Joe Chagra’s testimony was the other major evidentiary element. Joe was an attorney who had represented both his brother Jimmy and Charles Harrelson — a position that placed him at the intersection of the conspiracy, if the prosecution’s theory was correct. His decision to plead guilty to conspiracy to commit murder and testify against the others was significant but carried the inherent credibility problem of cooperating witness testimony: he was testifying in exchange for a reduced sentence, which gave him a material incentive to provide testimony the prosecution found useful. Cross-examination of cooperating witnesses is a standard feature of criminal defense practice precisely because this incentive is real and because juries are capable of understanding it, but the effectiveness of that cross-examination varies enormously depending on the resources available to conduct it.
The defense’s resources, in Charles Harrelson’s case, were approximately seven thousand dollars. The prosecution’s resources were five to ten million dollars. This is a disproportion that is, in the specific context of this case, more extreme than the disparities that typically characterize federal prosecutions, though disparities of resource between government and defendant are the norm rather than the exception in the federal criminal justice system. The government has the FBI, the United States Attorney’s Office, and unlimited resources; the defendant has whatever he or she can afford to assemble.
Harrelson’s defense — the claim that he had been set up by Pete Kay, that he was in Dallas at the time of the killing — was not demonstrably false on the basis of the evidence introduced at trial, but it was also not supported by the kind of documentation that would have been required to establish it convincingly. The alibi witnesses, if any, were not sufficient to overcome the government’s circumstantial case. The jury that heard the evidence returned a guilty verdict.