John McTiernan is a film director known for Predator (1987), Die Hard (1988), and The Hunt for Red October (1990). His last completed film was Basic, which came out in 2003. A few years after this, McTiernan entered a lengthy legal battle wherein he was accused of lying to the FBI. In April of 2006, McTiernan was charged in federal court, after having made a false statement to an FBI investigator earlier that year.
There was evidence that he had hired a private investigator, Anthony Pellicano, to illegally wiretap two people around the year 2000. At first, McTiernan claimed that he had met Pellicano, but had only very limited interactions with him. Later, McTiernan was presented with a recording of himself hiring Pellicano. He claimed that he only wanted to wiretap Charles Roven, as he was the producer of the film that McTiernan was working on at the time, a sci-fi thriller called Rollerball. McTiernan said that he and Roven disagreed about what the film should be, so he hired Pellicano to see what he was up to and if he was saying things that McTiernan was not aware of to the studio executives.
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It is unclear as to if Roven was ever actually wiretapped, as there was no evidence that he was. The defense tried to use this in court, but the charge that McTiernan was given was having lied to the FBI, so whether or not Roven was actually wiretapped didn’t matter. The defense claimed that he only lied because he was falsely accused. McTiernan initially pleaded guilty as part of a plea bargain for lenient treatment, but the prosecutors felt that he was still being dishonest. They believed that he had not only wiretapped Roven, but another person. Interestingly, in July of 2006, a few months after this hearing, McTiernan’s ex-wife, did file a lawsuit claiming he had hired Pellicano to wiretap her while they were going through divorce negotiations, but this information was not used in this trial.
Because of the prosecutors’ belief that McTiernan had illegally wiretapped two people, they felt he deserved a prison sentence. At this point in the case, the Predator director decided to get new lawyers and tried to withdraw his initial guilty plea. He claimed that his previous lawyers did not tell him about the possibility of suppressing some of the prosecutor’s evidence. The evidence in question was a recording proving McTiernan was guilty of lying, but he felt that this recording was unlawfully made, and so it should not have been used.
Suppression of evidence in a court of law usually occurs when evidence is obtained illegally. However, this piece of evidence was made unlawfully by Pellicano and appears to have been acquired legally. The terms illegal and unlawful are often used interchangeably, however in this case it seemed as though ‘unlawful’ was purposely used in description of Pellicano’s creation of the recording because it was not necessarily illegal.
The Judge, Dale Fischer, denied that the evidence be suppressed, and McTiernan was then sentenced to four months in prison and a $100,000 fine. Judge Fischer said that she felt as though McTiernan thought he was above the law, and he seemed to show no remorse for his crimes. McTiernan was supposed to begin this sentence in January of 2008, but he decided to appeal the ruling and was able to remain out of prison on bail while the appeal was pending with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. McTiernan alleged that Judge Fischer made hostile comments to him when she wouldn’t allow him to suppress the evidence, and because of this, he said she should have excused herself from the case.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decided that the ruling was void and allowed for McTiernan to withdraw his initial guilty plea. However, now that the case was reopened, the prosecution was no longer confined by their previous plea agreement for leniency, so this time they stated that McTiernan had lied to FBI investigators on two occasions, as while as committing perjury in the previous court case. The perjury was that in the previous hearing, McTiernan said that his lawyer had not told him what to say, which he later admitted was a lie. All of this combined could have resulted in over five years of jail time, so McTiernan decided to make a new plea bargain, stating that he was guilty on all three counts.
At this point, Judge Fischer sentenced him to one year in prison, three years of probation following it, and a $100,000 fine. She said she added to the initial sentence because of the perjury, and because McTiernan still seemed unable to take responsibility for his actions. He again tried to appeal, but the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decided the ruling was valid. McTiernan then tried to take the case to the US Supreme Court, again saying that since Pellicano had made the recording unlawfully, that the evidence should not have been used. The Supreme Court would not hear his case. McTiernan’s continued attempts to get the case appealed as a result of a conviction seem to prove Judge Fischer’s theory that he thought he was above the law.
On April 3, 2013, McTiernan began his sentence at the Federal Prison Camp, Yankton in South Dakota, which is a minimum-security prison. The buildings used to be part of a college campus, but now holds about 800 prisoners, primarily white-collar offenders. While in prison he did a bit of writing, and his wife said he was very depressed. A Facebook group was made by people who supported him and felt that he should be released. Celebrities such as Samuel L. Jackson, Alec Baldwin, and Brad Bird all expressed support for him publicly as well. After 328 days in prison, McTiernan was released and served the rest of his sentence under house arrest.