Aaron Strong, a former police officer in New Castle, Indiana, was convicted by a jury of witness tampering and deprivation of rights under color of law. The charges stemmed from an August 2019 incident where Strong struck a compliant arrestee with a baton. Following the incident, the New Castle Police Department referred the matter to the Indiana State Police for investigation. During a voluntary interview with Detective Andrew Wandersee, Strong lied about the number of times he struck the suspect and the location of the blows. The government presented evidence that federal authorities routinely collaborate with state police on excessive force investigations and that the FBI had assigned an agent to investigate Strong's conduct. Strong moved for acquittal, arguing there was no evidence he knew the state investigator would share his statements with federal officials. The district court denied the motion, and Strong appealed, challenging only the sufficiency of the evidence regarding the witness tampering charge.
The court analyzed the sufficiency of the evidence required to sustain a conviction under 18 U.S.C. § 1512(b)(3). To prove this offense, the government must show that the defendant engaged in misleading conduct with the intent to hinder communication to a federal law enforcement officer regarding a possible federal offense. The critical legal standard is whether there was a 'reasonable likelihood' of federal involvement, meaning the possibility was 'more than remote, outlandish, or simply hypothetical.' The court rejected Strong's argument that he needed to have subjective knowledge of the federal investigation. Instead, the court applied an objective standard, looking at whether a reasonable jury could find that federal involvement was likely. The court distinguished this case from United States v. Snyder, where federal involvement was deemed unlikely because convenience store robberies are rarely prosecuted federally. Here, the court relied on United States v. Sheffler, a recent Seventh Circuit decision holding that evidence of routine federal-state collaboration on excessive force cases is sufficient to satisfy the reasonable likelihood standard. The court noted that Detective Wandersee testified that while he had worked with the FBI on only two of over forty excessive force investigations, it was routine for state police to share information with federal officers. Furthermore, Special Agent Kempf testified that excessive force investigations consumed significant time and that federal and state officials regularly collaborated. Because the government presented evidence that federal investigations of such conduct were common and that a federal investigation had in fact materialized, the court found the evidence sufficient for a reasonable jury to conclude that Strong intended to hinder a federal investigation.
The decision affirms Strong's 151-month sentence for witness tampering and 120-month sentence for deprivation of rights. It reinforces the principle that lying to state investigators about excessive force can trigger federal liability when such conduct is a common target of federal civil rights prosecutions. The ruling clarifies that the 'reasonable likelihood' standard is a relatively low bar, satisfied by evidence of routine inter-agency cooperation and the actual occurrence of a federal investigation, even if the specific state investigator had limited prior experience with federal partners.
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