Posts Tagged ‘police brutality’


Forensics challenge Calif. police’s shooting point of view

Jordan — June 14, 2012 @ 3:48 PM — Comments (0)

Why was suspect handcuffed after being fatally shot 7 times?

(Pasadena, CA) Dr. Cyril Wecht has worked on the forensics for the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. His resume of countless other forensics studies have turned him into a consistently inquired upon professional.

He does not understand why 20-year-old Kendrec McDade was shot, as it appears he was unarmed while running from the scene of a robbery. But what Dr. Wecht and the McDade family’s attorney, Caree Harper, find most strange is that police handcuffed him after he received 7 fatal shots to major arteries.

Dr. Wecht cannot go so far as to say whether or not McDade was shot in the back, but he finds the image of cruelty painted by the police’s action of handcuffing a dying person enough to suggest an overuse of police force.

Police chief Phillip Sanchez claims the victim of McDade’s robbery told police he had a gun. Even though it is still debated as to whether or not he in fact did have a gun, this tip alerted the police to pursue him with extreme caution.

The great confusion over this case has resulted in four different investigations into what happened that night. The police reports claim to have photographs apparently showing McDade being a lookout for a 17-year-old friend who robbed the victim. They will not release these photographs or those of the scene yet.

Since the cops who shot McDade were the only witnesses on the dimly lit street, they can say, with no other witness doubt, that he reached for his waist when he neared the patrol car. However, Dr. Wecht says that handgun firers must show evidence of stippling, or small dots on their hand from firing the weapon. McDade showed no signs of those, at least meaning that no shots were fired on his behalf.

An article from the Pasadena Star News also raises concern of this case heightening the tensions between minorities and the Pasadena police department. They have more recently calmed in comparison to years ago, so we can only have hope that it does not return to its old state.

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Desperation

Tabby — July 14, 2010 @ 9:55 PM — Comments (1)

“Desperate times call for desperate measures,” 25 percent of the time, to be precise, in light of the case in point.

While there may be several reasons as to why people give false confessions, Lisa Black and Steve Mills of The Chicago Tribune zero in on the element of desperation in examining the gamut:

Trauma, lack of sleep and highly manipulative interrogation techniques are a few factors that can cause the most level-headed people to falsely confess to a crime — even one as heinous as a child’s murder, according to experts. Researchers believe that false confessions lead to about 25 percent of wrongful convictions, a statistic underscored by the increasingly sophisticated use of DNA evidence.

Take, for example, the case of Kevin Fox.  Having just lost his 3-year-old daughter to a brutal ordeal of sexual assault and murder, he found himself sitting in a “small, windowless room” with the police threatening that they would “arrange for inmates to rape him in jail.”  According to further records, the detectives “screamed at him, showed him a picture of his daughter, bound and gagged with duct tape, and told him that his wife was planning to divorce him.”  This went on for 14 hours.  Fox gave up and went along with the police’s hypothetical insisting that his daughter had died in an accident, thinking that, clearly, they would see that the hypothetical and the actual evidence coming from the incident did not fit together.  Quite the opposite of recognizing the mismatch, the police locked Fox away for 8 months before DNA evidence revealed that he could not have committed the crime.

The interrogation itself is stressful enough to get innocent people to confess,” said Saul Kassin, a psychology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. “But add to that a layer of grief and shock and perhaps even some guilt — ‘I should have been there’ — and then that the parent is trying like hell to be cooperative because they want the murder of their child solved.

The sort of torturous investigation as that endured by Fox is matched in immorality by its deceptive technique.  Dr. Robert Galatzer-Levy, a psychiatrist at the University of Chicago and the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, notes:

While law enforcement agencies have long relied on the “Reid Technique” method of interrogation to elicit confessions, some critics argue it’s based on faulty assumptions of deceptive behavior. Investigators are taught how to base their questions and method of interrogation on a suspect’s verbal and non-verbal cues and mood, sometimes using a “baiting” approach to elicit confessions.

This method becomes even more alarming when examined in light of its frightening potential:

Even those who believe such techniques are effective in obtaining true confessions say they can be misused by authorities.

There is a lot of coercion that can happen, short of the (former Chicago police Cmdr. Jon) Burge case where they are torturing someone to get confessions,” said Fred Hunter of Hinsdale, a licensed polygraph administrator. Burge, 62, was convicted last month of obstruction of justice and perjury for lying about torturing suspects in a civil case.

The lashes of this injustice are not limited to parents, such as Fox, but spread further to hit another group of people:

Those most vulnerable to overzealous police work often are “throwaway people,” said Hunter, referring to suspects who lack education, advocates or resources to represent themselves.

We know that for certain kinds of people, particularly those with mental illness and mental deficiencies, but other people as well, the psychological intensity of an interrogation can prove absolutely as torturous as physical pain,” said Lawrence Marshall, a Stanford University law professor who co-founded Northwestern University’s Center on Wrongful Convictions.

What can be said about a system that victimizes some of the most vulnerable members of our society?…And, perhaps, one of the sadder aspects of it all is the system’s reliance on the shortcut that is a confession…at the expense of solid evidence.

I think what we are seeing right now is there has become an overdependence on confessions,” said Marshall, who is appealing the case of Juan Rivera of Waukegan, who in May 2009 was convicted for the third time of the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl despite DNA evidence that excluded him. Lake County prosecutors suggested the girl was sexually active to undercut the DNA.

When translated from Latin, the origin of the opening proverb goes, “Desperate diseases must have desperate remedies.”  Coerced false confessions that lead to wrongful convictions, are they not a cancer of our law enforcement and our justice system?  What do you say would be the proper remedy?

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Illinois Supreme Court Decides Important Confession Case

Scott — October 14, 2009 @ 2:17 PM — Comments (0)

Bearing in mind that coerced confessions are one of the leading causes of wrongful convictions, I thought a recent case from Illinois might be of interest. The Illinois Supreme Court recently ruled that a confession obtained by police detectives from a teen-age suspect a few hours after he was punched by an officer in the jail downstairs was voluntary and admissible. The full text of the opinion (People v. Richardson, Ill., No. 105530, 9/24/09) can be accessed HERE.

An article from the BNA Criminal Law Reporter describes the factual background of the case as follows:

The 16-year-old defendant in this case was arrested for child abuse and aggravated battery of his infant daughter. While detained in the jail, a police officer punched the defendant, causing a black eye. The defendant identified the officer as the lockup keeper in the jail and further alleged that the officer put him in a full nelson and choked him until he passed out. When the defendant’s mother showed up, she raised a stink, and police internal affairs investigators were called.
Meanwhile, detectives investigating the child abuse brought the defendant and his mother upstairs to an interrogation room for questioning. The defendant waived the rights provided by Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436 (1966), and provided a videotaped statement that was used to convict him of the first-degree murder of his daughter.

Despite these facts,  the Illinois Supreme Court found that the confession was voluntary and thus admissible. The BNA article provides a thorough description of the court’s decision and its reasoning which was largely based on other Illinois cases and cases from other States holding that a physical assault of  defendant tat was “prior to, disconnected with, and apparently unrelated to the subsequent confession” did not necessarily render a confession involuntary for 14th amendment purposes.

The court could very well be correct that the defendant’s confession was not directly influenced by the prior abuse. There could be other reasons, such as those the court hung its hat on, that influenced the defendant to confess. Indeed it seems like much of the record supports the decision the trial court rendered and the Illinois Supreme Court affirmed.

I still find this case troubling, however. As I understand it the protections exteded by the 14th amendment are based on a recognition of the inherently coercive nature of interrogations which is based in large part on the extreme power imbalance between a criminal defendant in a custodial situation and the officers controlling and manipulating that situation. While I can understand the decision’s reasoning that the totality of the circumstances made the defendant’s confession voluntary, I still feel like the court gave short shrift to the undisputed fact that a law enforcement officer punched the defendant in the face giving him a black eye while he was in custody.

For me, perhaps the most troubling thing about this case and cases like it is that these decisions fail to deter abusive treatment of suspects and detainees. It is even more troubling when it seems, in my humble laymen’s opinion, that the prosecution would have had little if any problem obtaining a conviction without the confession. Then again anything can happen at trial, and perhaps there was more to the case than my quick and casual examination of the facts of this case revealed.

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Florida Non-DNA Exoneree Profiled

Seth — August 03, 2009 @ 5:57 PM — Comments (5)

Loyala University of Chicago College of Law has a great profile on Barney Brown, a non-DNA exoneree out of Miami, Florida.  Barney’s story is pretty incredible.

In 1970, at 14 years old and a young black boy with no criminal record, Barney was detained after a car in which he was a passenger was pulled over.  His parents were not notified.  He was then transferred to Miami on charges of raping and robbing a white woman.

After several lineups, the victim could not identify him as the perpetrator.  Despite this fact, the police pressed forward and brutalized Barney during interrogations, even irreparably damaging one of his eyes.

Prosecutors also pressed on and tried Barney as a juvenile.  With the victim unable to make the identification, the judge entered an acquittal and ordered his case dismissed.  Not satisfied, the prosecutors then did the following:

Barney’s nightmare should have ended there, but it didn’t.  Despite his acquittal in juvenile court, the prosecutor retried him in adult court and asked for the death penalty, which was permissible at the time.  Barney again pled not guilty, despite the fact that the prosecution offered him three years in a juvenile facility in exchange for a guilty plea.

When Barney’s mother heard about the prosecutors’ deal, she begged him to accept it.  But Barney couldn’t do it.  “Maybe I could lie about other things,” Barney told me matter of factly, “but I couldn’t lie against myself.”

Barney was convicted.  Because the State sought the death penalty 9which was allowed for rapes at that time) the jury, by a vote 7-5, spared Barney’s life.  Instead of meeting Old Sparky,  Barney was sentenced him to life imprisonment.

Now it doesn’t take a law scholar or Supreme Court justice to see the obvious problem with all of this.  The Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution strictly prohibits individuals from being tried for the same crime twice.  After hsi juvenile acquittal, the state was actually barred from trying him as an adult.

What is even more unbelievable is how long it took until a court actually took notice of this grievous constitutional violation and rectified it:

Though it took almost 40 years, the truth eventually prevailed.  After decades of trying to prove his innocence, lawyers Benedict Kuehne and Susan Dmitrovsky took his case before Judge Antonio Marin of Florida’s 11th Judicial Circuit Court.In an opinion that probably every person who has ever thought about going to law school would wish they could write, Judge Marin ordered Barney’sconviction to “be vacated and the defendant discharged from all liability for the charged offense.”

“This case,” Judge Marin ruled, “presents a clear example of a grievous constitutional double jeopardy violation[.]  As a result of this clear constitutional maxim, Mr. Brown should have never been forced to defend himself against the same rape and robbery charges a second time.  His life sentences for the 1970 adult court convictions should have never happened.  His incarceration within Florida’s prison system for most of his adult life should not have taken place.”

When news of Barney’s exoneration reached the prison on the evening of September 24, 2008, their reaction was unfortunately typical of many wrongfully convicted people.  Prison officials simply released him into the dark, rainy night with no one there to meet him and nowhere to go.

I met Barney Brown, 38 years after his wrongful incarceration began,  in March at the Innocence Network soon after he was released.  He is a wonderful guy, who is going to do great things with the rest of the time he has here on Earth.

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