by David Simon
Control. To keep it, you say whatever you have to. Then you say it over and over until it’s safe to stop, because if your suspect thinks for one moment that he can influence events, he may just demand an attorney.
As a result, the Miranda warning becomes a psychological hurdle, a pregnant moment that must be slipped carefully into the back-and-forth of the interrogation. For witnesses, the warning is not required and a detective can question those knowledgeable about a crime for hours without ever advising them of their rights. But should a witness suddenly say something that indicates involvement in a criminal act, he becomes-by the Supreme Court’s definition-a suspect, at which point he must be advised of his rights. In practice, the line between a potential suspect and a suspect can be thin, and a common sight in any American homicide unit is a handful of detectives standing outside an interrogation room, debating whether or not a Miranda warning is yet necessary.
The Baltimore department, like many others, uses a written form to confirm a suspect’s acknowledgment of Miranda. In a city where nine out of ten suspects would otherwise claim they were never informed of their rights, the forms have proven essential. Moreover, the detectives have found that rather than drawing attention to the Miranda, the written form diffuses the impact of the warning. Even as it alerts a suspect to the dangers of an interrogation, the form co-opts the suspect, making him part of the process. It is the suspect who wields the pen, initialing each component of the warning and then signing the form; it is the suspect who is being asked to help with the paperwork. With witnesses, the detectives achieve the same effect with an information sheet that asks three dozen questions in rapid-fire succession. Not only does the form include information of value to the investigators-name, nickname, height, weight, complexion, employer, description of clothing at time of interview, relatives living in Baltimore, names of parents, spouse, boyfriend or girlfriend-but it acclimates the witness to the idea of answering questions before the direct interview begins.
Even if a suspect does indeed ask for a lawyer, he must-at least according to the most aggressive interpretation of Miranda-ask definitively: “I want to talk to a lawyer and I don’t want to answer questions until I do.”
Anything less leaves room for a good detective to maneuver. The distinctions are subtle and semantic:
“Maybe I should get a lawyer.”
“Maybe you should. But why would you need a lawyer if you don’t have anything to do with this?”
Or: “I think I should talk to a lawyer.”
“You better be sure. Because if you want a lawyer then I’m not going to be able to do anything for you.”
Likewise, if a suspect calls a lawyer and continues to answer questions until the lawyer arrives, his rights have not been violated. If the lawyer arrives, the suspect must be told that an attorney is in the building, but if he still wishes to continue the interrogation, nothing requires that the police allow the attorney to speak with his client. In short, the suspect can demand an attorney; a lawyer can’t demand a suspect.
Once the minefield that is Miranda has been successfully negotiated, the detective must let the suspect know that his guilt is certain and easily established by the existing evidence. He must then offer the Out.
This, too, is role playing, and it requires a seasoned actor. If a witness or suspect is belligerent, you wear him down with greater belligerence. If the man shows fear, you offer calm and comfort. When he looks weak, you appear strong. When he wants a friend, you crack a joke and offer to buy him a soda. If he’s confident, you are more so, assuring him that you are certain of his guilt and are curious only about a few select details of the crime. And if he’s arrogant, if he wants nothing to do with the process, you intimidate him, threaten him, make him believe that making you happy may be the only thing between his ass and the Baltimore City Jail.
Kill your woman and a good detective will come close to real tears as he touches your shoulder and tells you how he knows that you must have loved her, that it wouldn’t be so hard for you to talk about if you didn’t. Beat your child to death and a police detective will wrap his arm around you in the interrogation room, telling you about how he beats his own children all the time, how it wasn’t your fault if the kid up and died on you. Shoot a friend over a poker hand and that same detective will lie about your dead buddy’s condition, telling you that the victim is in stable condition at Hopkins and probably won’t press charges, which wouldn’t amount to more than assault with intent even if he does. Murder a man with an accomplice and the detective will walk your co-conspirator past the open door of your interrogation room, then say your bunky’s going home tonight because he gave a statement making you the triggerman. And if that same detective thinks you can be bluffed, he might tell you that they’ve got your prints on the weapon, or that there are two eyewitnesses who have picked your photo from an array, or that the victim made a dying declaration in which he named you as his assailant.
All of which is street legal. Reasonable deception, the courts call it. After all, what could be more reasonable than deceiving someone who has taken a human life and is now lying about it?
The deception sometimes goes too far, or at least it sometimes seems that way to those unfamiliar with the process. Not long ago, several veteran homicide detectives in Detroit were publicly upbraided and disciplined by their superiors for using the office Xerox machine as a polygraph device. It seems that the detectives, when confronted with a statement of dubious veracity, would sometimes adjourn to the Xerox room and load three sheets of paper into the feeder.
“Truth,” said the first.
“Truth,” said the second.
“Lie,” said the third.
Then the suspect would be led into the room and told to put his hand against the side of the machine. The detectives would ask the man’s name, listen to the answer, then hit the copy button.
Truth.
And where do you live?
Truth again.
And did you or did you not kill Tater, shooting him down like a dog in the 1200 block of North Durham Street?
Lie. Well, well: You lying motherfucker.
In Baltimore, the homicide detectives read newspaper accounts of the Detroit controversy and wondered why anyone had a problem. Polygraph by copier was an old trick; it had been attempted on more than one occasion in the sixth-floor Xerox room. Gene Constantine, a veteran of Stanton’s shift, once gave a mindless wonder the coordination test for drunk drivers (“Follow my finger with your eyes, but don’t move your head… Now stand on one foot”), then loudly declared that the man’s performance indicated obvious deception.
“You flunked,” Constantine told him. “You’re lying.”
Convinced, the suspect confessed.
Variations on the theme are limited only by a detective’s imagination and his ability to sustain the fraud. But every bluff carries a corresponding risk, and a detective who tells a suspect his fingerprints are all over a crime scene loses all hope if the man knows he was wearing gloves. An interrogation room fraud is only as good as the material from which it was constructed-or, for that matter, as good as the suspect is witless-and a detective who underestimates his prey or overestimates his knowledge of the crime will lose precious credibility. Once a detective claims knowledge of a fact that the suspect knows to be untrue, the veil has been lifted, and the investigator is instead revealed as the liar.
Only when everything else in the repertoire falls does a detective resort to rage. It might be a spasm limited to a well-chosen sentence or two, or an extended tantrum punctuated by the slamming of a metal door or the drop kick of a chair, perhaps even a rant delivered as part of a good-cop, bad-cop melodrama, although that particular routine has worn thin with the years. Ideally, the shouting should be loud enough to suggest the threat of violence but restrained enough to avoid any action that could jeopardize the statement: Tell the court why you felt threatened. Did the detective hit you? Did he attempt to hit you? Did he threaten to h
it you? No, but he slammed his hand down on the table, real loud.
Oh my. Motion to suppress denied.
What a good detective will not do in this more enlightened age is beat his suspect, at least not for the purpose of obtaining a statement. A suspect who swings on a homicide detective, who raves and kicks furniture, who tries to fight off a pair of handcuffs, will receive as comprehensive an ass-kicking as he would out on the street, but as a function of interrogation, physical assault is not part of the arsenal. In Baltimore, that has been true for at least fifteen years.
Simply put, the violence isn’t worth the risk-not only the risk that the statement obtained will later be ruled inadmissible, but the risk to a detective’s career and pension. It would be another thing entirely in those instances in which an officer or an officer’s family member is the victim. In those cases, a good detective will anticipate the accusation by photographing a suspect after interrogation, to show an absence of injuries and to prove that any beating received prior to the suspect’s arrival at the city jail had nothing to do with what occurred in the homicide unit.
But those are rare cases and, for the vast majority of murders, there is little for a detective to take personally. He doesn’t know the dead man, he just met the suspect and he doesn’t live anywhere near the street where the violence occurred. From that perspective, what civil servant in his right mind is going to risk his entire career to prove that on the night of March 7, 1988, in some godforsaken tract of West Baltimore, a drug dealer, Stinky, shot a dope fiend, Pee Wee, over a $35 debt?
Still, circuit court juries often prefer to think in conspiratorial terms about back rooms and hot lights and rabbit punches to a suspect’s kidneys. A Baltimore detective once lost a case because the defendant testified that his confession was obtained only after he had been mauled by two detectives who beat him with a phone book. The detective was sequestered and did not hear that testimony, but when he took the stand, the defense attorney asked what items were in the room during the interrogation.
“The table. Chairs. Some papers. An ashtray.”
“Was there a phone book in the room?”
The detective thought about it and remembered that yes, they had used a phone book to look up an address. “Yeah,” he acknowledged. “A yellow pages phone book.”
Only when the defense attorney looked approvingly at the jury did the cop realize that something was wrong. After the not guilty verdict, the detective swore he would never again begin an interview until he had cleared the room of every unnecessary item.
The passage of time can also damage the credibility of a confession. In the privacy of the interrogation room, it requires hours of prolonged effort to break a man to a point where he’s willing to admit a criminal act, yet at some point those hours begin to cast doubt on the statement itself. Even under the best conditions, four to six hours of interrogation are required to break a suspect down, and eight or ten or twelve hours can be justified as long as the man is fed and allowed the use of a bathroom. But after a suspect has spent more than twelve hours in an isolated chamber without benefit of counsel, even a sympathetic judge will have qualms about calling a confession or statement truly voluntary.
And how does a detective know he has the right man? Nervousness, fear, confusion, hostility, a story that changes or contradicts itself-all are signs that the man in an interrogation room is lying, particularly in the eyes of someone as naturally suspicious as a detective. Unfortunately, these are also signs of a human being in a state of high stress, which is pretty much where people find themselves after being accused of a capital crime. Terry McLarney once mused that the best way to unsettle a suspect would be to post in all three interrogation rooms a written list of those behavior patterns that indicate deception:
Uncooperative.
Too cooperative.
Talks too much.
Talks too little.
Gets his story perfectly straight.
Fucks his story up.
Blinks too much, avoids eye contact.
Doesn’t blink. Stares.
And yet if the signs along the way are ambiguous, there can be no mistaking that critical moment, that light that shines from the other end of the tunnel when a guilty man is about to give it up. Later, after he’s initialed each page and is alone again in the cubicle, there will be only exhaustion and, in some cases, depression. If he gets to brooding, there might even be a suicide attempt.
But that is epilogue. The emotive crest of a guilty man’s performance comes in those cold moments before he opens his mouth and reaches for the Out. Just before a man gives up life and liberty in an interrogation room, his body acknowledges the defeat: His eyes are glazed, his jaw is slack, his body lists against the nearest wall or table edge. Some put their heads against the tabletop to steady themselves. Some become physically sick, holding their stomachs as if the problem were digestive; a few actually vomit.
At that critical moment, the detectives tell their suspects that they really are sick-sick of lying, sick of hiding. They tell them it’s time to turn over a new leaf, that they’ll only begin to feel better when they start to tell the truth. Amazingly enough, many of them actually believe it. As they reach for the ledge of that high window, they believe every last word of it.
“He came at you, right?”
“Yeah, he came at me.”
The Out leads in.
THURSDAY, MARCH 10
“Sixty-four thirty-one.”
Garvey listens to ten seconds of silence, then keys the mike a second time: “Sixty-four thirty-one.”
More dead air. The detective cranks the volume control on the Cavalier’s radio, then leans over to check the frequency indicator on the front of the set. Channel 7, just as it should be.
“Sixty-four thirty-one,” he says again, releasing the key on the hand mike before adding the less procedural “oooh, yoo-hoo… Anybody home in the Western? Helloooo…”
Kincaid laughs from the passenger seat.
“Sixty-four thirty-one,” repeats the dispatcher, acknowledging the detective in a mumble that suggests only mild irritation. It’s a known fact that those assigned to a police communications unit are carefully screened to ensure that they will sound as if they’ve been watching televised bowling tournaments for a month. Perhaps it’s the job, perhaps it’s the metallic squawk of the broadcast itself, but the speaking voice of the average police dispatcher falls somewhere between tedium and slow death. In Baltimore, at least, the world will not end with a bang but with the weary, distracted droning of a forty-seven-year-old civil servant who will ask a patrol unit for the 10-20 on that mushroom cloud, then assign the incident a seven-digit complaint number.
Garvey keys the mike again. “Yeah, we’re in your district and we’re gonna need uniforms for a paper,” he says, “and also a DEU at Calhoun and, ah, Lexington.”
“Ten-four. When do you need them?”
Unbelievable. Garvey suppresses an impulse to ask if the weekend after Labor Day is convenient for everyone involved.
“We need them as soon as possible.”
“Ten-four. What’s your ten-twenty again?”
“Calhoun and Lexington.”
“Ten-four.”
Garvey returns the radio mike to its metal retainer and settles back into the driver’s seat. He slips a pair of wide-framed glasses down the bridge of his nose, then begins rubbing his dark brown eyes with one thumb and forefinger. The glasses are an incongruous accessory. Without them, Garvey looks like a Baltimore cop; wearing them, he looks for all the world like the proper businessman his father wanted him to be.
Garvey’s appearance is, on the whole, decidedly corporate: dark blue suit, blue dress shirt, a necktie of red and blue Republican stripes, well-shined Bostonians-a businessman’s ensemble made whole by the addition of a dark brown briefcase that travels between home and office, crammed with files and reports. Tasteful, nondescript, the clothes cover a tall but well-proportioned frame that is at first glanc
e equal to the wardrobe in its ordinariness. Like his body, the detective’s face is long and thin, with a well-trimmed mustache and high forehead that ascends to a carefully combed crop of thinning black hair.
Except for the small lump that a.38 revolver produces on the back of one hip, Garvey fairly reeks of sales manager or, on a day when his blue pinstripe suit has been deployed, vice president for marketing. At first encounter, an untutored visitor to the homicide office might reasonably mistake Garvey for something from the police department’s planning and research department, a middle-management type who at any moment will begin pulling flow charts and quarterly projections from his briefcase, explaining that domestics and robbery shootings are down, but drug-related futures will continue to ascend through the last quarter. This image would shatter, of course, at the very moment Mr. Clean opens his mouth and emits the usual station house effluence. For Garvey, as for nearly all of the detectives in the unit, obscenities roll off the tongue in that practiced, fucking-this-motherfucker cadence that becomes, against a backdrop of violence and despair, a kind of strange poetry.
“Where are these motherfucking uniforms?” Garvey says, replacing his glasses and looking in both directions on Calhoun. “I don’t want to spend all fucking day hitting this house.”
“Sounded like you fuckin’ had to wake that goddamn dispatcher up,” Kincaid says from the passenger seat. “Now he’s trying to wake up some other poor motherfucker.”
“Well,” says Garvey, “a good police officer is never cold, tired, hungry or wet.”
The Patrolman’s Creed. Kincaid laughs, then jerks open the passenger door and pushes himself up and out to stretch his legs on the sidewalk. Two more minutes pass before one radio car, then another, then a third, pull behind the Cavalier. Three uniforms gather on the corner, conferring briefly with the detectives.
“Anybody here know where your DEU is today?” asks Garvey. It would help to have the district drug enforcement unit around in the event the raid produces dope for the simple, selfish reason that submitting narcotics to evidence control, even in small quantities, is a pain-in-the-ass process.
