The Cost of Snitching 

Page 2 of 3

Shackled Victims
While a conviction is a laudable goal, Salt Lake public defender Patrick Corum says, “There has got to be some interim steps before we lock [victims] up because they are reluctant to testify.”

That’s a situation he was confronted with two years ago, when he walked into a 3rd District courtroom and encountered “one of the worst things I’ve seen in court.” Ashley Godnick, a mother of two, was in tears, in a jumpsuit, handcuffed at a counsel table, begging to be let out of jail, while her alleged abuser, then-28-year-old Lonial Milline, watched in court. The juxtaposition between sobbing victim and the observing perpetrator, Corum says, “struck me as very sad. She clearly didn’t want to testify, and they made the decision to lock her up.”

According to the probable-cause statement, Godnick told police on May 14, 2008, that Milline grabbed her by the hair, threw a glass at her, held a knife to her leg, which Godnick denies, took away her phone and punched her in the face. Six days later, Godnick described the incident in a letter to the judge as “a small argument” that “was exaggerated a little bit” by both her and the police. “I just want this behind us so we can move on,” she wrote.

Andruzzi saw it differently. She feared that Milline’s violence was escalating. If prosecutors give victims the right to decide whether a case proceeded or not, “isn’t that putting a target on her back? I prefer to take the target myself.”

Godnick says Andruzzi “pestered” her to testify on the phone at her job at a doctor’s office. Andruzzi felt Godnick needed to testify at the preliminary hearing, “given [her partner’s] history,” which included several previous domestic-violence-related charges, one involving Godnick.

Two officers showed up at Godnick’s work with a $100,000 arrest warrant at 9:30 a.m. on July 3, 2009. After four days of jail food, jump suits, cell bars and intimidation by fellow inmates, she was transported in shackles and handcuffs to a holding cell in court. Andruzzi came to see her and told her she would be released only after she testified or Milline pleaded guilty. Andruzzi meant it as a statement of circumstances, she says. Godnick saw it as a threat.

Milline’s lawyer, however, did not show up at court. The judge sent Godnick back to jail for two more days. Milline pleaded guilty, Godnick says, “so I didn’t have to be in jail.” He received a suspended year sentence and counseling.

Andruzzi met with the Utah Domestic Violence Coalition, who informed her of their concerns about victims being re-victimized by the county’s use of material-witness warrants. After that meeting, she pursued a different tack, issuing what she calls “9-to-5 warrants,” where an investigator picks up a witness in the morning and escorts them to court. Recent examples, according to defense attorneys, involve an officer escorting a mother from her child’s hospital bed to court and a warrant being sought for a juvenile alleged to be a sex-abuse victim. Other than Godnick, Andruzzi says she’s approved six warrants by her staff in the last two years, of which one resulted in a brief incarceration.

Sim Gill says Godnick’s incarceration sent “a chilling effect” to those who think of turning in abusive partners. “They call out for help in a moment of crisis […] and the prosecutor reaffirms to that abuse victim, ‘You have no power, I have all the power.’ ”

Godnick, meanwhile, called the police on Milline, in a separate domestic-violence incident on Oct. 23, 2009, which led to three misdemeanor charges being filed against him.

“Nobody’s here for me.”
Jail, Corum says, “is a bad place. It’s demeaning, traumatizing. That someone who is a victim of a crime is jailed seems to me horrendous.” The same might also be said for a seemingly good Samaritan whose one selfless act lands him behind bars.

Rich was released on Nov. 7, 2009, without work or a home to go to. He promised the authorities he would attend the preliminary hearing on Lingmann’s murder-solicitation charges, but did not turn up. Amann requested and was granted a material-witness warrant. On Dec. 6, cops found Rich sheltering from a viciously cold wind behind a Dumpster.

At first, he was grateful for warmth and food, even if it was Salt Lake County Jail, where he had been a snitch six months before. “I was supposed to be kept out of Salt Lake,” he said, during the first of four visits City Weekly paid to the jail during Rich’s last five months there.

He was told, he said, that he would testify Feb. 8, 2010, and then be released. But as the months dragged on with no end in sight to his incarceration, Rich became increasingly frustrated. “I’m putting two hands out there to help everybody, and there’s nobody here for me.”

Rich has “been a disciplinary problem every time he has been in—significantly more than average,” says Unified Police Department Lt. Mike DeNiro, Salt Lake County Jail spokesman. His five-month material-witness warrant stretch was no different. He accrued four verbal warnings and six written violations, the latter resulting not only in the loss of privileges, such as access to the library, but also in being moved from minimum security to medium, where he was in lock-down 23 hours a day with a cell mate.

Rich alleges a corrections officer had been harassing him, including assigning a strange inmate with long nails and hepatitis to his cell. “[The guards] are hanging me little by little,” he said. “I can’t take it anymore.”

By late March, Rich’s anguish was more than apparent. “I can’t believe they are doing this to me,” he said, his eyes rimmed black with exhaustion.

When he threatened, he said, to put his head through the cuff board used to secure inmates’ hands when dinner is passed into their cells, he was moved to administrative segregation in Supermax 3. Now Rich was in a locked-down cell alone and only allowed out for one two-hour period every 48 hours, when he could shower, go to a multi-purpose room and the recreation yard. Those two hours, except for showering, he was shackled and manacled.

“You earn your way there,” DeNiro says. “You land there because you’re being a problem.”

Without access to legal counsel, Rich said, “I can’t get my anger off my chest, I can’t vent nothing.” In court in March, prosecutors raised the subject of representation for Rich, but he said he never met his court-appointed counsel until the day he was released.

Rich told a police officer that he had had enough and would refuse to testify. Shortly after, Amann filed a motion to have Rich’s testimony put on record. He wrote that Rich was “essentially being punished for his positive action in bringing to light allegations against Dennis Lingmann. The unusual circumstances of this case are patently inequitable to Rich, who has sought nothing more than justice in coming forward.”

Those inequities left Rich feeling “abused. Send me to prison, whatever you want. It can’t be worse than this [jail],” he complained in April. “I’m human. I’ve got feelings, and I suffer, too.”

In mid-April, Parrish, Amann and Detective Jason Jones visited Rich in jail. When they questioned his negative attitude, his reply, he recalled, was succinct. “I do something good, look what happened to me.” The three men pressed Rich that they needed him to testify. If he faked amnesia, he said they told him they would prosecute him.

Eventually, he agreed. “I’m doing it for [Lingmann’s victims],” he said.