Andrew Childers' Prosecution of Dr. Peter Chen so far

This is not legal advice

Dr. Peter Chen’s work is the most cited piece on the RAID wikipedia page

All opinions are my own. This is not intended to provide legal advice. I am not a lawyer. Readers seeking legal counsel should consult with their own attorney.

In Alan Turing’s day, gross indecency (today known as being a gay man) carried the same connotations in the public mind as sexual child abuse,¹ and this conflation was so strong that studies of gay men showed that many of them, if not most, very much feared blackmail [0]. Turing was convicted in 1952, only to be pardoned 60 years later after his apparent suicide when his life was left in ruins from the charges he faced two years earlier. Today the Turing Award, given out by the Association for Computing Machinery, is known as the Nobel Prize of computer science. Dr. Peter Chen is a Hall of Famer for his influential work on computer security and serves as a Fellow in that organization.

The award was named after Turing in no small part due to his magnificent achievements during the Second World War when he created the only computer capable of cracking the Nazi’s radio communication code. His work, even by conservative estimates, saved millions of lives and shortened the war by multiple years. The world can only imagine how much quicker the digital revolution would have taken place had Alan Turing been able to live a full life.

For those who don’t know, one of Dr. Peter Chen’s earliest works is arguably the most consequential improvement made to the RAID data storage system; this had a huge impact in setting the standard for harddrive storage going forward. And he did this before most software engineers on the market today were even born. Right now many variations of RAID are implemented in every datacenter in the world, for almost every server. Trillions of devices rely on it and you are most certainly reading this article from a server using improvements Dr. Peter Chen published in 1994 which led to RAID becoming such a popular data storage solution.

Much like the computing machinery of Turing’s time, the computing devices we rely on everyday are shrouded in secrecy. As the volume of the military-industrial complex and the Intelligence Community’s classified material grows exponentially in a world that becomes increasingly difficult to navigate without digital devices, it is at the intersection of consumer computing, security, and government where many of these secrets lie — I’ll unpack this in later articles. The problem has become so alarming that Biden’s Director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, wrote this January in her letter to Senator Wyden and Senator Moran that such secrets not only harm national security, but also contribute to a further erosion of trust in our democratic institutions [1].

Though the social fallout of Turing and Dr. Chen are no doubt very similar, it cannot be understated that Turing’s accusations were strictly homophobic towards gay men while the laws that Dr. Chen is being charged under very properly criminalize vile behavior. The actual numbers around child molestation are difficult to grasp but what we do know is that there are people in every county whose full-time jobs are dedicated to identifying abused children and their abusers, working together with police and prosecutors. About 9 times out of 10, the alleged abuser is someone the victim knows [2], and in November 2020 the mother of the victim in this case filed a police report naming Peter Chen. A few months later, he was arraigned on January 27th, 2021 [3], and the case was handed over to the 22nd Circuit Court of Washtenaw County.

Before he knew he himself was going to be charged with anything, Professor Chen once said during a UMich Computer Science and Engineering town hall that the worse the allegations are, the harder it is to remember that all people deserve due process [4]. In the eyes of the law, people in the United States have a very important and necessary right to be deemed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The US legal system, while it is far from perfect, works much better than most of the world’s because of this burden of proof and assumption of innocence. A smaller burden of proof is known as preponderance; if the evidence points to a greater than 50% likelihood that the claim is true, then the burden is met. In contrast to both of these, probable cause means that there is some evidence the accused might be guilty. The evidence could be quite flimsy but just so long as it is not directly contradicted by reality and said by someone who seems credible, even if it has a less than 1% chance of being right, the courts, prosecutors, and police can bring someone up on charges with probable cause anywhere in the US and this is what Dr. Peter Chen stands charged on.

For all criminal charges, if the person isn’t anonymous they can be considered a credible witness. Child victims can testify against the accused. It seems that given the victim verifies what her mother reported back in 2020, the burden of proof would be met for probable cause with the victim acting as witness to the crime. This by itself allows the prosecutor to take the case to court but there may have been more corroborating evidence and there usually is.

Prosecutors are the individuals who get to determine which cases are prosecuted according to the US Supreme Court²; they “control the door to the courtroom [5].”³ The burden of proof for prosecutors to take someone to court is probable cause. The plaintiff represented by the criminal prosecutor is the State or some other government agency often denoted as “The People” e.g. “The People v. Peter Chen.” In criminal court, it is important not to conflate the plaintiff (the prosecutor) and the victim.⁴

If you are a Michigander, you may have heard of Criminal Sexual Conduct (CSC) cases. Dr. Peter Chen’s case is one of these in the first degree and sometimes referred to as “CSC 1.” Prosecutors in Michigan are more likely to take on CSC cases because they are allowed in the courtroom to state: all that is needed to convict beyond a reasonable doubt is a single witness’s testimony and also the jury is instructed this before going into deliberation. The exact jury instructions are here (M Crim JI 20.25). Some 15 other states have similar instructions of varying strength and in other states, this statement could constitute an unduly influencing of the jury because it is offering an interpretation of the law instead of allowing the jury to make up their minds without influence and could be objected to in the courtroom on grounds that it is possibly misstating the law [6].

The differing laws around this are not unrelated to what US Supreme Court Judge Sotomayor brought up in one of her lone dissenting opinions which she stated “the empirical evidence demonstrates that eyewitness misidentification is the single greatest cause of wrongful convictions in this country [7].” Something worth noting here in that opinion is that “misidentification” is a politically correct way of addressing — under one label — both people who genuinely are mistaken and those who are lying.

The law firm representing Professor Chen is the same one that represented Larry Nassar who did indeed settle against his many charges, probably at the recommendation of his lawyers. It would appear Professor Chen is at least in a different position given that he has not entered a plea bargain. During a pretrial hearing, Andrew Childers, the prosecutor, stated there would be no resolution, and recommended that the case proceed to trial [8], a strong indication the defense is going to defend Professor Chen’s innocence in a court trial. And this is very interesting because 94% of state felony arrests with convictions enter a plea bargain and never have a trial in the US [9].

Also interesting to note, is that Professor Chen had his bail arrangements modified such that he can do whatever interstate travel he pleases, an indication that the judge is satisfied with Professor Chen’s ability to cooperate with any ongoing investigation and also his not being a flight risk.

Correction: May 8th, 2022 The earlier version of this article stated that the mother filed the police report in November 2019. I got this information from [3]. The redacted public court documents I received from this publication’s legal team suggest otherwise with the mother saying that she filed the Monday before Thanksgiving of 2020 which is November 23rd, 2020.

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Last week my publication’s legal team began reviewing the case files to make sure they are suitable for release and to ensure my perspective does not get tainted by information that is not suppose to be in the public domain, I have not reviewed them and will only be looking at the new documents they present me that have proper redactions assured. Pending completion of the legal review, the new documents whose redaction will be assured by this publication’s legal team will be discussed next week. There are some 200 pages in this case file and this has cost thousands of dollars. I am exploring ways to gather funding, please comment with suggestions if you have them. Everything has been financed out-of-pocket so far.

Please send any reporting tips to profchennews@protonmail.com. I set it up with as many security settings as I could manage and the public key is attached below.

1. Homosexuality was so often conflated with pedophilia as late as 1967 such that deceased Chief of the Morality Police of Copenhagen Jens Jersild said it is “difficult to define” their difference [10].

2. In Bordenkircher v. Hayes, “so long as the prosecutor has probable cause to believe that the accused committed an offense defined by statute, the decision whether or not to prosecute, and what charge to file or bring before a grand jury, generally rests entirely in his discretion [12].”

3. “There are no legislative or judicial guidelines about charging, and a decision not to file charges ordinarily is immune from review” according to a 2004 study on prosecuting sexual assault [11].

4. The prosecutor may choose to move forward with the case even if the victim is unwilling to testify. A witness may be held in contempt of the court for refusal to appear or answer questions (MCL 767.5), punishable by fines or imprisonment (MCL 600.1715), and the decision to drop charges must come from the prosecutor.

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[0] Hodges, A., 1983. Alan Turing : the enigma. New York: Simon And Schuster, p.461.

[1] Haines, A., Director of National Intelligence. The Office of Senator Ron Wyden, Jan 2022. Letter to Senate. p.1.

[2] Howard, S., 2000. Sexual Assault of Young Children as Reported to Law Enforcement. . US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics. “Victim-offender relationships in sexual assault”.

[3] Bruckner, M., 2021. University of Michigan professor charged with first degree sexual misconduct, placed on leave. [online] WDIV. [Accessed 1 May 2022].

[4] https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~weimerw/dei/2020-04-16-townhall.html

[5] Neubauer, D. 1988. America’ s Courts and the Criminal Justice System. Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole Publishing Company, p.200.

[6] Buller, T., 2017. Fighting Rape Culture With Noncorroboration Instructions. Tulsa Law Review, 53(1), Appendix A, B.

[7] Perry v. New Hampshire

[8] Dougall, J. 2021. Trial for former UMich CSE Professor Peter Chen to begin Jan. 31. [online] The Michigan Daily. [Accessed 1 May 2022].‌

[9] Yoffe, E. 2017. Innocence Is Irrelevant in the Age of the Plea Bargain. [online] The Atlantic. [Accessed 1 May 2022].

[10] Jersild, J., 1967. The Normal Homosexual Male versus the Boy Molester. Cph: Nyt Nordisk Forlag, backcover.

[11] Spohn, C & Holleran, D 2001, ‘Prosecuting Sexual Assault: A Comparison of Charging Decisions in Sexual Assault Cases Involving Strangers, Acquaintances, and Intimate Partners’, Justice Quarterly, vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 651–688.

[12] Bordenkircher v. Hayes