Police state : how America’s cops get away with murder

291 Pages·2015·2.27 MB·English

by  Spence

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COPYRIGHT
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First Edition: September 2015
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DEDICATION
This book is dedicated to Edward Moriarity, one of America’s great trial lawyers, a man of
unfathomable courage, and a loyal friend.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE........................................................................................................................................................i
COPYRIGHT......................................................................................................................................................iii
DEDICATION...................................................................................................................................................iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS...................................................................................................................................v
LET’S BEGIN TOGETHER.............................................................................................................................1
MANDATE FOR MURDER............................................................................................................................9
THE SECRET LIES OF THE FBI...............................................................................................................54
KILL HIM—DON’T TOUCH HIM.............................................................................................................74
KILL THE RENEGADE................................................................................................................................86
SMASH THE STEEL BUTTERFLY.........................................................................................................112
THE NEW AMERICAN GESTAPO.........................................................................................................140
HELL’S UNSPEAKABLE CONTEST.......................................................................................................174
GIVE THE SPARROW TO THE HAWK................................................................................................192
EPILOGUE: WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?................................................................................251
NOTES..................................................................................................................................................................I
LET’S BEGIN TOGETHER.............................................................................................................................I
CASE 1: MANDATE FOR MURDER.............................................................................................................II
CASE 2: THE SECRET LIES OF THE FBI........................................................................................................II
CASE 3:KILL HIM—DON’T TOUCH HIM.....................................................................................................II
CASE 4:KILL THE RENEGADE.....................................................................................................................II
CASE 5:SMASH THE STEEL BUTTERFLY.....................................................................................................II
CASE 6:THE NEW AMERICAN GESTAPO...................................................................................................II
CASE 7:HELL’S UNSPEAKABLE CONTEST..................................................................................................III
CASE 8:GIVE THE SPARROW TO THE HAWK............................................................................................III
EPILOGUE:WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?..........................................................................................III
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS................................................................................................................................IV
INDEX..................................................................................................................................................................V
ABOUT THE AUTHOR...........................................................................................................................XVIII
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LET’S BEGIN TOGETHER
I’m a trial lawyer. I make arguments. And I ask questions. I’ve defended the poor, the
forgotten, the lost, and the damned for over sixty years in the courtrooms of America. Over
my career I’ve shut out a haunting question I wasn’t prepared to face: Are we safe from our
own police? Have our police become killers on the loose who cover up their crimes—and
too often there’s no one to stop them?
Who could have stopped the long-standing police brutality in Baltimore that led to the
death of Freddie Gray following his less-than-joyful joyride in a police van, hands cuffed
behind him, and without the protection of a seat belt? The medical examiner found that
Gray’s “catastrophic injury”—his neck was snapped—happened when he was slammed
into the back of the van’s interior. The examiner reported that “a head injury Gray
sustained matche[d] a bolt in the back of the van”—just another notorious “rough ride”
awarded to citizens who dared be black and make eye contact with a cop.1 Gray’s case
brought to the forefront other cases of broken necks, paralysis, and death and attempted
cover-ups by the police in Baltimore. The brother of a man who died in police custody said
he was so badly beaten they had to have a closed-casket funeral; the police medical
examiner found he had died of a heart attack brought on by an underlying heart ailment
and dehydration from the summer heat.2
In South Carolina, Walter Scott was stopped for a broken taillight, and when he ran he
was shot multiple times in the back and killed. The killing cop tried to cover his crime with
a phony story about Scott pulling a Taser. Who could have stopped that murder? And while
we consider these questions we must remember that the police are our employees. Ours.
How do we save ourselves from being brutalized and murdered by our own public
servants?
Daily, across the land, we’re deluged with shocking stories of the murder and maiming
of our citizens by the police. Many of us no longer feel safe in our own homes, much less the
public streets. One man told me that if he stood on the corner and screamed at the top of
his voice about how he felt, no one would hear him—except, ofcourse, the cop on the beat,
who’d likely haul him off for disturbing the peace, and might kill him if he ran or resisted,
or looked the cop in the eye. We instinctively take comfort in our sacred rights as
Americans. But when faced with an arresting police officer with questionable sensitivity to
human dignity, and a justice system that is too often overworked and undertrained, a
system often diseased with prejudice and sold out to Power, we may discover that our
constitutional rights could be as well chronicled by a ripped-out page from yesterday’s
newspaper blowing down the street.
We’ve been spoon-fed for decades on Law & Order and endless other cop shows
assuring us that in America, whether we are rich or poor, powerless or otherwise, our
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police will protect us. We’ve been conditioned by the corporate media, the voice of Power,
to believe that the police put their lives in danger to keep us safe, all of us, no matter our
race, color, or creed. Sounds good. And it seems contrary to ordinary decency, even un-
American, to ask the police to protect us and then point long, accusatory fingers at them
and claim too many are sadistic killers at heart. Moreover, to question the very ones we
must trust to keep us safe injects us with the invasive virus of foreboding, and we live with
enough undeserved anxiety already.
When we hear someone breaking into our house, when we’re assaulted by a brutalizing
spouse, when a drunk or mentally disturbed member of our household is acting out,
perhaps dangerously, we look to the police for protection. Many argue that the police may
overstep lawful boundaries now and then, but the price we must pay for their protection is
to make room for their occasional excesses. Besides, if they use unnecessary force it’s
usually against gangs, dope dealers, and other deserving criminals and not against good
citizens such as us. But where do we find ourselves if we fear the police as much as we fear
the wild-eyed crazies beating down our doors? In the end we find ourselves asking: What
power do we possess to protect ourselves from criminal cops? And when the cops and
prosecutors, and often the judges, are members of the same cabal of power, how can we
hope to bring about meaningful reform? Are we shackled by our own powerlessness? Is our
only remedy to quietly, subserviently trust the police and hope that the cops who arrive on
the scene aren’t suffering from an inborn or recently acquired but irresistible urge to maim
and kill?
Even our vaunted United States Supreme Court has found ways to protect our “killing
cops” and to thereby put us under the fully fledged threat of becoming citizens of a police
state. The court recites how a citizen operating his car with only one headlight chose to
speed away instead of exiting his car as demanded by the officer and how the police chased
the car for more than five minutes at speeds in excess of 100 miles an hour.3Eventually the
citizen was stopped, after which the police fired fifteen shots into the car, killing both the
driver and his innocent passenger. The court held that such conduct did not violate the
Fourth Amendment rights of the dead and that the police were protected by what the law
calls “qualified immunity.” What can we do? Perhaps we can do nothing more than shrug
our shoulders and quietly recite one of those tired old saws: “The system isn’t perfect, but
it’s the best damned system in the world—love it or leave it.” Besides, if one of our
unarmed kids runs from the police, he should be shot fifteen times and killed. And his date
should be killed for dating a kid who would run from the police. Both had it coming, right?
As a trial lawyer, my day-to-day focus has been on protecting the rights of persons
charged with crimes, men and women I’d learned to care for and who looked to me to fight
for their freedom. I hadn’t stepped back to examine the justice system across the land as a
functional, operating organism. But one day, a startling insight slipped into a conscious
moment. I realized I’d never represented a person charged with a crime in either a state or
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federal court, in which the police, including the FBI, hadn’t themselves violated the law—
and on more than one occasion, even committed the crime of murder. Could this possibly
hint at what many Americans, even most Americans, face in our courtrooms today? Let me
say this straight: I don’t mean to suggest that every cop is a bully, a criminal, or a killer. I do
mean too many bullies and criminals and killers are cops. And most get away with it. And
that bothersome question arises: What superior force is in place to stop them?
Several weeks ago I was speaking to a couple of hundred criminal defense attorneys,
mostly public defenders. The average number of cases each of the lawyers had taken to
trial or otherwise concluded was something in the neighborhood of fifty. I said to the group,
“Please stand up if you can honestly represent to me that in every one of your cases the
police or prosecutors have in some way violated the law.” I couldn’t believe what I saw. All
but four stood up, men, women, older lawyers and young, all with sad, serious faces looking
directly at me. I turned to the four who remained seated. “What about you?” I asked. “Why
aren’t you standing?”
The lawyer seated closest to me said, “Well, Mr. Spence, you said in every case the cops
violated the law. I’ve had a couple where they didn’t.” The other three nodded their
agreement.
My spontaneous inquiry to this gathering of criminal defense attorneys wouldn’t excite
most academicians, who are nourished by hard, rattling statistics. Still, simple arithmetic
confirms that in more than a thousand criminal cases from across the nation, police or
prosecutors or both had been observed violating the law. Let’s ask another question: Do we
expect police and prosecutors to charge themselves with their own crimes? And still
another: Do we think the cops will become whistle-blowers on each other?
We’re staring at something that’s staring back, something that’s inherently dangerous to
a free society. I can no longer ignore what I’ve known all along—and have never wanted to
admit: Too many of America’s police are potentially state-sanctioned killers who know if
they’re called upon to answer for their crimes they’ll likely be protectedby prosecutors and
judges. But police crime is not as easy to hide these days, with vast numbers of our
population sporting cell phones with video cameras. And when shocking videos of police
killings are publicly shared, the community can explode into reciprocal violence. Rage
against excessive police force is becoming mainstream in America. Even the complacent
middle class, which for decades has been lulled comfortably by the belief that police crime
was isolated to the powerless poor and the voiceless minorities, is beginning to awaken.
We remember it was a citizen’s video of a white police officer shooting and killing an
unarmed black man as he ran that sparked public fury in the Walter Scott case.
The police in many cities are transforming into paramilitary forces. In years just past,
the Department of Homeland Security has doled out $35 billion to police across the land to
purchase “weapons of war.” And as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have simmered down,
the Pentagon itself has dumped $4.2 billion in surplus weapons on America’s police
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departments.4 The militarization of America’s police, granting them indomitable power
over the people, brings on visions of a police state. We remember the German people who
actively or passively supported the rise of the Third Reich. If we listen, do we hear the
Führer’s ghost laughing? If we listen, do we hear what history has tried to teach us? When
the police become the military, the people become the enemy. Even the National Security
Agency (NSA), “our international cop,” has recently been caught illegally spying on us,
reminiscent as it proves to be of Nazi Germany.
And now the F.B.I. admits that its elite forensic unit has given flawed testimony in
hundreds of cases over two decades involving hair identification, including thirty-two
defendants sentenced to death. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a former
prosecutor, said, “These findings are appalling and chilling in their indictment of our
criminal justice system, not only for potentially innocent defendants who have been
wrongly imprisoned and even executed, but for prosecutors who have relied on fabricated
and false evidence despite their intentions to faithfully enforce the law.” University of
Virginia law professor Brandon L. Garrett said the results reveal a “mass disaster” inside
the criminal justice system. And the Washington Post commented that the findings by the
FBI so far “likely scratch the surface.”5
Many speak for Power—the Power-owned media, the Power-owned politicians, even
the Power-owned courts. Money and Power own America, but the people—who speaks for
them? Has “Liberty and Justice for all” today become merely a meaningless slogan? And if
so, do we cling to it at our peril?”
Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the School of Law at the University of California, Irvine,
writes in his timely and cogent article entitled “How the Supreme Court Protects Bad
Cops”:6
In recent years, the court has made it very difficult, and often impossible, to hold
police officers and the governments that employ them accountable for civil rights
violations. This undermines the ability to deter illegal police behavior and leaves
victims without compensation. When the police kill or injure innocent people, the
victims rarely have recourse.
How bad is it out there? Every day new revelations of outrageous police crimes erupt.7 In
Brooklyn a witness states under oath that a cop coached him to testify falsely, and some
forty of the cop’s cases are under review; in New Orleans a judge recently found that a
black citizen spent more than forty years in prison (mostly in solitary confinement) under a
conviction and sentence based on an unconstitutional indictment.8 A peaceful march of
thousands on Staten Island protested the police chokehold death of Eric Garner, a black
man.9 And even the UN’s watchdog against racism urged the United States to halt the
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excessive use of force by police after Michael Brown, an unarmed black youth, was shot six
times and killed by a white cop in Ferguson, Missouri.10
In this book, we’ll look at some of my cases, everyday examples of how police have
trampled the rights of American citizens, even executing them without trial. We’ll return to
the deadly siege and slaughter of innocent Americans at what has been candidly called “the
massacre at Ruby Ridge.” From Los Angeles to New York City, and day after day, as
common as a summer cold, our attention is called to cases of police brutality and
corruption throughout the country. Crowds of grieving citizens attend the funerals, parade
in the streets, and write their senators and representatives. We call for investigations, and
predictably the police are usually cleared.
Nothing changes.
The question is, why?
It starts with the social climate in which our police and prosecutors act—another way of
saying it starts with us: with our cultural deference to and even adulation for the police, our
fear that crime will spike if we limit them in any way, and perhaps our naïve assumption
that most people in our system get what’s coming to them even if they were innocent of the
particular crime for which they’re charged.
The police are the progeny of Power. Although cops are technically our employees, they
do not answer to the schoolteacher, the secretary, the lawyer, the doctor, the carpenter, nor
to you or me. They do not answer to an American jury, for, except in rare cases, the police
enjoy immunity from suit even for their intentional wrongs.11They answer to no one except
to Power—to the politicians, and to themselves.
It’s one thing to read cold statistics that suggest something’s awry. But statistics provide
us no real understanding of human pain and helplessness, and they do little to move us
toward reform. Thankfully, most Americans haven’t had an abundance of firsthand
experience with overly aggressive police. Most of us have never been the victim of a police
baton across the side of the head or a Glock 17 in the gut, or found our child dead in the
street with six bullets through his body. Most of us have never faced the horror of pleading
guilty to a crime we didn’t commit to save ourselves from being convicted of a frightening
list of added crimes we also didn’t commit. In short, we cannot know the truth until we’ve
lived in the skin of the people. Yet the business of the criminal law goes on every day in
every community in the nation, and the dreaded shadows cast by brutal and corrupt police
have too rarely been exposed to the sunlight.
Over the decades, yes, from the beginning, it’s been a story often told but too rarely
heard. Through a potpourri of whimpers, grievances, investigations, and even litigation we
have, from time to time, protested the use of excessive force by the police. But today we
have reluctantly begun to ask painful, fundamental questions: Do these recurring acts of
excessive force signal something new? Are we headed into a budding police state? Some
even ask themselves quietly: Have we already arrived? And when a citizen’s camera phone
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