Tightening the Screws

The Justice Department’s latest filing in the Zehm case offers a new look inside the pressure cooker that likely awaits the Spokane Police Department and its attorneys at trial later this year.

The 75-page filing by Assistant U.S. Attorney Tim Durkin featured in Thursday’s front page Spokesman-Review article, “Feds: Testimony Altered,” is now available here.

Tom Clouse’s story focuses on new assertions being made by the Justice Department that top Spokane police officials, including Assistant Chief Jim Nicks, are now expected to provide trial testimony that will directly dispute the Department’s early accounts of the altercation that lead to the death of Otto Zehm, a 36-year-old man suffering from schizophrenia. Clouse’s story highlights sections of the new filing that indicate Spokane police investigators set out to alter and even discredit eye witness testimony that contradicted the self-defense claims of defendant Karl Thompson, Jr., the Spokane police officer who first encountered Zehm in a north side convenience store the night of March 18, 2006.

Durkin’s brief describes Thompson’s encounter with Zehm as a “violent attack” by the police officer against the affable janitor whose last recorded words were, “I only wanted a Snickers.”

But the main purpose of his brief is to persuade Federal District Court Judge Fred Van Sickle to resolve apparent conflicts of interest in the Thompson’s defense team, led by attorney Carl Oreskovich.

In short, what Durkin is arguing is that it is already clear that at least some Spokane police officers, including Assistant Chief Nicks, are positioned to provide testimony that will either dispute or conflict with Officer Thompson’s account of the encounter with Zehm. Ironically, Durkin is contending that this is not fair to Thompson, because, he writes, both the City Attorney’s office and Thompson’s counsel, Oreskovich, have not only been cooperating to defend Thompson but are working together to defend other city officials involved and perhaps implicated in the case.
Wrote Durkin: “In light of what the United States believes to be the obvious and apparent conflicts, as well as other potential conflicts in defense counsel’s legal relationships with the City and all of its ‘employees’, that could materially affect defendant’s [Thompson's] 6th Amendment right to effective and ‘conflict free’ representation at trial, and since defense counsel has refused to address these apparent conflicts pretrial, the United States respectfully requets this Court to perfor an in-depth review of defense counse’s and his firm’s various legal roles and relationships…”