Whether an in-custody criminal informant who has repeatedly benefited monetarily and received lesser sentences from previous cooperation with the government and reasonably expected to receive additional benefits for further cooperation is a government agent for the purposes of Massiah and its progeny

QUESTIONS PRESENTED | David Nagle was a long-time, paid government informant. In 1981, he claimed to have extracted a jailhouse confession from James Rodwell, who was subsequently indicted for the unsolved murder of a police captain’s son. Nagle’s testimony regarding this purported confession was critical to Rodwell’s 1981 conviction for first-degree murder. James Rodwell has maintained his innocence through this case’s lengthy history. In the course of years of litigation, including an extensive evidentiary hearing decades after the conviction, this case has produced findings that Nagle was dishonest in his testimony, that he was a registered informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) who engaged in multiple informant agreements in multiple cases : from which he benefitted extensively, and that he had an entrepreneurial history of seeking favor with law enforcement in exchange for leniency. Nevertheless, in this particular case Mr. Rodwell was not able to establish evidence of an agency relationship between Nagle and the government sufficient to satisfy Massachusetts law. The questions presented are: | 1. Whether an in-custody criminal informant who has repeatedly benefited | monetarily and received lesser sentences from previous cooperation with the | government and reasonably expected to receive additional benefits for further cooperation is a government agent for the purposes of Massiah and its progeny; 2. Whether the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s rulings that defendants must affirmatively prove the existence of an articulated agreement containing a specific promise of a benefit to a jailhouse informant by the government is incorrect as a matter of law and inconsistent with established federal precedents because it : : precludes a finding of an implicit agreement whereby an experienced jailhouse informant who has cooperated regularly in the past can reasonably and accurately expect to be compensated for future cooperation thus establishing an agency relationship that implicates the Sixth Amendment rights of a defendant. . 3 |