USA v. Paul Slough, et al, No. 10-3006 (D.C. Cir. 2011)
Annotate this CaseCriminal proceedings were conducted with five defendants, members of the Raven 23 team from Blackwater Worldwide ("Blackwater"), where Blackwater was hired by American security officials to evacuate a diplomat from a car bomb explosion and where there existed a dispute over who fired shots that killed and wounded Iraqi civilians. At issue was whether the district court properly dismissed an indictment against the five defendants on the ground that the evidence presented to the grand jury, and the decision to prosecute two of the defendants, was tainted by statements of defendants. The court held that the district court erred by treating evidence as single lumps and excluding them in their entirety when at the most, only some portion of the content was tainted; by failing to conduct a proper independent-source analysis as required by Kastigar v. United States and United States v. Rinaldi; by applying the wrong legal standard when it excluded a defendant's journal and his testimony simply because the news reports based on some of the immunized statements were "a cause" for his writing it; and to the extent that evidence tainted by the impact of one defendant's immunized statements may be found to have accounted for the indictment of that defendant, it did not follow that the indictment of any other defendant was tainted.
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