have anything, right?

So any of those things have a picture, any of the things from the Dominican Republic?

They do have a picture of the individual who they purport is the, is Juan Baez.

But I'm talking about pictures from decades ago.

So that, I mean, like juvenile photographs, such that I think that no backfinder, if either of the documents were admitted into evidence, could conclude reasonably that they prove reasonable that he's the same person.

So like, that's so many layers down the road.

Because how old is your client right now?

40 something.

40 something.

And so pictures from like a teenager high school, like, I mean, I still can fit into my high school clothes, but you know, I can't say that for everybody.

All right, let's not brag.

Well, once you have a baby, talk to me if you can still fit into your high school clothes.

I wish I had that excuse.

So essentially, I mean, we're talking, and I think that we're all practitioners here.

And just from like a, it's like a very neutral perspective, you can see that there's a deep proof problem in the government's case.

I mean, right?

Okay.

Well, sure.

Just because he used false identities or different identities before, there's nothing to say that this current identity is not his real identity.

There's nothing admissible to say that.

Correct.

And also nothing probative, even if it was admissible, as we just discussed.

So I'm like, let's put this case up for trial.

They're going to answer not ready.

And the case is going to be dismissed.

And I'm going to be like every other one of these cases I've handled.

Every other one of these cases.

I've never had a case like this go to trial before, because they've always been dismissed, because the DA produces a police report, and then they're like on a trial date, like, oh, how do I get this shit in?

They don't think about that until the trial date.

And then they develop, like, situational amnesia so that the next time they have the case, they also can't remember that they need to get authenticated and certified documents to prove what it is that they're claiming.

So I'm like, okay, I marked the case up for trial.

Can you tell us a little bit about your client, though, and, like, how is he during this whole process when you meet him, just to kind of get to know him?

My client is – he's an awesome client to deal with.

And Charlotte is incredible.

I mean, like, when she first pitched the case to me, I remember this.

She came in with, like, a tabbed packet of information about, like, all, like, the dirty deeds that have happened to Wilson, you know, in this case, and all, like, the government, like, shadiness that's been going on.

So, I mean, she's a powerhouse of a woman.

I think she's, like – if every man had, like, a woman like her in their life, we would, like, not fuck up, like, anything.

But because we don't have that, we all make terrible decisions, including Wilson.

But he's good because he's, like, OG.

He's done his time.

And this is, like – you know, he's done 15 years, and he's threatened with a fake license case.

So he's, like, ride or die, Marat, do what you've got to do.

And he – you know, I had a lot of cred with him because it was a referral-based, you know, appliance.

So people told him that, like, you know, I walk on water.

So then going – so going forward, then, like, you're just – hey, let's just set it for trial then.

I don't think they can prove this case.

I am just going to object.

We're just going to object.

That's our objection, objection, objection.

And I guess you'll probably do some pretrial motions or motions to limit what can come in too, right?

Correct.

So I have a pretrial motion that's ready to go.

So I show up on the first – and this is where things are just, like, my temperature rises because –

my temperature has been hot on this case from the beginning because I feel like everything that happened to this guy is just so shitty.

And the way that the court handled it was just so shabby at all times until the trial, ultimate trial in this case, five years later.

Now – and just to put it in context, I'm talking about the motion to reconsider that I filed got scheduled with, like, five hearings where the judge who handled the case was like,

why is this in front of me?

I'm like, because you decided it and you need to reconsider it.

And she's like, oh, well, you know, pick another date.

And then I pick a date and she's not there.

You know, so, like –

So the pretrial motions all relate to my clients, you know, the lack of evidence that they have to prove their case.

So I have the motions.

I'm not filing them.

But every time I'm showing up for trial, my case is getting bumped because there are other real cases that are on the docket that are taking precedent over my case, number one.

And number two, the court cannot, for the life of it, get a Spanish interpreter to show up for my case.

And I'm like, for the first time this happens, I'm like, I don't care.

I want my case dismissed.

And then the second time it happens, I'm like, I've already been here for trial.

This is the second trial date.

You guys don't have a form for me.

Dismiss the case.

And then it happens and it happens and it happens.

So, like, I'm talking about maybe five trial continuances at this point.

And so I can't even talk to a judge about the evidence issues.

And meanwhile, I'm talking to the DAs.

I'm like, you know you can't prove this, right?

And the responses I'm getting are things like, oh, no, I can totally get this in because I can talk about what the police officer learned.

I'm like, okay, I mean, so that's hearsay, right?

But that's where I'm not going to explain the rules of evidence to a person that doesn't want to understand them.

So, you know, but now as a private lawyer who's charging a flat fee, my margins on this case are like nothing.

Okay.

And so I'm getting pissed about all these continuances.

So, finally, I have a motion and limit a hearing.

I'm like, I know you can't hear my case today, judge, but just look at the motion and limit a and look at the fact that all they have is hearsay and unattested documents.

Enter orders that it can't be admitted and dismiss the case.

Now, I have that hearing in front of a judge who's like, I'm going to deny the motion.

And essentially, he says, because I don't think that the rules of evidence are intended to make this type of prosecution so hard.

And right.

And so my response is, help me look at the guide to evidence and identify the, it makes the case too hard for the prosecutor to prove exception to the hearsay rule.

But because I don't see that exception, anyway, so motion and limit a denied to exclude the lack of a passport, to exclude the foreign language documents from another country and exclude police reports.

Okay.

So.

All the authentication.

All of that's coming in?

All of it's coming in.

And then he says.

How?

La Marie, I would love to speak with you where you live in my world.

Because I told you at the beginning that I share the pain of public defenders everywhere because you guys deal with insanity, I'm assuming, even in the city of California.

Yeah.

But I mean, realistically, look, the records we all agree shouldn't have come in.

But now that the judge is saying they can come in, who's authenticating these records?

How are we laying a foundation?

He says, subject to authentication.

And I'm like, so now, and you asked me, like, I'm preparing for trial.

Preparing for what trial with what evidence, I don't know, because rules of evidence don't apply.

I don't know what evidence is or is not going to come in.

I know what evidence should not come in, but.

All of it.

All of it.

But it doesn't matter because I don't have judges who are willing to apply the rules of evidence and hold a comely to the fire.

And prosecutors would think that if somebody learns something and they're a cop, that's an exception to the hearsay rule.

And it defeats authentication objections, et cetera.

So now I'm like, oh, my God, I'm preparing for, like, a trial that could go 17 different ways.

All right.

Which is what we do as trial lawyers sometimes, I guess.

Yeah.

And I'm marking the case for trial.

And the case is not being reached because no session available.

The DA needs a continuance because the cops aren't there.

There's no interpreter available.

I'm like, fuck you, I object every single time.

And now I'm filing motions to dismiss on speedy trial grounds because under the Massachusetts rules, which are aligned somewhat closely to the Federal Speedy Trial Act, there is somewhere around 500 and some days of non-excludable delay under the speedy trial clock.

And under Massachusetts law, the case law is extraordinarily clear that the delay that occurred in my case due to court congestion, prosecutors not having their witnesses ready, lack of an ability to conduct a trial because there's no interpreter, all count against the commonwealth.

If the defendant objects, and if the judge does not make findings, that the continuance is in the interest of justice, both of which occurred in this case.

No findings, and I made the objections.

And how much time are we talking here?

So this is a case that spanned five years.

But the time that was excludable on the speedy trial, non-excludable on the speedy trial clock was 500 and some days of delay that needed to be justified.

Is your client in custody for all of this because of the parole violation?

No, no, no, no.

Oh, good.

Because he had already almost maxed out his sentence.

It was a minimum mandatory.

So he got the couple of extra months off back that he had to do, and then he's out.

So the whole time I'm dealing with him, he's out.

He's a free man.

He's coming to court.

Okay, and so am I.

So now I'm filing motions to dismiss on speedy trial grounds, and these motions are getting denied with no memorandum of decision, no judges explaining why the motion is being denied.

So I'm like, okay.

Because they can't just say, I don't want to.

Right, because they can't just say I don't want to, and because I don't know what happens in that court, because I'm not a frequent flyer in Boston Municipal Court Central, nor do I want to be, given the way this case went.

But the motions are being denied.

So I'm like, okay, I renew the motion on the next day, and another judge hears it, and then he says, oh, he says, this judge says, well, Mr. Arkin, I'm going to deny this motion.

I just want you to know I consider myself an expert in speedy trial law.

And I said, again, then that means that you understand that the case law I'm supporting requires that this case be dismissed.

So he denies the motion again, not even a margin endorsement.

But then as I'm walking out, he says, but you can renew it to Milvo in front of the next judge.

I'm like, okay.

So I do that in front of the next judge who also denies the motion.

But this particular hearing is interesting, and it sort of sets the stage for why this case is important, because the DA who is assigned to the case is a fellow by the name of Jack Lucy.

Jack Lucy is from one of those white shoe firms in Boston, like we call them sweatshops, where they send their associates, who I'm assuming make more than all of us combined, even though they're associates,

to the trial court service prosecutor to learn how to try a case.

Okay, so they get these little rotations for six months, right?

And just a little side note here, every DA that's been assigned to this case, in my tenure with it, has been a loaner firm, big firm prosecutor.

So they don't care about the case because they're having...

We have those.

Those are down here.

The tap attorneys.

The tap attorneys, or I've had big firm guys, they just want their courtroom experience, they want to do a trial.

They're so eager.

Oh, totally.

We're all supposed to be so impressed that they're from this big law firm.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And it's amazing because they're just terrible.

They have no idea what they're doing at all.

But their lack of skill is burnished by their complete and utter arrogance, at least as to some of them.

And in this case, Jack Lucy in particular, extraordinarily arrogant.

They're not there to lose, by the way.

They come in to win.

They are there to win.

So Lucifer is your prosecutor.

Yeah, so Jack Lucifer is my prosecutor.

And I...

Because I always think and hope, like, no matter how times I get, like, burned by the way lawyers can be, I always hope that the one I'm talking to next is going to be, like, a reasonable person.

So I try to have a reasonable conversation, at least in the start.

And so I email him the motion to dismiss, and I say, would you please review this motion?

And perhaps you should agree, you would agree that we can obviate a hearing because the motion ought to be allowed because of the precedent.

I know.

That's very sweet.

And he writes back, and he says, I reject your argument.

These are the words that he uses.

I reject your argument that a speech trial motion should be allowed.

And I'm like, what, you reject my argument?

All right, now it's on.

So we don't go to court to argue it.

And my partner, Ryan, is the one who goes in to handle it on this day just because, like, for purposes of not having a heart attack.

And so Ryan went and he handled the case.

And unfortunately, Ryan found himself embroiled in, like, this hearing that was just, like, just a kind of, like, lawyer horror movie type of a hearing.

So the prosecutor is, like, saying things that have, like, nothing to do with the law.

He's making citations in a memo he files to the court that are extraordinarily misleading.

And I won't go into detail because it's so much.

And then he argues to the judge that none of the time which carries the day on a speedy trial calculation counts against the Commonwealth because the continuances were not the DA's fault, some of them.

Which is false because the DA is in charge of the trial list, right?

And because the continuances were related to the defendant's benefit because they were needed to get a Spanish interpreter.

So he's essentially saying that the court's inability to provide a forum at which the defendant can be present and participate is excludable time under the speedy trial clock, which is fucking bonkers, right?

It's so easy to get a Spanish interpreter.

They're all over the place.

You know, like, even, like, sometimes people speak some really foreign language I've never even heard of sometimes.

They get an interpreter there.

They call them up.

They're there at the next court date.

It happens.

Like, we have one Kiche interpreter for the whole county.

We're very lucky here in that regard.

I mean, I think this is a major issue nationally.

I think, like, here we're very spoiled to have access to the interpreters that we do.

But I feel like in your case, he's basically saying he's not entitled to the dismissal because it's the same amount of time he could have learned English, right?

I mean, it's like...

Well, but there's a low-key racist edge to it, too, because he's also saying...

Not low-key.

Yeah, I was going to say, it's pretty in your face.

Right.

I mean, you know, I'll allow you guys to draw the conclusions as I try my best to present this as objectively as possible.

But laced within that argument was a contention that the defendant was pretending to not speak English because the troopers stated that he didn't need an interpreter, you know, when they had their unrecorded interview with my client.

The interview which Charlotte DeLolo would have put on its head if she had been permitted to testify.

But who cares?

I'm sorry?

Who cares?

Even if that's true.

Even if he gave some statements and participated in an interview with the troopers in English, if there is now formal legal proceedings, he's saying, I need an interpreter to understand these.

Who cares?

Right.

I mean, I think that's fair to say because...

But the DA's contention is not that, that he has limited facility.

The DA's contention is that he speaks English better than I do, right?

He has no need of an interpreter, and it's made up.

And so...

Oh, he's saying your client is engaging in these tactics.

Correct.

And it's not actually necessary.

He lies about his name.

Of course he's lying about not speaking English.

Goddamn this brown person.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Exactly.

All of which would have been revealed had the state police actually recorded the interview that was conducted in a formal place of detention.

So the DA's kind of like making these arguments, casting aspersions against our client, and then also essentially arguing that the defendant's speedy trial right is held in abeyance indefinitely until such time as the court gets around to giving him an interpreter or he learns enough English to participate in this trial.

So...

What a crazy argument to make.

I mean, what if he had been detained throughout of this?

He's saying that even if he's detained, it doesn't matter.

If the court can't provide him what he needs, the government can just continue this indefinitely.

So not only is it an illogical position, it's also a position that's contrary to specific precedent in Massachusetts, which recognizes, you know, like, people have a constitutional right to be present during their trial.

And being present means understanding what's happening.

So Ryan comes back.

He's fit to be tied.

He fucking hates his DA.

I'm like, pump the brakes, man.

Pump the brakes, you know.

He's a new guy.

He's learning, whatever.

So me being his, like, apologist.

When that motion of dismissal gets denied, I'm like, okay.

I take an appeal to the Supreme Judicial Court on this because I'm like, I cannot resolve this case.

I'm like, so much fucked up shit is happening.

I need a Supreme Judicial Court judge to intervene and order dismissal.

You're not allowed to appeal on an interlocutory basis the denial of a motion to dismiss as a matter of right.

But I said, I don't care about my rights.

Look at this.

It's fucked up what's happening.

Please, someone from the SJC fix this.

And the SJC, which was their right, declines to hear the petition.

So now the case is, again, angling for trial.

Now we are in March of the year 2025.

March 27th, specifically, the case that, the date that I showed for jury trial.

On that date, my client appears.

Now, one of the things that I said in my pleading to the Supreme Judicial Court is,

there's an extraordinary reason why you should hear my case now.

And that is because the government alleges that my client is an undocumented immigrant.

And I am concerned that if my client shows up for a sham trial date,

he's not going to have his day in court because ICE is going to swoop in and grab him.

So he's going to be essentially forced to appear in court for a fake trial date for the exclusive,

on a case that is dead under a speed trial clock,

for the exclusive reason of engineering his deportation.

And I said, that is an extraordinary reason to intervene that SJC didn't agree, which is the prerogative.

Wait, why did you, why did you put that part?

Because he's, he's been coming to court all these other times and he's never been detained.

Or kidnapped by ICE, but now you're putting in an appeal that you're concerned if you,

that the court should order dismissal because if he were to go back to court, he may be kidnapped by ICE.

Because now there's Trump.

What's that?

Look at the timing.

This trial date is the first one under the new Trump administration,

where Trump has promised to...

Okay.

Where people are being kidnapped out of vans on the street right now.

All right, so all those, all those prior trial dates were before Trump administration, before January 20th, essentially.

That's correct.

Okay.

And David, prior to that, the Biden administration basically had a, a position or a memorandum that there were certain areas that they considered sensitive locations,

where they would not interfere and conduct ICE enforcement so that there would be a certain level of security in the court process or hospitals or churches or things like that.

Or schools too, right?

Yes.

And then the Trump administration day one was like, we're undoing all that.

It's a free for all.

Not only that, the court is an excellent place to detain non-citizens because they had to go through security screening.

So someone else has already done our job for us.

They got no weapons.

We can just, whoop, pick them up and get out of here.

Fish in a barrel, picking them up at the courthouse.

Okay.

And that was 100% the directive that Trump gave to ICE to rescind all this, all the protected or sensitive area policies of the Biden administration.

So now, and I'm seeing people getting and hearing of stories of people getting arrested when they show up to court.

I'm like, this is so fucking wrong that the court allowed this case to delay in violation of my client's speedy trial rights.

And now my client is going to show up for a fake trial simply to be picked up by ICE.

Okay.

So that was, that was the premise of why I asked for extraordinary relief.

But that answers your question, David.

Okay.

Thank you.

So then now we're at, now we're actually litigating pretrial motions, but there's a big thing that's changed.

I have a judge that cares about the rules of evidence and the rule of law.

Hot damn.

God damn it.

The one.

The one.

The one in my experience in that courthouse that is prepared to call balls and strikes according to the quaint little things that we call rules and laws.

The quaint little things.

Right.

And so now we're having this rogue judge, rogue judge, by the way, and I'm kind of like not talking about the fact that another judge denied my motion in lemonade previously.

And I'm, and I'm looking at it.

I'm responding to the DA's motions that are being filed.

I'm, I'm responding to them defensively because I want to frame it around.

This is what the DA wants to do.

And now judge Somerville, you have to look at what he's doing and say, this is so fucking not happening.

And he does.

And we're motion eliminated followed by the prosecutor is getting denied motion after motion after motion.

And it's like, I'm fucking like in nirvana because I, I, I, I, I'm practicing law in front of a judge in a court of law.

Are they, are they motions to admit evidence?

Is that what he's doing?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Motion to, uh, I look at my desk.

I printed everything so I could have the answers at my fingertips, but motion to admit business records.

And the business records, by the way, are the police report from Puerto Rico.

Motion to admit photocopies and screen captures.

Those are the photographs, the passport and the police report, things like that.

Oh, and the best one was this one.

Motion to admit defendant's judicial admission.

Because now this DA has a theory that no other prosecutors come up with, which is that in a criminal case,

you can use the pleadings of a lawyer and the argument that they make as an admission of the defendant to be admitted substantively at their jury trial.

Okay.

So he wanted to use my SJC pleading where I said, you need to stop this because of immigration enforcement to constitute an admission that my client is in fact, not Wilson Martel LeBron.

Is this still the white devil?

This is still the white, this is, this is still the white, this is, this is still A.J. Jack Lucy, whom you've, uh, the white, the A.J. Lucy.

It felt fitting.

Yeah.

I, again, I'll allow you to try your own inferences and conclusions.

And so, Judge, some people's like, are you fucking out of your mind?

Like, none of this is coming in.

So now, um, what I'm moving on.

Because normally, if you want to admit records, you need, like, some type of sworn affidavit from the custodian of records,

saying that these, you know, records are what they purport to be made under the usual course of business,

or whatever, here's the exception, or they, whatever they fall into.

And, I mean, for even foreign records, I'm sure there's even a foreign records, some type of exception to that, too.

But you have to follow the process.

You can't just take records, say they're from this, here you go.

You need some sort of sworn affidavit, at least.

You, you can, in front of every other judge that I litigated this case in front of in the Boston Municipal Court.

Oh, that's true.

But not at Somerville, who, um, uh, is the, is the dissenting opinion that the rules of evidence and the rule of law applies in that court.

And so, what I'm learning from Charlotte DeLolo, who's present, prepared to testify in one of the infinite variations of how this trial could have gone,

um, and she is, I have her sequestered out in the hallway, because she might testify.

And what I learned from her is that as the, um, motions are being denied during the recesses in the morning,

A.D. and Lucy is running off into the hallway and huddling up with the cops and saying,

Things are not going good. This is not going good. We got some problems, dude. We got to figure something out.

So, like, you know, he knows that he's just getting absolutely spanked.

Wait, who's he saying that to in the hallways?

Sergeant David Dumont from the state police, the, the complaining officer, Sergeant, uh, uh, something Thompson, uh, the, his partner,

an ICE agent, Brian Sullivan, who had been present at each and every one of the trial dates in this case.

All 10 of them.

Are they all witnesses in some way?

They're the...

Well, I mean, so, in the DA's imagination, um, Sullivan is a witness because he looked up the record of my client's passport in some database somewhere

and ran an APIS check about fingerprints, okay?

So, in his mind, yes, he's a fact witness, right?

Mm-hmm.

Okay.

And are they the same two officers that had the fake come in and talk to the DMV?

They are the, yes, those are the witnesses in the prosecution.

They're the kidnappers.

They are the alleged kidnappers, yes.

Two state troopers who kidnapped and then the one ICE agent who says he looked him up in some database from Puerto Rico.

Right, and the police officer learned, in exception to the hearsay rule, that Jack Lucey thinks applies.

He could testify to all the stuff that he checked on the computer.

Cops, cops, I mean, police officers are very able to do a lot of things.

Oh, yeah, no, no, no.

I almost said qualified, but they are able to do a lot of things.

There are some superpowers that play, to be sure.

So...

The white devil and lower demons are meeting in the hallway to figure out what happens when the judge is denying all of his...

I mean, they're DMV employees.

What do you expect?

Well, I want you to bookmark in your mind the image that I tried to create of A.D.O. Lucy running in a panic to speak to these guys.

Okay.

Opening statements happen.

Oh, no, I'm sorry.

Jury impalement.

Jury impalement is fine.

It's not perfect.

And I had some disagreement with Judge Sullivan about some jurors that were minority jurors, which are rare, despite their constituency in Suffolk County, being excluded such that only one black juror remained in my case.

And my client is black.

He's a black Hispanic now.

And so...

But the judge even fucking...

He even did the right thing there because after I raised a concern about striking black jurors, he designated my one black juror as the floor person in the jury so that he couldn't be alternated out.

Oh, you could do that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, he did it.

I think that judges have a lot of leeway in terms of selecting four persons and the procedures for selecting alternates.

And so he could, and I wasn't going to complain about it, and he, in fact, did.

And I'm like, okay, great.

Perfect.

So now we get into opening statements.

And, of course, the ADA Lucy, I'll continue to refer to him as, gives an opening statement which, like, directly violates several of the pretrial orders.

I'm like, honestly, you know?

So I'm, like, moving for a mistrial with prejudice because the DA is specifically subverting the judge's rulings and prejudicing my client.

And Judge Somerville says something along the lines of, at Sidebar, how many cases have you tried to ADA Lucy?

And he goes, this will be my second.

And he's like, okay.

So you're, he's like, I'm going to chalk it up to an experience, but I'm warning you, don't disobey my orders.

And I'm like, okay, I wish, like, as a new lawyer, I had judges that were nice like that.

It never happened.

I mean, like, anyways, I can remember crying as a new lawyer about how just fucking mean judges were to me as a new lawyer.

But anyways, opening statements are in Trooper Dumont, the complaining witness is on the witness stand.

Dumont, the direct examination is just plotting and inane and endless in the same way that new lawyers conduct direct examinations, right?

Of like a fucking simple case.

He's got Trooper Dumont in the stand for like, I don't know, an hour on direct examination.

So the judge then calls a recess.

It's now 4.05 in the afternoon.

The first witness is in the witness stand.

Court tends to break at 4.30, but he's like this, we've all had enough.

And he goes, I'm ordering this trial to resume tomorrow at 9.30, which by the way, I also love because getting into Boston in the morning is a total nightmare.

And so we're adjourning for the day.

We leave the courthouse.

Now, when I say we, it's me, Ryan, my law partner, and my boss, a.k.a. my wife, Shah, Shah Arkan.

And we, and Charlotte DeLello, who is our sequestered witness.

We leave the courthouse and my team, which is a lot quicker on the uptake than I am, notices some folks that are in like street clothes at the corner of the courthouse building.

And they kind of point to, or not, not in that direction to draw my attention to it.

I look over there and make eye contact with these individuals and they start running.

Now, Charlotte had told Wilson to leave out the back of the courthouse because of the fear of what was going to be happening.

Of ICE.

And so when they see us emerge without Wilson, they're like, oh.

And so they start running along the side of the building.

Now, I say this to you after the fact, as I piece together what happened.

It's all happening, and I'm sure you guys have witnessed events like this where like your brain is kind of in slow motion.

You're not fully processing what's happening.

But I'm gathering.

So who runs to the side of the building?

The plainclothes, ICE agents.

The two men in street clothes.

Street clothes, okay.

Who are wearing like hoodies, like graphic tees, like the kind of people you meet in the subway or see walking up into the street.

Like not, they don't look like undercover cops.

They look like people in the community, right?

But they're ICE agents.

They're running to the back of the courthouse.

I clear the corner and now have a view of what's happening, and I see a blacked out SUV and my client being escorted into the SUV.

Jesus.

And Charlotte is saying, and now we kind of are understanding what's happening.

Now, they're not wearing badges of office or anything that would outwardly suggest that they were ICE personnel or FBI or whoever was involved in the operation.

So I want you to picture that moment because we're looking at people in extraordinarily street clothes.

I don't know if that's a correct turn of phrase, but civilian clothing.

Civilian clothing, but not low-key undercover cop clothing, right?

I mean, like street clothing.

And they are holding on to my client and forcibly placing him into the back of a fully blacked out vehicle and whisking him away.

And so at that moment when you're seeing that, you're like, one of two things is happening.

Either my client is being kidnapped, which is possible, or he's being abducted by ICE.

I inferred that it was ICE, although there was, I mean to communicate to you that there was nothing in their outward appearance that suggested that they were law enforcement personnel.

Nothing at all in the way that lawyers like us who have some experience can identify those people like very fucking obviously, all right?

And so it very much had the trappings of a kidnapping.

But I assumed that it was ICE and Charlotte is asking, what do I do?

And I said, go up to them, ask them where they're taking him and who they are, and you cannot do anything else.

Because I am aware of the threats that have been levied by the administration that individuals who obstruct or interfere with, in that very broad sense of the word, federal enforcement actions will be prioritized or for country.

It's not clear what that is.

So don't stand in front of them and block them, right?

But ask them questions in a reasonable manner.

And so the video that we have, which I'm assuming you've seen, shows Charlotte Walkenley saying, where are you taking him, where are you taking him?

And there's no answer given.

The SUV pulls away.

We're now at the place where the SUV was, and there are ICE agents, who we now know to be ICE agents, dispersing and walking down the street.

And I said to them something along the lines of, is this a kidnapping?

You won't tell us who you are.

You won't tell us who you are.

And in the meantime, there are civilians that are on the street saying, like, you know, what's happening here?

What's happening here?

And then as they're piecing together what it is, they're yelling out, cowards!

To the people that are abducting my client.

So Ryan, who, again, is quicker on the uptake than I am, notices that one of the people that was involved in the abduction was, in fact, ICE agent Brian Sullivan.

So now that allows us to confirm, not through their words, but through circumstantial aspects of this happening, that this is, in fact, an ICE abduction.

So I fire off an email to ADA Lucy, because I'm pissed, and I'm standing there on my two thumbs on the iPhone.

ADA Lucy, I just observed a commotion outside of the courthouse.

My understanding is that ICE agents have captured my client.

They were used to identify themselves or indicate where they were taking him.

I am instructing you now to sequester ICE agent Sullivan, the two troopers that are involved in the case, and any other ICE person that was present,

and interview them in order to ascertain who was aware of an ICE plan to disappear my client in the middle of his ongoing jury trial.

And then I want you independently to write a statement of your own knowledge of this ICE plan, and when you became aware of it, and what you did to stop it, okay?

Well, he must have been in on it.

They had that meeting in the hallway.

So there are inferences that you might draw, Lauren Marie, about this, okay?

And so that was the inference that I drew, was that, in fact, this was a conspiracy that was going down to disappear my client and thereby end his constitutional jury trial.

Because they were losing.

One might draw that inference, that those flustered sorties to the huddled troopers and the ICE agents,

where the message was, this is not going well, there might have been some sort of consensus at that point.

But there was reasonable suspicion, if not probable cause, that that was the case in my mind, and I'm asking for documentation of what happened.

Okay.

I then go back to my house, and I write a 17-page motion asking the court to dismiss the matter with prejudice

because of the prosecution team conspiring to violate my client's right to his ongoing jury trial

and the indulgence of his selected jury of his peers, the jurors that he was content with, right?

Who are now forever going to be lost to him.

And then to convene a hearing where the court can determine the culpable actors and impose sanctions against them.

Which is what I – the whole point of me talking to you now is so that lawyers can look at this and do this, too.

So that the narrative is not the defensive narrative that lawyers like us have become accustomed to where we are apologizing for our clients being abducted by ICE,

but going on the offensive and pointing out the serious incursion upon the most basic constitutional protections that this type of disappearance entails.

Can we just talk – I mean, like, let's just – can we just pause for a second and talk about, like, what a big deal this is?

Just – I mean, I know, like, we're defense attorneys.

We're constitutional warriors.

We're in this all the time.

I mean, for us, like, it's so offensive to have the idea that someone's due process rights could be usurped by some other entity who wants to do their own thing.

To have an abduction – to have a trial and then have an abduction in the middle of the trial.

To have a district attorney conspire with ICE, assuming that's – if that's true or not, but it certainly seems that way.

Like, why should the average citizen care about this?

Like, we care about it.

This is our job, right?

But why – I mean, why is this a big deal to, like, the average citizen?

I mean, I think we all have burning answers to that question that we'd like to give.

But it is the erosion of constitutional principles as applied to the currently disfavored minority, okay?

And so when we countenance and tolerate the exceptions to constitutional protections for the disfavored class, all we're doing is we are setting ourselves up to become the next.

Victim of that constitutional incursion.

So there must be a bright red line where the American citizenry recognizes that the constitutional wall is crumbling asunder in the opprobrium that we have for undocumented immigrants in this country.

And we must be vigilant for that because the next disfavored minority might be you.

A threat to injustice – a threat to justice anywhere or is a threat to justice everywhere?

The MLK quote.

A lot smarter and more –

More articulate than we are.

It's due process for all or due process for none.

Correct.

If you're going to say that the people you don't like or you think did something bad aren't entitled to due process, then there's nothing to protect you tomorrow.

When they say you're a person now that we think is bad, you're not entitled to due process either.

Due process is everything.

We joked about it when we started, but due process really is the foundation of everything.

And in this situation, it's completely unnecessary, right?

Like, let's say, for example, you win your trial and your client ends up actually being Juan Baez or whoever the government is purporting him to be, then they can go ahead and get their administrative or, at best, judicial warrant and then, you know, proceed with removal proceedings, right?

Like, the outcome of your case is completely separate and irrelevant.

So to interfere with this right is so invasive and disgusting.

I mean, it's really, really egregious actions.

Well, I want to pull the camera back a little bit more and really underscore just how frightening this scenario is, because what's happening, what happened in this case, there's all the hallmarks of the dictatorships that we as a country rail against and identify ourselves at our core by being different from that, by being opposed to that.

The disappearance of the disappearance of individuals during a trial, filing charges, and engineering the circumstance where the person cannot defend themselves.

There's all the hallmarks of incommunicado detention and prosecution without due process of law or any form to litigate a person's innocence.

Well, even the way they detained him.

All the authoritarian countries in the world, and America took a big leap forward toward that authoritarian abyss by sanctioning this kind of conduct and then doubling down on it, as I'll describe to you in a few moments.

So the response among defense lawyers traditionally has been a defensive response when our client is not in court because ICE has grabbed them.

We are their apologists, and we say, geez, I'm sorry, judge, that my client is not here.

Please don't issue a warrant for his arrest.

He had no intention of being deported.

It wasn't willful.

We always say it wasn't a willful failure to appear.

It wasn't a willful.

Oh, shit, but maybe you want the warrant to bring him in from wherever they took him in this case.

Well, you don't need the warrant.

There's a writ of habeas corpus that can be filed to bring him back into the state custody if the feds decide to honor it, in which case, in this case, they, by the way, didn't.

But the important thing is we need to flip that narrative on its head and not apologize for our clients being disappeared by ICE.

We need to punish ICE for disappearing our clients and punish the state actors, the police, and the prosecutors who were complicit in it and aid in its occurrence by filing offensive litigation in the form of motions to dismiss and sanctions when appropriate.

And that's what we need to do as the line of defense against this sort of authoritarian action as lawyers because we are the only ones that have the power to sort of press these claims.

I was going to say, so what happens next?

You shut off the email to Lucifer.

I'm sure he's going to really respect that.

And then, like, what happens?

No response.

And then the next morning, I show up to court with my 17-page motion, which I did instead of preparing for this trial, which I think is now not going to happen.

And I walk in, and I'm standing outside the courtroom, and now the brass is descending upon me from the DA's office.

People that I don't know with that very stern, but, like, I'm going to cover my ass in some way look on their face that we're familiar with when the government is engaged in a cover-up.

Oh, don't forget their little American flag pin on the lapel.

Right, right, right.

I mean, I'm certain that that was theirs.

They're patriots.

Yeah, they are.

They are for sure.

And so they walk up to me and say, do you have a motion?

And I'm like, hi, my name is Murat.

Who are you?

You know?

And they said, oh, sorry about that.

You know, we were sort of brought up to speed about what happened here.

And, you know, we need to know if you're finding a motion.

And I said, let's put a pin in that question, and maybe you can answer my question first.

Why is it that when I brought this to your attention last night, I got fuck all in terms of a response from you in compliance with my request to find out the truth of what happened here?

And they said, well, we're not at liberty to provide answers to that question.

And I said, well, I'm not at liberty to provide you a copy of my motion then.

So I go into the courtroom, and when the judge comes on the bench, I file a copy of my motion with the DA's office, and I file a copy with the judge.

And the judge had been made aware by the court officers of what had happened, that the defendant had been taken by ICE.

And so now the judge takes a recess to read the pleading, and he comes back, and he starts reading from my pleading.

And you can tell that he's fucking so on board and so amped up and so pissed off about what happened.

And he's like, we're going to have – he was acceding to my request to have an evidentiary hearing on this.

Now, as this is happening, lawyers from the Suffolk County DA's office, Appeals Division, are coming in trying to end the hearing before it really starts, filing motions to stay the proceeding because there was no prosecutorial misconduct.

And the DA's office had no knowledge of an ICE plan to remove the defendant during the trial.

And I said, that's what we're going to find out by having this hearing.

So your motion – your 17-page motion was a motion to dismiss for prosecutorial misconduct?

Correct.

And to convene a sanctions hearing to identify the people involved and to met out punishment for the egregious prosecutorial misconduct that occurred in this case.

Does that mean you get to, in the sanctions hearing, put the white devil on the stand and ask him to talk about the conversations with the officers in the hallway and what he knew?

Right.

So at one point in the hearing, the judge asked me, what prosecutors do you intend to put on the witness stand?

And I said, all of them.

Because, like, I'm getting fucking dramatic in this hearing, okay?

Because now I had notified the powers that be about, you know, in the defense bar.

I spoke to Jen Klein from the Committee for Public Counseling Service in Massachusetts the night before, who was, like, the genius for public defenders in the intersection between immigration and criminal law.

Allison, do you know Jen Klein?

I just met her recently, yeah.

Okay, okay.

She seems incredible.

Yeah, she's an excellent lawyer and helpful.

And I notified her and I notified other lawyers of what was happening and, you know, made some overtures to the press.

And so now we're doing a fucking packed courtroom, okay?

So every news outlet is there, cameras, the whole nine yards.

Until now, it's the Murat Show.

And I'm going to excuse me what's happening.

I'm like, let's fucking go.

Murat, the do, the do, the drink.

The drip from your due process is dripping right now, man.

It is dripping.

Damn.

Exactly.

So now, the first thing that I do is I call Trevor DeMond, the first witness in the case, to testify as a witness.

And through questioning, I asked him to produce his cell phone and produce any communications between himself, ICE agent Sullivan, and the DA's office.

Yeah, you did.

Okay, so I'm like, read the text messages.

Now, the text messages, he's reading off of his phone, and they are revealing a number of interesting facts.

Although, these facts are coming out through tooth extraction, because he's like fucking terrified about everything that's happening.

Trooper DeMond.

Which is great, because he should be terrified about what's happening, because I'm going to get to the fucking truth about all of this.

And so, it is revealed that there was a text communication the night before the trial, where Sullivan, Dumont, Thompson, the two troopers, and the ICE agent, are in a group friend chat, created solely for the purpose of discussing this case.

Wait, was this a signal chat?

A signal?

No, this wasn't that level of sophistication.

This is a funny Apple iMessage chat.

It's just, it's amazing.

So now, through my questioning, I learned that there was a conversation on their friend chat the night before, where ICE agent Sullivan is saying, I'm working on an op plan to grab him.

And the record says, 4-3, April 3rd.

So, they're then, so an op plan to grab him, communicated to the two troopers who are the government's primary witnesses in the case.

Conspiracy right then and there, right?

To remove the defendant.

So, the ICE agent is telling the state troopers, I'm going to op to nab him.

Okay, April.

All right.

The new person committing the new abduction is telling the two troopers who abducted him before, I'm going to finish what you guys started.

Correct.

Okay, so now that is, and now they're talking about the date, because the record shows April 3rd, but the trial date is March 27th.

Okay, so, but whatever the date is, Sullivan is revealing that he has a plan to grab the defendant, you know, in court that day.

And then he says, in the messages, plan was grab him on the way out.

I emailed Jack this morning, but haven't heard back.

Jack who?

The white devil?

Lucifer.

The white devil.

So, now, shit's getting real, because now I have the prosecutor directly implicated by way of this, by way of this text message.

So, then, I continue to question him.

By the way, quick spoiler alert, there were, during the hearing, he is claiming that he doesn't know what an op plan is, and they thought that it was for April 3rd, not the real trial date, which is March 27th.

He is claiming, who is he, he is claiming, who is he, Josh?

I'm sorry, Sergeant DeMont.

Okay.

The trooper.

One of his messages is trying to gaslight me in terms of what they actually mean.

I don't know what an op plan is, and they're talking about April 3rd, so I had no reason to read it.

We don't know what war plans are.

I don't know.

Yeah, you're bringing some bells here, so, now, to create some implausible deniability about what he knew about what was going to be happening.

But then, through my questioning, it is revealed that there is a lunchtime meeting.

This is, as the trial is underway, proceeding.

And during that lunchtime meeting, Jack Lucey, his trial buddy, Matt Lieber, Sergeant Thompson from the State Police, Sergeant DeMont from the State Police, and Brian Sullivan are convening, and Sullivan states that he has a plan to remove the defendant, Martel LeBron, at the first opportunity today, including that if he leaves for lunch, he's going to grab him then.

Okay?

Now, the DA's office, this is important, because the DA's office is protesting that we don't need to have a hearing, because the DA's office has no knowledge of an ICE plan to remove the defendant during his trial.

These are the representations that are being made by general counsel for the Suffolk County District Attorney, and then ultimately, District Attorney Kevin Hayden himself.

The line is, our lawyers knew of no plan to remove the defendant during his ongoing jury trial.

Now, DeMont is on the list and confirming that there is a lunchtime meeting where that op plan was very much revealed.

Okay.

So then, through further questioning, it is revealed there are additional messages on this chain that DeMont has hidden when answering questions.

Okay?

I'm not going to go through the sequence of how it all comes up, but it is revealed that the following message was hidden by Troop of DeMont in the course of his testimony that he didn't know what an op plan was or that it involved removing the defendant.

The hidden message goes like this, I won't be able to go 4-3, that was the 12th day when I thought it was that date, but if Brian, Brian Sullivan, does his thing, it won't matter, LOL.

I die.

Okay, so that is.

And it's just like the emojis they use in this, I mean, this is just, how is this happening?

I don't know about any ICE plan, I don't know what an op is, it's all like this.

ICE mumbo jumbo that I don't understand.

But the hidden message is, if Brian does his thing, it won't matter, LOL.

Okay.

And then there's another message that is hidden that is revealed later, which is, at 5-13, the evening before the trial, Brian Sullivan sends in the group chat the following message, quote,

That was painless, Jack and Matt seem okay.

Now, Dumont never mentioned this message, Jack and Matt are the two trial prosecutors.

So, the hidden message is that there was a conversation with Brian Sullivan and the two DAs the night before the trial, and Matt and the two DAs seem okay.

You can interpret that how you will.

But what I infer from that was that there was, in fact, a phone call the night before the trial where Jack Lucy and Matt Lieber were informed of an ICE plane to remove the defendant mid-trial, and were good with it.

And hid it from the court, including when the judge ordered the trial to be recessed until the next day, hid it from the judge, the fact that no trial was going to be going forward because Wilson Martel LeBron was going to be abducted by ICE.

Is this, so not Jack, the other guy, Matt Lieber?

Yes.

Is he the DA?

I'm sorry.

He's a line prosecutor.

Oh, okay.

He's not one of the firm guys.

He's like a regular prosecutor and the trial buddy for Jack Lucy for his second trial.

Make sense?

Okay.

Like under the supervision of this really, you know, actual government prosecutor.

Okay, so now, again, I ask you to put in relief the representations of the DA's office that they had no knowledge of a plan to remove the defendant.

And by the way, it's so saccharine that it's going to make you want to fucking puke.

But the DA's office, when they're opposing this motion for sanctions and any suggestion that they're complicit, is representing,

Your Honor, we are as upset about this as the defendant is.

We are dismayed that ICE, unilaterally, decided to remove this defendant in the middle of this trial, and we're making every effort to get him back.

Okay?

So.

They should be disbarred.

So, now, he gets off the witness stand.

All right?

Meanwhile, the DA is objecting to every question that I'm asking.

Objection.

I'll fucking bet.

Yeah.

And so, like, I'm all, like, in my, like, showman mode.

And so, like, as the DA, as I'm getting to the heart of this stuff that I know, explaining to you, the DA is objecting.

And I stand up and I go, don't you want to hear the truth?

I love it.

Please tell me he takes the fifth.

So, that kind of shut him up.

But then the objections then start spiraling out again.

And the DA, and I'm like, and now, you know how it is when the DA is objecting.

The witness forgets what you asked and you're going to repeat the question again.

You're so, like, in the zone and full of gas that, like, you're on your next question and you don't remember how you phrased the last question.

So, now, it's interrupting your brother and I'm getting fucking pissed.

And so, the DA gets up to object again.

And I know you said this, but you said that there's some comedy aspects to this and I thought I'd share this with you.

He gets up to objecting again.

I go, sit down.

And he fucking does.

What a dream come true that moment is.

I have dreams that happens to me one day.

I mean, like, so many of those dreams came true because, like, I, you know, there's so much history here and, like, so much built up in me.

And I got my forum and I had the cameras, you know what I'm saying?

And all the defense bar and the ACLU and everybody's there, they have my back.

So, I feel this is my forum.

Okay?

So, I told that motherfucker to sit down and he did.

And it was amazing.

What a legal boner moment.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, then, right.

And that might have been responsible for the dew on the walls.

And so, I then have Trooper Thompson on the stand.

And now, Trooper Thompson, in his testimony, is also test-a-lying.

And he says, again...

Test-a-lying.

Right.

But he doesn't know anything.

He's agreeing that there are these messages about Sullivan having an ICE plan, but he doesn't know what that is.

And has no idea that ICE is going to remove the defendant in the middle of the trial.

Okay.

Now, further messages from this chain that I'm able to extract show that the morning of the trial, that there was discussion among the three men on the text, surprised that Wilson Martel LeBron had the ball to show up to court.

The messages are, from Dumont, LeBron is here, and Thompson responding, quote, unreal.

So, again, inferring that Trooper Thompson was, in fact, aware of an ICE plan, because in light of that ICE plan, it would be unreal that somebody would show up knowingly to face deportation, right?

Now, Trooper Thompson also is testifying that he had no knowledge that there were backup ICE agents that were present to assist in the kidnapping.

But I'm able to develop from him a text message that he received, which states from Sullivan, the ICE agent, if he leaves, give me a heads up, I'm working on backup.

Okay.

So now, Thompson said he doesn't know about backup, but now in the message, he's being told about backup.

And then he then, quote, recants his earlier testimony.

Okay.

But not before he spars with me in an effort to claim that he didn't know who the he was in the message.

If he leaves, give me a heads up, I'm working on backup.

His testimony on her oath, Trooper Thompson's, before he recanted, was that he didn't know that the he was Wilson Martel LeBron.

And if that is not testifying, I don't know what is.

All right.

So now...

What's the judge's demeanor?

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry you're trying to get through.

There's a lot to get through, but what's his demeanor during this hearing like?

The judge is just like, for serious lawyers, his demeanor is exactly what you want it to be.

All fucking business.

I want to know the truth.

And as the DAs are objecting, another, as you framed it, a lawyer boner moment was when he said, you're not to the DA.

You're not going to object your way out of the truth.

Looping in my don't-you-want-the-truth volume to the DA.

That should be framed.

Yeah.

It was just...

A little transcript page.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So then, the hearing is interrupted because it's the end of the day on Friday.

Now, Judge Somerville has acceded to my suggestion that Brian Sullivan is a necessary witness in this case

and has instructed the DA's office to get him to appear for further hearings on Monday about this case.

So this is now Friday the 28th.

We're moving into Monday the 31st, I guess.

And he says, and I want ICE agent Sullivan to know that if he doesn't show up, I'm going to issue a warrant for his arrest.

So, like, lawyer boner moment number three, the judge threatening to issue a warrant against an ICE agent.

Okay.

ICE agent Sullivan...

It's Monday.

ICE agent Sullivan doesn't show up.

The DA's are filing motions to quash as to the testimony of prosecutors from their office.

And the judge is like, denied, denied, denied.

And among the discovered disclosures, and, you know, I'm trying to say this as succinctly as possible,

and I told you this is a long story, but one of the disclosures stated the following, and this is important.

Pursuant to Rule 14C1E of the Massachusetts Rules of Co-op Seizure, the Commonwealth discloses that on 7.05 p.m., Friday, March 28th, 2025,

ADA Christopher Booten, he's one of the brass lawyers I was mentioning, and the part that I was going to hold back,

I don't want to hold back because I think that my secret belief is that Chris Booten is an unwilling soldier for the DA's office

and hates what's happening and wants to secretly help me to expose what's happening.

And it is my belief that Chris Booten forced the administration to include the following disclosure,

that he spoke with ICE agent Sullivan that Friday night to inform him of the court's order to be president on Monday, March 31st.

During this conversation, Sullivan claimed that during a meeting with ADA Lieber and ADA Lucy and the troopers at the lunch break,

Sullivan told them he was going to take the defendant into custody,

and as a defendant went outside the courthouse for lunch, Sullivan was going to grab him.

So this is, as the representations are still flowing from the DA's office, that they had no knowledge of an ICE plan to remove the defendant.

This is from an ADA himself saying this.

This is from ADA Rogue One, okay?

Right.

The one, my, I think my one secret supporter in the DA's office, my mole, all right, forced them to disclose this.

That's my opinion, all right?

I can't prove it, but that's what I think happened.

So now I have Trooper DeMont and Trooper and ICE agent Sullivan on record asserting that the DA is fully complicit in this ICE plan

and to hide the plan from the judge and the defendant, okay?

Now ADA Lucy gets on the witness stand.

I call him as a witness, and this is just like, you know, that's that moment, all right?

And so now I'm questioning ADA Lucy, and what ADA Lucy does is he concedes that

there was, in fact, a lunchtime meeting, but what he was told was that ICE was going to wait until the trial was over

and a verdict was rendered before they were going to remove the defendant.

So that is their story.

Their story is that, and it comes only from that one source, ADA Lucy, that ICE was mentioned, but that they were going to wait in an orderly fashion

until the trial reached its natural conclusion, a verdict was rendered, and only then affect the removal.

And thus, Trooper Sergeant DeMont lied under oath, according to ADA...

Because the person they're saying lied under oath is the person who said that they were going to grab him at lunchtime?

So the DA's office is saying that Sullivan, I'm sorry, Sergeant DeMont lied under oath when he claimed that ADA Lucy was informed of the ICE plan to remove him during the trial, during the trial.

But Lucy already claimed he knew nothing at all, and now is saying, oh, just kidding, they were going to get in after the, you know, criminal trial was all over.

So he got caught in his own lie.

I mean...

Also, wasn't he the one who said, it doesn't really matter? Like, ha ha, he's...

No, that was Trooper DeMont who said...

Okay, sorry.

The LOL?

The LOL was called DeMont, yes.

So again, to recap, at this point, DeMont has testified that there was a lunchtime meeting where the ADAs were apprised of the plan to remove the defendant as soon as he left the courthouse,

even if he goes outside to grab a bite to eat, okay?

Now we also have Agent Sullivan from ICE saying the same exact thing as Sergeant DeMont.

It is only ADA Lucy who was saying, that's not what Sullivan said.

In fact, Sullivan said, we're going to wait until the trial is over.

And the cross-examination continues, including the fact that, okay, and this agreement to wait until the trial is over meant that, you know,

he was going to leave for the day and then come back the next day and keep doing that until the trial is over.

But why is it that ICE backup had arrived on this day if we were going to wait for, you know, the trial to be over?

Because clearly this trial was nowhere near going to be over on that day.

So you have like the story from ADA Lucy self-destructing on the witness stand and some very contentious cross-examination,

the kind that you would imagine you would have.

And then the court takes a recess because it's been a long morning on that Monday.

We come back in from the recess and Judge Somerville comes out on the bench and he says,

I have some important information to share with you.

I've received correspondence from the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts,

United States Attorney Leah Foley,

indicating that the U.S. Attorney's Office has decided to remove a part of this case to the federal court.

And as a result of that, Judge Somerville felt that the feds were now depriving him of jurisdiction to resolve the merits of the case.

So after all of this, he can't make a ruling now?

So Judge, no.

So Judge Somerville doesn't have time to fully review the removal petition.

The removal petition was, in fact, quite narrow and it related solely to the summons for Sullivan to appear,

the ICE agent to appear, and the potential for a warrant for his arrest if he failed to appear.

Because they're saying the judge couldn't order the ICE agents to appear in court on Monday.

Yes.

And so that issue was being removed to federal court.

Oh, just that limited issue.

But Judge Somerville didn't have time to read it and felt that the walls were closing in and the feds were taking away jurisdiction.

Okay.

So he says, at this point, I am ordering that the testimony is closed, but I made my decision, he says.

Okay.

What was his decision?

So now, at that point, I no longer get to finish questioning Lucy, and I don't get to question all of the prosecutors they intended to question.

But he enters this ruling, and he finds that there is egregious governmental misconduct in the form of a conspiracy involving ICE agent Sullivan and the two state troopers who, on a peripheral basis, were aiding and abetting the plan to capture the defendant and remove him in the middle of trial and thereby obstruct justice.

So he makes that finding of egregious governmental misconduct.

He orders the complaint to be dismissed with prejudice as a result of that.

He, this is the one thing that I disagree with Judge Somerville on, he relents from making a finding of intentional complicity on the part of the prosecutors.

Again, returning to the refrain that he felt that the trial prosecutors were too young and inexperienced to handle the situation.

Didn't have the proper training to know what to do, and therefore, were not intentionally culpable.

But they still lied, though.

What does training and expression do with lying?

They lied.

I mean, I can kind of understand a new lawyer being like, oh, I don't do this ICE, they want to, whatever.

But you lied about it.

Right, right.

Okay.

You know, I mean, I have to say that I have a tremendous amount of respect for Judge Somerville.

Like I said, I mean, like, I would trade any other judge for a judge like him, or most any other judge.

But still, the prosecutors get away with it.

They get off the hook.

Although he does say that the district attorney's office has engaged in culpable misconduct in the sense that the administration failed to train their prosecutors how to handle matters ethically.

So he makes that finding, that there's not sufficient ethical training, and that blowed in part from ADA Lucy's concession that he never read the rules of professional conduct that apply, especially to prosecutors, to serve as ministers of justice in Massachusetts.

Shouldn't that be a mandatory minimum requirement?

I mean, are we kidding here?

I mean, one would assume that the requirement for being a prosecutor, and there were in my case, were to be familiar with the rules of conduct that govern prosecutors.

And he didn't.

And so the judge made at least that particular case.

Like, oops, I didn't turn over discovery.

I forgot to read that page.

Oh, oops, I've, you know, committed misconduct in these multiple grounds.

Oh, I forgot to check that out before I stepped foot into the courtroom and chose to prosecute a case.

I mean, that's absolutely absurd.

And I think that, you know, again, I want to emphasize that I do differ with Judge Somerville just on this one point,

because I feel that if you are sufficiently trained to prosecute and lock people up,

you are sufficiently trained and accountable for your unethical conduct that you do in the course of that profession.

And thus, I have no compassion for ADA Lucy or anybody else that lacked sufficient training,

because if you're trained enough to lock people up, you better be trained enough to do so ethically.

So I diverge from him on that point.

He then, so he orders the matter dismissed.

And then on the subject of sanctions, he says that he is going to hold ICE agent Sullivan in contempt of court for obstruction of justice.

And he then refers an obstruction of justice prosecution to the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office for purposes of investigation and prosecution.

Sorry, the same district attorney's office that was colluding with him to abduct your client.

Now, it doesn't even go to like the AGA.

I mean, so before we rail against that too much, I think that there are rules-based requirements that require that would be referred to the county prosecutor,

who then, one might assume, would conflict themselves out of an investigation which would uncover their own-

No, because they haven't read that page in the prosecutorial ethics book.

So that, you know, so that's correct.

So one would imagine would go to the AG's office.

And so the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office currently is charged with the task of investigating and prosecuting ICE agent Sullivan.

Following that ruling, which was, which sent shockwaves, obviously, through the courthouse in the community,

the United States Attorney for the District of Massachusetts fires off two letters.

Fires off letters to the judge and to District Attorney Kevin Hayden.

And the judge is informed in this letter, personally to him, that Judge Somerville had no legal basis whatsoever

to hold an ICE agent in contempt of court and warned him that any action to interfere with

the enforcement actions of a federal agent, quote, will not be tolerated.

And similarly, a letter to Kevin Hayden, the district attorney, the elected official for Suffolk County,

is told to immediately cease any investigation of ICE agent Sullivan

because any interference with a federal matter, quote, will not be tolerated.

You know, the Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution, right?

The, I mean, the kind of like federal feds Trump state.

They can't a judge order an ICE agent in the court?

A state judge order an ICE agent in the court?

And, I mean, that's...

So I think we still, we still believe that there are limits on the actions of federal officers.

And there are limits separately in the actions of federal officers in so much as those actions

interfere with the lawful function of the states, including the function of the state judiciary

to oversee the dignity and lack of criminality of its own proceedings

and to ensure that crimes committed against the people of the commonwealth, such as obstruction

of justice, are prosecuted under Massachusetts law.

And so the concept of supremacy immunity, which is what Leah Foley is referencing, the U.S. attorney,

is not an unlimited carte blanche to allow law enforcement officers that are assigned to the federal government

to act with impunity of state constitutional mandates and state criminal law.

And the restriction is this.

Federal actors may not be prosecuted for the actions that they take that are necessary and

proper to the execution of their function.

Which we know this wasn't.

And so I posed it to the panel.

Do we, as a group, or maybe as a society, consider it necessary and proper to engage in an action

that terminates an individual's ongoing jury trial and forces that person to be disappeared

from the jurisdiction of the court, never to be returned, and not have the right to have a

verdict rendered by the jury of his peers?

Is that necessary and proper?

Generally.

Is it necessary and proper in a case where, like this case,

Isaac and Sullivan, for years, was in possession of an administrative warrant, Allison,

for the removal of Juan Baez, who they believed to be, Wilson Martel LeBron,

and on nine prior court dates, never executed that warrant?

Is it necessary and proper to wait for that 10th court date and for a jury to be impaneled

and for the trial to be proceeding to then take that action?

And to me, this is not rhetorical.

The answer is no.

It is not necessary and proper.

And thus, Judge Somerville fully had the authority to hold Isaac and Sullivan in contempt,

and Kevin Hayden, the district attorney, and the people of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts

fully had the right to have Isaac and Sullivan prosecuted for obstruction of justice.

And yet, because of that, and let me not say, let me not pronounce causation here,

but let me state that within a week of those missives being sent to Judge Somerville and D.A. Hayden,

the attorney general for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which represents the trial court in all litigation,

filed an appearance in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts and accompanied that appearance with a notice that the state of Massachusetts does not oppose the dismissal of the contempt action by a federal judge,

which then left Judge Young in the federal court to order dismissal of the contempt finding of Judge Somerville based on the fact that there was no litigable controversy before the court.

Shame.

And so one might then infer that U.S. Attorney Leah Foley's message had its intended effect of crushing dissent and objection from the state against tyrannical actions by the federal government to disappear somebody in the middle of their trial.

And thus, we slip into authoritarianism, right?

And we free fall into it.

It's kind of, right?

This chilling effect by the federal government, by Foley, that we are going to go after anybody that messes with the federal government,

even if we step into the state courts and deprive people of their constitutional rights during a jury trial.

Okay.

Okay.

So one might, so the Attorney General doesn't explain their reasoning for agreeing or not objecting, leaving us to only speculate as to their decision to defer to the U.S. Attorney's demands.

It's kind of like duress, right?

All this is done under duress, right?

You might as well just hold a gun to someone's head and be like, withdraw the case or we're going to shoot you in the face.

I mean, that certainly is the sentiment.

I mean, and I think that, I mean, isn't that sort of like the playbook of dictators and authoritarians to not just control people's behavior through punishing them, but by making them too afraid to act?

And that is exactly what's happening here.

Exactly.

Because why not, why not let this get reviewed, right?

I mean, everybody wants an answer.

We, we as state practitioners want an answer, right?

I mean, like the, the administration is basically saying we want to challenge these certain state laws that might put limits on our ICE enforcement.

So why isn't this the test case?

Why, why put that chilling effect in place on a case where, you know, you didn't think you did anything wrong?

So, I mean, it's sort of interesting because it almost seems as though the federal government taking that stance recognizes that this was a fuck up and they stepped too far.

Because you're absolutely right.

If you've had this admin warrant for how many years and you've had how many opportunities you've known who this person is, why wait until that particular moment to execute it?

I mean, so, and this is, the letters sent by U.S. Attorney Foley, I think, are important in their phrasing because a lot of the language in those letters had been, had been used before in the context of the federal government stance toward lawyers that litigate or publicly oppose ICE's action, ICE's enforcement actions and its encroaching upon the community and people's rights.

So, you know, the same language of interfering with and not being tolerated as applied to lawyers was now levied against judges and elected officials on the state level.

And it fucking worked.

And so, this case was a watershed moment in my view because to me, it's a beacon, Judge Somerville was a beacon of guidance for other judges to look at in this circumstance and know what to do because now he's forged the route.

But, but, but the, but the Attorney General's Office in Massachusetts by, by sort of like dropping the floor up from underneath Judge Somerville has, has signaled perhaps to judges throughout the state that they are not going to have the backing of the Attorney General's Office if they are brave enough to defy this authoritarian regime.

And, and, and, and, and, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the problem is that the scare tactics are, are, are, are, are effective.

They are just so effective.

Lawyers are afraid.

Now, judges and prosecutors appear to be afraid.

But the thing is, we as lawyers, I think, are sort of like the only bulwark.

We are the only wall that can stand and, and, and, and, and.

Defenders of the Constitution.

And to defend, and to defend the Constitution.

And so, what I am now doing is calling upon all of us to say, fuck you, to the freedom, and to get in there and make litigation and stand up for the rule of law and to help with what happens.

Because if something happens to you, maybe that is what it's going to take for some change to be, to, to happen.

Because if you're too afraid to speak, it is all going to happen to you and everybody else.

Thank you for listening.

Yeah.

All right.

Thank you.

This is incredible.

Horrifying.

It's.

I know.

I'm sad.

I mean, I feel like your advocacy is incredible in this case, but I am.

Yeah.

I'm left discouraged.

But.

Yeah.

You're an amazing advocate, though.

That's, I mean.

Yeah.

You go down, go down swinging, right?

Like, I hope that, I hope this podcast is shared.

I don't, I don't think I've ever done one of these episodes where I wanted people to listen more than I want people to listen to this one.

I hope everyone shares it.

I hope everyone hears it.

I hope the average person who listens to this knows that if there's ever a time to speak out, you better wake up.

It's now, and I hope all the public defenders hear it, and they remember how important our job is now more than ever.

I'm so thankful for you and sharing your story and all the public defenders who are going to get up and go to court every day and say, this is bullshit.

Murat, you weren't a fan of the podcast.

I know you were referred to us by, actually, by Hunter Parnell from Public Defense List.

So you've been on his podcast, you referred to our podcast, and so we're going to close out the podcast now.

And so I'm going to ask you a question that we ask all our guests, and I feel like you've already answered it.

But tell us why you are a defense attorney, why you are a defender of the Constitution.

What made you become a defense attorney?

You started off as a prosecutor, or you went to law school, you became a prosecutor, and then you came to the good side, from the dark side.

So can you tell us why you ended up here, or what you believe in that made you end up here, whatever it is, however you want to answer it?

You know, I don't know that there's a simple answer that was formed in one particular moment in my career.

But what I can say is that my desire to become a prosecutor flowed from my interest in righting wrongs.

And so, you know, people that had been hurt by others, I wanted to be the person that could help those people, protect the community, keep people safe.

Over time, and as you gain experience as a prosecutor and are introduced to more serious matters, I think that to some extent, and I have to say it is only to some extent because a full realization of this cannot occur until you leave the fold of the DA's office.

But you begin to see the lack of clarity between what is right and wrong, between who is the good guy and the bad guy, between who is the champion of truth and who isn't.

And so, when you have these cases where the defendant today is the victim tomorrow, you know, and we're dealing with real people and real problems and real things where there is no sort of moral yes or no binary resolution to any given conflict, there is a story and a human story to be told in all of it.

And so, that outline of a realization began to sort of like congeal in me, like sort of like on the periphery.

And then when I went into private practice and observed sort of like from the outside, the way in which the system is contrived to process individuals into roles of right and wrong without necessarily a true instance of the truth of what happened.

And without really, with sort of an ends, justifies the means type of a mindset that you see just how important it is that there are lawyers who are willing to scrutinize everything that the government does and to ensure that the rule of law is meticulously followed and the constitution is not just obeyed, but liked and respected and revered

and defended above anything and everything else.

Because this is what makes our country democratic and freedom is the constitution.

And so, it is in the face of every hint of an encroachment that I find that motivation.

And it flows from my view of myself as a patriot because I love this country so much.

And I want my country to grow up in a, my daughter to grow up in a free country.

She's seven years old.

And I don't know what the world is going to look like for her tomorrow.

So nothing else matters.

And every instance in which I have an opportunity to oppose tyranny and oppression, I'm going to do it with the loudest voice possible.

Amen.

You know, when people ask me like how you defend self, like I don't even care like what my client did.

If you're going to, as long as the process is done correctly, like that, when we, if I go to trial and lose, it doesn't matter.

Was the problem, was it done properly?

Correct.

Was I allowed to put on my defense?

Were the, you know, did you overrule or make the right calls?

Did you call balls and strikes?

Did the DA disclose the right evidence?

Did they, it just, is it done properly?

That's all I care about.

What was that due process?

That's right.

That's all that matters.

That's all that matters.

Is it done properly?

That's it.

I will say, um, that you say that's all that matters, except for when you represent somebody who's actually innocent.

And then you're like, holy shit.

I don't care about the fucking process.

Don't let the Tesla fool you.

Murat sounds like a PD at heart.

Yeah.

You know, you're just, you're so close to your, you're almost there.

Almost there.

Well, I will say, well, I am, I am, uh, I have, uh, on, on, um, on the basis of special appointment,

taking matters in the federal court as a, uh, uh, CGA lawyer, uh, when they, when they needed help.

Uh, and I am now also a public defender, uh, that is assigned exclusively to murder, murder cases.

So I do do public defense work.

We'll make you an honorary public defender, Murat.

Your passion is inspiring.

I will claim you.

Yes, definitely.

Definitely a badass.

Definitely a badass.

Right.

For sure.

So, but thanks for being on the podcast today.

Thanks for taking time out of your busy life to, to let us know of the fights, the good fight that you're fighting.

And I know this is ongoing right now.

It's in the news.

Uh, there's updates.

Uh, there's, uh, there's updates.

There's like back and forth between the Sofa County DA and the, and the fully, uh, DOJ or special counsel, whatever you call, call them.

I feel like we could do one of those law and order commercials where it's like ripped straight from the headlines.

Yeah, but I will, I will say that, um, uh, out of every, out of every terrible thing that happens, you can always find something good.

And one of the good things that happened as a result of this case is the notoriety it received and the platform that has given me to provide a blueprint on how to respond to this type of situation and to show lawyers that it is okay to, to, to not be afraid and to do this stuff and to take the chance to do what's right.

And so many lawyers have said that they, uh, uh, learned about this and they are excited to fight too.

And let's blow it up some more because of you, because of what you guys are doing, this message now will reach a much, much broader audience, which is an incredibly important service that you guys are providing by amplifying this message, because it is only when we know that we can fight, that we are able to fight.

And you guys are getting that message across and it's fucking awesome.

Under his eye, Murat, under his eye.

We don't want to just drip.

We want to pour guys.

Let's pour it on.

Yeah, let's go.

All right, guys, I'm going to close it now.

Thanks for being on the podcast.

Lauren, of course, thank you.

And Allison, thank you for being on the podcast too.

Thanks, Murat.

It was so nice to meet you.

Great to meet you too.

Thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of Another Not Guilty.

Shout out to Daniel Mark, creator of A&G's original theme music, and our audio engineer, Chris Adams.

And guess what?

We have another Not Guilty story coming your way next week, because we public defenders fight injustice every single day.

in the American criminal system.