Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets

by David Simon

  A small, wavering sound of protest passes your lips and the detective leans back in his chair, shaking his head sadly.

  What the hell is wrong with you, son? You think I’m fucking with you? Hey, I don’t even need to bother with your weak shit. I got three witnesses in three other rooms who say you’re my man. I got a knife from the scene that’s going downstairs to the lab for latent prints. I got blood spatter on them Air Jordans we took off you ten minutes ago. Why the fuck do you think we took ’em? Do I look like I wear high-top tennis? Fuck no. You got spatter all over ’em, and I think we both know whose blood type it’s gonna be. Hey, bunk, I’m only in here to make sure that there ain’t nothing you can say for yourself before I write it all up.

  You hesitate.

  Oh, says the detective. You want to think about it. Hey, you think about it all you want, pal. My captain’s right outside in the hallway, and he already told me to charge your ass in the first fuckin’ degree. For once in your beshitted little life someone is giving you a chance and you’re too fucking dumb to take it. What the fuck, you go ahead and think about it and I’ll tell my captain to cool his heels for ten minutes. I can do that much for you. How ’bout some coffee? Another cigarette?

  The detective leaves you alone in that cramped, windowless room. Just you and the blank notepaper and the Form 69 and… first-degree murder. First-degree murder with witnesses and fingerprints and blood on your Air Jordans. Christ, you didn’t even notice the blood on your own fucking shoes. Felony murder, mister. First-fucking-degree. How many years, you begin to wonder, how many years do I get for involuntary manslaughter?

  Whereupon the man who wants to put you in prison, the man who is not your friend, comes back in the room, asking if the coffee’s okay.

  Yeah, you say, the coffee’s fine, but what happens if I want a lawyer?

  The detective shrugs. Then we get you a lawyer, he says. And I walk out of the room and type up the charging documents for first-degree murder and you can’t say a fucking thing about it. Look, bunk, I’m giving you a chance. He came at you, right? You were scared. It was self-defense.

  Your mouth opens to speak.

  He came at you, didn’t he?

  “Yeah,” you venture cautiously, “he came at me.”

  Whoa, says the detective, holding up his hands. Wait a minute. If we’re gonna do this, I gotta find your rights form. Where’s the fucking form? Damn things are like cops, never around when you need ’em. Here it is, he says, pushing the explanation-of-rights sheet across the table and pointing to the bottom. Read that, he says.

  “I am willing to answer questions and I do not want any attorney at this time. My decision to answer questions without having an attorney present is free and voluntary on my part.”

  As you read, he leaves the room and returns a moment later with a second detective as a witness. You sign the bottom of the form, as do both detectives.

  The first detective looks up from the form, his eyes soaked with innocence. “He came at you, huh?”

  “Yeah, he came at me.”

  Get used to small rooms, bunk, because you are about to be drop-kicked into the lost land of pretrial detention. Because it’s one thing to be a murdering little asshole from Southeast Baltimore, and it’s another to be stupid about it, and with five little words you have just elevated yourself to the ranks of the truly witless.

  End of the road, pal. It’s over. It’s history. And if that police detective wasn’t so busy committing your weak bullshit to paper, he’d probably look you in the eye and tell you so. He’d give you another cigarette and say, son, you are ignorance personified and you just put yourself in for the fatal stabbing of a human being. He might even tell you that the other witnesses in the other rooms are too drunk to identify their own reflections, much less the kid who had the knife, or that it’s always a long shot for the lab to pull a latent off a knife hilt, or that your $95 sneakers are as clean as the day you bought them. If he was feeling particularly expansive, he might tell you that everyone who leaves the homicide unit in handcuffs does so charged with first-degree murder, that it’s for the lawyers to decide what kind of deal will be cut. He might go on to say that even after all these years working homicides, there is still a small part of him that finds it completely mystifying that anyone ever utters a single word in a police interrogation. To illustrate the point, he could hold up your Form 69, on which you waived away every last one of your rights, and say, “Lookit here, pistonhead, I told you twice that you were deep in the shit and that whatever you said could put you in deeper.” And if his message was still somehow beyond your understanding, he could drag your carcass back down the sixth-floor hallway, back toward the sign that says Homicide Unit in white block letters, the sign you saw when you walked off the elevator.

  Now think hard: Who lives in a homicide unit? Yeah, right. And what do homicide detectives do for a living? Yeah, you got it, bunk. And what did you do tonight? You murdered someone.

  So when you opened that mouth of yours, what the fuck were you thinking?

  Homicide detectives in Baltimore like to imagine a small, open window at the top of the long wall in the large interrogation room. More to the point, they like to imagine their suspects imagining a small, open window at the top of the long wall. The open window is the escape hatch, the Out. It is the perfect representation of what every suspect believes when he opens his mouth during an interrogation. Every last one envisions himself parrying questions with the right combination of alibi and excuse; every last one sees himself coming up with the right words, then crawling out the window to go home and sleep in his own bed. More often than not, a guilty man is looking for the Out from his first moments in the interrogation room; in that sense, the window is as much the suspect’s fantasy as the detective’s mirage.

  The effect of the illusion is profound, distorting as it does the natural hostility between hunter and hunted, transforming it until it resembles a relationship more symbiotic than adversarial. That is the lie, and when the roles are perfectly performed, deceit surpasses itself, becoming manipulation on a grand scale and ultimately an act of betrayal. Because what occurs in an interrogation room is indeed little more than a carefully staged drama, a choreographed performance that allows a detective and his suspect to find common ground where none exists. There, in a carefully controlled purgatory, the guilty proclaim their malefactions, though rarely in any form that allows for contrition or resembles an unequivocal admission.

  In truth, catharsis in the interrogation room occurs for only a few rare suspects, usually those in domestic murders or child abuse cases wherein the leaden mass of genuine remorse can crush anyone who is not hardened to his crime. But the greater share of men and women brought downtown take no interest in absolution. Ralph Waldo Emerson rightly noted that for those responsible, the act of murder “is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him, or frighten him from his ordinary notice of trifles.” And while West Baltimore is a universe or two from Emerson’s nineteenth-century Massachusetts hamlet, the observation is still useful. Murder often doesn’t unsettle a man. In Baltimore, it usually doesn’t even ruin his day.

  As a result, the majority of those who acknowledge their complicity in a killing must be baited by detectives with something more tempting than penitence. They must be made to believe that their crime is not really murder, that their excuse is both accepted and unique, that they will, with the help of the detective, be judged less evil than they truly are.

  Some are brought to that unreasoned conclusion by the suggestion that they acted in self-defense or were provoked to violence. Others fall prey to the notion that they are less culpable than their colleagues-I only drove the car or backed up the robbery, I wasn’t the triggerman; or yeah, I raped her, but I stayed out of it when them other guys started strangling her-unaware that Maryland law allows every member of the conspiracy to be charged as a principal. Still others succumb to the belief that they will get
a better shake by cooperating with detectives and acknowledging a limited amount of guilt. And many of those who cannot be lured over the precipice of self-incrimination can still be manipulated into providing alibis, denials and explanations-statements that can be checked and rechecked until a suspect’s lies are the greatest evidentiary threat to his freedom.

  For that reason, the professionals say nothing. No alibis. No explanations. No expressions of polite dismay or blanket denials. In the late 1970s, when men by the names of Dennis Wise and Vernon Collins were matching each other body for body as Baltimore’s premier contract killers and no witness could be found to testify against either, things got to the point where both the detectives and their suspects knew the drill:

  Enter room.

  Miranda.

  Anything to say this time, Dennis?

  No, sir. Just want to call my lawyer.

  Fine, Dennis.

  Exit room.

  For anyone with experience in the criminal justice machine, the point is driven home by every lawyer worth his fee. Repetition and familiarity with the process soon place the professionals beyond the reach of a police interrogation. Yet more than two decades after the landmark Escobedo and Miranda decisions, the rest of the world remains strangely willing to place itself at risk. As a result, the same law enforcement community that once regarded the 1966 Miranda decision as a death blow to criminal investigation has now come to see the explanation of rights as a routine part of the process-simply a piece of station house furniture, if not a civilizing influence on police work itself.

  In an era when beatings and physical intimidation were common tools of an interrogation, the Escobedo and Miranda decisions were sent down by the nation’s highest court to ensure that criminal confessions and statements were purely voluntary. The resulting Miranda warning was “a protective device to dispel the compelling atmosphere of the interrogation,” as Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in the majority opinion. Investigators would be required to assure citizens of their rights to silence and counsel, not only at the moment of arrest, but at the moment that they could reasonably be considered suspects under interrogation.

  In answer to Miranda, the nation’s police officials responded with a veritable jeremiad, wailing in unison that the required warnings would virtually assure that confessions would be impossible to obtain and conviction rates would plummet. Yet the prediction was soon proved false for the simple reason that those law enforcement leaders-and, for that matter, the Supreme Court itself-underestimated a police detective’s ingenuity.

  Miranda is, on paper, a noble gesture which declares that constitutional rights extend not only to the public forum of the courts, but to the private confines of the police station as well. Miranda and its accompanying decisions established a uniform concept of a criminal defendant’s rights and effectively ended the use of violence and the most blatant kind of physical intimidation in interrogations. That, of course, was a blessing. But if the further intent of the Miranda decision was, in fact, an attempt to “dispel the compelling atmosphere” of an interrogation, then it failed miserably.

  And thank God. Because by any standards of human discourse, a criminal confession can never truly be called voluntary. With rare exception, a confession is compelled, provoked and manipulated from a suspect by a detective who has been trained in a genuinely deceitful art. That is the essence of interrogation, and those who believe that a straightforward conversation between a cop and a criminal-devoid of any treachery-is going to solve a crime are somewhere beyond naive. If the interrogation process is, from a moral standpoint, contemptible, it is nonetheless essential. Deprived of the ability to question and confront suspects and witnesses, a detective is left with physical evidence and in many cases, precious little of that. Without a chance for a detective to manipulate a suspect’s mind, a lot of bad people would simply go free.

  Yet every defense attorney knows that there can be no good reason for a guilty man to say anything whatsoever to a police officer, and any suspect who calls an attorney will be told as much, bringing the interrogation to an end. A court opinion that therefore requires a detective-the same detective working hard to dupe a suspect-to stop abruptly and guarantee the man his right to end the process can only be called an act of institutional schizophrenia. The Miranda warning is a little like a referee introducing a barroom brawl: The stern warnings to hit above the waist and take no cheap shots have nothing to do with the mayhem that follows.

  Yet how could it be otherwise? It would be easy enough for our judiciary to ensure that no criminal suspect relinquished his rights inside a police station: The court could simply require the presence of a lawyer at all times. But such a blanket guarantee of individual rights would effectively end the use of interrogation as an investigative weapon, leaving many more crimes unsolved and many more guilty men and women unpunished. Instead, the ideals have been carefully compromised at little cost other than to the integrity of the police investigator.

  After all, it’s the lawyers, the Great Compromisers of our age, who have struck this bargain, who still manage to keep cuffs clean in the public courts, where rights and process are worshiped faithfully. It is left for the detective to fire this warning shot across a suspect’s bow, granting rights to a man who will then be tricked into relinquishing them. In that sense, Miranda is a symbol and little more, a salve for a collective conscience that cannot reconcile libertarian ideals with what must necessarily occur in a police interrogation room. Our judges, our courts, our society as a whole, demand in the same breath that rights be maintained even as crimes are punished. And all of us are bent and determined to preserve the illusion that both can be achieved in the same small room. It’s mournful to think that this hypocrisy is the necessary creation of our best legal minds, who seem to view the interrogation process as the rest of us look upon breakfast sausage: We want it on a plate with eggs and toast; we don’t want to know too much about how it comes to be.

  Trapped in that contradiction, a detective does his job in the only possible way. He follows the requirements of the law to the letter-or close enough so as not to jeopardize his case. Just as carefully, he ignores that law’s spirit and intent. He becomes a salesman, a huckster as thieving and silver-tongued as any man who ever moved used cars or aluminum siding-more so, in fact, when you consider that he’s selling long prison terms to customers who have no genuine need for the product.

  The fraud that claims it is somehow in a suspect’s interest to talk with police will forever be the catalyst in any criminal interrogation. It is a fiction propped up against the greater weight of logic itself, sustained for hours on end through nothing more or less than a detective’s ability to control the interrogation room.

  A good interrogator controls the physical environment, from the moment a suspect or reluctant witness is dumped in the small cubicle, left alone to stew in soundproof isolation. The law says that a man can’t be held against his will unless he’s to be charged with a crime, yet the men and women tossed into the interrogation room rarely ponder their legal status. They light cigarettes and wait, staring abstractedly at four yellow cinderblock walls, a dirty tin ashtray on a plain table, a small mirrored window and a series of stained acoustic tiles on the ceiling. Those few with heart enough to ask whether they are under arrest are often answered with a question:

  “Why? Do you want to be?”

  “No.”

  “Then sit the fuck down.”

  Control is the reason a suspect is seated farthest from the interrogation room door, and the reason the room’s light switch can only be operated with a key that remains in possession of the detectives. Every time a suspect has to ask for or be offered a cigarette, water, coffee or a trip to the bathroom, he’s being reminded that he’s lost control.

  When the detective arrives with pen and notepaper and begins the initial monologue to which a potential suspect or witness is invariably subjected, he has two goals in mind: first, to emphasize his complete control of th
e process; second, to stop the suspect from opening his mouth. Because if a suspect or witness manages to blurt out his desire for a lawyer-if he asks for counsel definitively and declines to answer questions until he gets one-it’s over.

  To prevent that, a detective allows no interruption of his soliloquy. Typically, the speech begins with the detective identifying himself and confiding that this is some serious shit that the two of you have to sort out. In your favor, however, is the fact that he, the detective, is a fair and reasonable man. A great guy, in fact-just ask anyone he works with.

  If, at this moment, you try to speak, the detective will cut you off, saying your chance will come in a little while. Right now, he will invariably say, you need to know where I’m coming from. Then he’ll inform you that he happens to be very good at what he does, that he’s had very few open cases in his long, storied career, and a whole busload of people who lied to him in this very room are now on Death Row.