Texas Proud said:
So, who defines 'having knowledge of the actual commission of a felony'
I might suspect they are doing something criminal, but don't know for sure it is a crime... they might just have clients who don't want to be known.. blah blah blah.. wouldn't you have to prove this knowledge to win
Yes, the elements of the offense have to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. But, and this is especially true in conspiracy cases, sometime between arrest and trial date there is a moment where almost all of the defendants realize that it is time to sing early and sing often. It usually comes about the time that their defense attorney realizes his client is going to go down in flames and the best thing to do is to cooperate. Once they get rolling, they spill their guts and talk about everything. That's when we pull out all of our notes, surveillance reports and documents we seized in search warrants and start asking questions. Like, "...explain who Gladys Jones is and why you were using an apartment in her name to store drugs/money?" he will eventually testify that Gladys rented him a $800 a month apartment for $10,000 for three days use and talk about all the conversations he had with Gladys that illustrate that she knew he was committing a crime and used the apartment to help get that done. Then we testify about all the things that we saw, overheard or seized that corroborate what he is testifying to. The jury makes the final decision.
I don't know the specifics of Fastow's case, but if he did cooperate early, and his information was worthwhile, then he probably did get a significant reduction in sentence. We arrested about thirty bad guys one morning that were involved in a heroin conspiracy. We gave all of them "the offer" before we took them to jail. Most of them at that time, and this is typical, lied and denied any involvement in criminality. But the head of the organization was smart, he said he wanted to think about the offer overnight and would talk to us the next day. We had them all together briefly as we were loading them into vans to transport them from our office to the jail, he used that time to tell all of them "Nobody talks to the cops until you hear from me." The next morning he agreed to talk and testify against everyone in
his organization. He also lured his source of supply into the US so we could arrest him with a kilo of heroin, but his real value came in that he made it so there was no use in any of the defendants to try and fight their cases. We had a few trials of small fish that were stupid, but everybody else rolled over and went to sentencing. By singing early, and telling everyone else to keep quiet, he also maximized his usefulness, although in the process he screwed over all his lieutenants because none of them could outshine his knowledge and testimony. He turned a life sentence into 12 years. He continued to sing after being incarcerated, a fact that drove the US Marshals crazy because we had put him in their witness protection plan. Every time he called us to give us info he learned behind bars, they had to change his name and move him to yet another prison. He stopped calling when they told him they were going to stop protecting him if he called us again.
