PASADENA, Calif. (CN) — A longtime West Hollywood politician and Democratic donor asked a Ninth Circuit panel on Monday to throw out his conviction for causing the deaths of two Black men who died of drug overdoses in his apartment.
Ed Buck, 69, was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison after a jury found him guilty of providing lethal doses of methamphetamine to Gemmel Moore in 2017 and to Timothy Dean in 2019. Both died in “party-and-play” bouts where Buck would invite men, sometimes homeless or struggling with addiction, to his apartment to provide them with drugs and have sex with them.
Buck’s attorney Michael Denea tried to convince the three-judge panel that the trial judge should not have allowed the prosecution to pile up evidence for their charge that Buck ran a drug house, for which he was also convicted, which improperly swayed the jury to convict him in the deaths of the two men.
The cumulative witness testimony and the videos of the “party-and-play” events that the prosecution showed at trial to prove that drug-premises charge created undue prejudice regarding whether Buck actually provided methamphetamine to Moore and Dean, Denea told the panel
“Why is that an abuse of discretion?” Senior U.S. Circuit Judge Richard Paez, a Bill Clinton nominee, asked the attorney, noting that the judges can allow evidence of prior acts and the like to show a defendant’s modus operandi. “In your view, it’s just too much?”
“It’s overkill,” Denea said. “What’s being created in the jury’s mind is what they would believe to be irrebuttable evidence that this particular defendant caused the harm to Timothy Dean and Mr. Moore as a result of this constant piling on of evidence from each of these witnesses and each of the videotapes […] with regard to his being an evil person.”
Chelsea Norell, an attorney for with the U.S. Justice Department, told the panel that the judge only admitted a small sample of the videos because it was direct evidence of the drug-premises charge.
The videos were also properly admitted during the trial because they showed a “ritualistic” modus operandi whereby Buck would undress his victims, direct them to smoke or inject methamphetamine, and push them beyond their limits to take more drugs than they could possible consume, Norell said.
“That was circumstantial evidence that he provided the fatal doses to Timothy Dean and Gemmel Moore,” the attorney told the panel.
The excerpts shown at trial, she said, were just a tiny fraction of the thousands of “party-and-play” videos that Buck had on his computer, she said.
The panel was very interested in the government’s explanation of the initial discovery of drugs and paraphernalia at Buck’s apartment when law enforcement showed up in 2017 in response to a medical emergency on the day Moore died. One officer spotted the drugs through the cracks of the slightly open drawers of a large, rolling toolbox in the living room.
This, Buck argues, amounted to a warrantless search in violation of his Fourth Amendment rights.
However, Norell told the panel that the same deputy also saw drugs in Buck’s kitchen, which wasn’t challenged at a suppression hearing where he sought to exclude the evidence of the drugs found in the toolbox, making any error by the judge harmless. She also said other witnesses testified about the drugs Buck kept in the toolbox.
U.S. Circuit Judge Jacqueline Nguyen and Senior U.S. Circuit Judge Andrew Hurwitz, both Barack Obama appointees, joined Paez on the panel.
Born in Ohio, Buck has said that he made enough money from “several business ventures,” to retire in his 30s.
He moved to West Hollywood in 1991 and lived in the same drab three-bedroom rent-controlled apartment for the next 30 years. He was a fixture in West Hollywood politics, often giving public comment at the City Council meetings, and running unsuccessfully for the part-time council in 2007. He is credited with helping to convince the council to ban the sale of fur in West Hollywood, making it the first city in the country to do so.
He donated more than half a million dollars to various Democratic politicians including Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Gavin Newsom, as well as other candidates and political action committees between 2008 and 2017.
Buck has said that in his mid-40s, he was prescribed amphetamine to treat his narcolepsy, which eventually grew into a methamphetamine addiction.
During the two-week trial, a chorus of victims testified about their experiences with Buck who, according to prosecutors, “treated them like lab rats in his twisted experiments.” Buck cultivated relationships with numerous Black men, some of whom were prostitutes, others drug addicts, others poor — at times all three. They were enticed into Buck’s orbit by the promise of money, shelter and drugs.