By David Oscar Markus

The Eleventh Circuit affirmed a life sentence and a
no-hearing suppression denial this week in United States v. Spearman, No.
24-10300, a dark-web child-exploitation case out of West Palm Beach (Judge
Cannon below). The panel was Rosenbaum, Branch, and Kidd. Judge Branch wrote
for the court. 

The court affirmed Judge Cannon’s decision not to hold a suppression hearing.   

You gotta read Judge Kidd’s dissent, which opens like this: “A two-hour suppression
hearing. That is all Spearman requested.” 

Judge Kidd then criticized criminal discovery and explained that in a civil
case you can serve interrogatories, requests for admission, and take
depositions. “Not so in the criminal context.” He continues: “if a government
agent’s knowledge is not reduced to writing, then a hearing often is the only
mechanism a criminal defendant can use to probe that person’s knowledge.”

The district court
faulted Spearman for not offering declarations or affidavits from people with
knowledge of a joint venture. Kidd’s response is the question that answers
itself: who, exactly, would those witnesses be? “The only ‘witnesses or
persons with knowledge’ of a joint venture between the U.S. government and the
foreign law enforcement agency would be the very people Spearman sought to
examine at a hearing: the government agents who worked on the case.” The
court could have compelled those agents to say more. It did not. And Spearman,
in Kidd’s words, was “powerless under our criminal justice system” to
do it himself.

“It places
those defendants in a classic catch-22 situation: To establish entitlement to a
hearing, a defendant must present evidence that only a hearing would
uncover.” And the close of that paragraph is the line I would put on the
board: “If Spearman had the information that he sought to uncover, then he
would not need a hearing…. But Spearman did not have this information that
only a hearing could uncover. So he gets no hearing.” 

Judge Kidd concludes: “A suppression hearing is
one of the few tools available to criminal defendants to probe the extent of
the government’s intrusion upon their ‘persons, houses, papers, and
effects.'” 

Good for Judge Kidd.