The trial of Juan Espinoza Martinez, a federal case, took place on Wednesday and it was all about the so-called “ephemeral” social media messages that were said by the prosecution to be the solicitation of death, whereas the defense pointed out that they were just neighborhood rumors.
Martinez, a carpenter from Chicago, aged 37 years, is charged with offering a $10,000 bounty on Snapchat for the killing of Gregory Bovino, a Border Patrol official who is notorious for leading tough immigration enforcement operations and he is also the one who has been closest to the Mexican border.
The trial is being heard in a context where the government’s story about threats to federal agents is being tested against the background of a time of very intense civil unrest and the area of Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood being the target of immigration crackdowns.
Snapchat Solicitation
The digital traces on Snapchat and the messages sent to a person who turned out to be a government informant are the main reasons for the prosecution to build its case.
The messages reportedly contained a photo of Bovino and the caption “10k if u take him down.” The government claims that these posts are nothing but a gang insider’s plot of murder-for-hire while the defense says the context was completely innocent. They argue that Martinez was merely informing and was expressing his irritation over the influx of federal agents in his neighborhood.
The reliability of the digital evidence has become even more difficult with the fact that the receiver, a construction business owner, had been getting money for supplying information to the federal agencies.
Informant Credibility
The witness of Adrian Jimenez, the informant who set off the alarm for Homeland Security by his messages, is the main source of the courtroom drama. During the cross-examination, the defense brought up Jimenez’s medical problems that have lasted for a long time, and his previous role as a paid source, wondering if he really saw the messages as a threat or if he was just after the money.
This doubt is further supported by the larger picture of “Operation Midway Blitz,” where almost half of the criminal cases linked to it have been dismissed because of the absence of evidence or government misconduct.
One such case that has caught attention is that of Judge Joan Lefkow who did not allow the testimony about Martinez’s alleged gang connections because of no evidence and the supposed target, Bovino, is not going to testify, as he did in previous cases, because he was found to have given false testimony in separate federal proceedings.
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