Seventh Circuit Criminal Case of the Week: Of Hearsay and Bootstraps
The court staked out no new legal ground in its opinions last week, so I’ll just briefly describe a case that nicely illustrates a classic problem in evidence law. Based on information provided by a confidential informant, Milwaukee police stopped a Ford Excursion on suspicion of drug activity. Inside were Marc Cannon (the driver), David Harris (Cannon’s cousin), $8,900 in cash (found in Harris’s pockets), and a brick of cocaine. The cash pointed to Harris’s likely involvement in the drug-dealing operation, but, without more, the evidence still seems short of beyond a reasonable doubt.
At trial, the government thus relied heavily on the testimony of the confidential informant, Anderson, who recounted a series of interactions with Cannon and Harris. Perhaps most damaging to Harris was testimony that Cannon told Anderson that his cousin was coming to Milwaukee with a signficant amount of cocaine. This testimony, of course, was hearsay: Cannon himself did not testify, and Harris had no ability to cross-examine him. In order to overcome the hearsay problem, the government relied on the exception for statements by co-conspirators. But this required the government to prove that Cannon and Harris were indeed co-conspirators, and the strongest evidence of that were the very statements whose admissibility was at issue. The government’s argument thus had something of a boot-strapping character.