Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [185]
This was widely seen as a blatant denial of my constitutional rights. According to my attorney, no one in the history of the United States had ever been refused a bail hearing. Not the notorious impostor and escape artist Frank Abagnale Jr. Not the serial killer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer. Not even the crazed stalker and would-be presidential assassin John Hinckley Jr.
As if that weren’t bad enough, my situation quickly got much worse. A defendant has the right to see the evidence the prosecution plans to use against him at trial. But the government lawyers continually gave reasons in court for not turning all the evidence over to my attorney. Most of the discovery was in electronic format—the files seized from my computers, floppy disks, and unencrypted backup tapes.
My lawyer then asked the judge to allow him to bring a laptop into the prison visiting area so he could review the electronic evidence with me. Again Judge Pfaelzer denied the request, adding, “We’re never in the world going to do that.” She apparently believed that just sitting in front of a computer, even under my attorney’s supervision, I could somehow cause great damage. (There was no wireless Internet in 1998, so it would have been impossible for me to pull an Internet connection out of thin air. But she simply didn’t know enough about how computers worked to have any idea whether I could connect to the outside world.) And besides, the prosecutors kept warning her that I would have access to the victim’s proprietary source code, or that I might write a computer virus that could somehow be released into the wild. As a result, we weren’t permitted to examine any of the electronic evidence against me that was key to the government’s case. When my attorney asked the judge to order the government to print out the files, the prosecutor said that there were far too many of them, so many that they would fill up the entire courtroom, and the judge refused to order the government to comply.
As word got around about the unfairness of my predicament, Eric Corley rallied a group of supporters who wrote articles on websites, spread the word in the online community, passed out fliers, and pasted bright yellow and black bumper stickers that said “Free Kevin” all over the place. Eric even sent some to me in custody.
On my thirty-fifth birthday, while I was being detained at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles, my supporters wanted to come visit me, but as a pretrial detainee, I was allowed visits only from my immediate family and legal counsel.
When I spoke to Eric on the phone, I told him I would go to the law library on the third floor of the detention center at exactly 1:30 p.m. Eric and members of the “Free Kevin” movement located the window and positioned themselves across the street. Then, when the guards weren’t looking, I pressed a “Free Kevin” bumper sticker against the window. Eric snapped a photo that ended up being used on the box cover of his documentary film about my case, Freedom Downtime.
Sometime later, the crowd started a demonstration across the street from the detention center itself. I looked out the window of another inmate’s room to see a parade on the street below: a chain of people holding up a big yellow and black “Free Kevin” banner and “Free Kevin” picket signs. Apparently this made the prison officials nervous. Shortly afterward, the entire prison was locked down for “security reasons.”
With the growing public awareness of my case, nearly two years after my attorney demanded that the government turn over discovery materials, Judge Pfaelzer finally relented and allowed me to use a laptop computer to review the evidence with my attorney. I never knew what made her change her mind. Maybe another judge had pointed out that she risked being reversed on appeal. Or perhaps someone had explained that without connecting the laptop to a modem and phone line, there was no way I could damage anything.
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