Can iPods Help Guarantee a Fair Trial?

By

Picture 4
iPod Classics.


Lawyers defending a pair of brothers accused with murdering for the mob want to give them iPods so they can review the evidence against them, ensuring they have adequate time and means to prepare a defence.

Fotios “Freddy” and Ty Geas, brothers and reputed mob enforcers, are accused in the 2003 murders of organized-crime boss Adolfo Bruno and henchman Gary D. Westerman.

Their lawyers say they have had only two hours per week over four months to pore over thousands of pages and hundreds of hours of audio recordings, all of it potential evidence offered by prosecutors for a trial at U.S. District Court in Manhattan beginning March 8.

Prosecutors countered that they will work with the Bureau of Prisons a concession, adding  that they purchased an iPod so Ty Geas can listen to audio recordings in his cell at the Manhattan Detention Center.

In an unrelated trial, a pair of the Colombo crime family’s top leaders were given iPods in late 2010 so that they could review government audio evidence behind bars. In this case, the 160-gigabyte Apple iPod Classics were paid for by the government as part of an experimental program to speed up preparation for their upcoming racketeering trials.

Thomas “Tommy Shots” Gioeli, acting boss of the Colombo family, and Joel “Joe Waverly” Cacace, the family’s consigliere, both got what were described as specially-outfitted iPods that only housed the audio recordings.

Many mafia trials involve mountains of recordings that wiseguys must review before their trials can begin. Currently, the recordings are burned onto CDs and defendants listen to them in dedicated rooms with computers or CD players.

Portable entertainment devices are hot contraband in prison. Just ask Lil’ Wayne who discovered the sound of silence in jail during his last month in prison, confined in “punitive segregation” spending 23 hours a day alone, after getting caught with an iPod.

Smuggled iPods also regularly make the headlines. In 2009, two guards in Washington, D.C. were arrested after allegedly smuggling in must-have items for prisoners — namely iPods, cell phones and chargers.

Source: New York Post, Mass Live

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