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July
22, 2002 8:45 a.m. |
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Southern California last week, two groups of police officers were much
in the news, each for vastly different reasons. The Orange County Sheriff's
Department basked in well-earned adulation following the arrest of a suspect
in the kidnap and murder of five-year-old Samantha Runnion, who was taken
from in front of her Stanton home last Monday. Meanwhile, up the freeway
in Inglewood, a less-flattering light was shining on that city's police
department, two of whose members were indicted on charges relating to
the July 6 videotaped arrest of a 16-year-old.
By now you've probably heard the tape of the heart-wrenching 9-1-1 call from the man who found Samantha's body Tuesday afternoon. "I have a three-year-old boy," he told the sheriff's dispatcher between sobs, and my guess is he hasn't let him out of his sight since. By Wednesday evening, sheriff's detectives had turned their attention to Alejandro Avila, 27, of Lake Elsinore, a rural area of Riverside County, about 50 miles southeast of Stanton. More than one caller to the sheriff's command post identified Avila as a possible suspect, and after some initial investigation detectives knew they may have gotten lucky. Avila had been charged with child molestation in 2001 and, though he was acquitted by a jury, one of the girls who accused him had lived in the Stanton townhouse complex where Samantha was kidnapped. Avila's neighbors reported seeing him cleaning the inside of his car and, though none of them was flat, changing all four of the tires on his car. Avila also resembled a composite drawing of the suspect described by Samatha's playmate.
Avila was under surveillance as he left his home Thursday morning. Detectives faced a difficult choice: They could try to conduct a consensual interview with him and lock him into a story, or they could maintain their surveillance until enough evidence was pieced together to link him to Samantha's murder. If they chose to contact him, detectives ran the risk that Avila would "lawyer up" and refuse to talk with them. The surveillance option was also risky. If Avila was their man, he would surely be tail-conscious, and following someone who does not want to be followed is much trickier than TV and the movies would have you believe. If the surveillance was burned, Avila would be on the loose and difficult to find again. The Mexican border was only 50 miles away, and he might slip across it heading south just as easily as hundreds heading north do every day. And of course detectives were worried that if Avila escaped he would be on the prowl for his next victim.
The decision was made to talk to him. Detectives in an unmarked van approached Avila as he drove through Lake Elsinore with a friend. He was not under arrest, they told him, but they wanted to ask him some questions. What followed will surely be debated ad nauseam by the many attorneys who will populate the cable talk shows as the case winds its way toward a verdict. In a consensual interview, police are not required to advise a suspect of his Miranda rights, one of which of course is the right to counsel. And the first thing any defense lawyer tells a client is to clam up and make the cops prove their case. Detectives wisely arranged to take Avila to a hotel rather than a sheriff's station, as case law has found that a consensual interview can turn into a custodial interrogation — thus requiring a Miranda admonition — in the "coercive atmosphere" of a police station.
At the hotel, Avila was interviewed over the course of twelve hours, during which he was allowed frequent breaks and telephone calls to his mother. But was he truly free to leave? His defense attorney will surely argue that he wasn't, a position I predict will be loudly echoed by Greta Van Susteren, Mickey Sherman, and many others. And if he wasn't free to leave, they will say, he should have been informed of his rights to remain silent and to be represented by counsel. If this argument is accepted by the judge at Avila's trial, any statements he made after being denied these rights must be suppressed. Further, any evidence gathered as a result of these statements must also be suppressed under the "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine.
But all of that will be hashed out in due season. If news reports of Avila's DNA being found on Samantha's body are correct, arguments about the hotel interview will be all but meaningless. One can only hope that Orange County prosecutors will do a better job of putting their DNA evidence in front of a jury than their Los Angeles counterparts did in the O. J. Simpson criminal trial. Of course, the typical Orange County juror has an I.Q. somewhere well above room temperature (distinguishing him from the twelve dullards who gave Simpson a pass in 1995), so we needn't worry that Avila's jury will be overwhelmed by the technical stuff.
The mention of Mr. Simpson seems to be an apt segue to the developing carnival in Inglewood, where Officers Jeremy Morse and Bijan Darvish are each free on $25,000 bail after a Los Angeles County grand jury indicted them on charges arising from the videotaped arrest of Donavan Jackson. Johnnie Cochran, leader of the minstrel show that sang and danced its way to Simpson's acquittal, has signed on to represent Jackson and his family in the forthcoming orgy of racial hysteria over an altercation in which, oddly enough, the only people injured were the cops. Morse, shown on the tape slamming the handcuffed Jackson on the trunk of a patrol car and striking him in the face, was charged with assault under the color of authority. Darvish, Morse's partner, was charged with filing a false police report, presumably for failing to fully describe the manner in which Morse threw Jackson onto the car.
According to the vitriol coming from the Jackson camp, Morse and Darvish have been added to the list of notorious badge-wearing racist oppressors, a list that includes Mark Fuhrman, Stacy Koon, Bull Connor, and, judging from some of last week's e-mail, Jack Dunphy. (I'm on the list for having dared to suggest that there might be more to the story than was shown on the videotape, and it turns out that there may indeed be.) Morse's attorney, John Barnett, claims that Jackson, while bent over the back of the squad car with his hands cuffed behind him, grabbed Morse in the crotch, and that this was the provocation for Morse's popping him in the chops.
In the tape, Morse can be seen reacting as if in pain, then reaching down toward his crotch with his left hand. An instant later he lets Jackson have it with his right hand, pow, right in the kisser. Darvish wrote these details in his police report before the existence of the videotape came to light. The tape shows that Darvish wasn't looking at Jackson when Morse threw him onto the trunk, so it shouldn't be seen as sinister that he failed to describe it in the report. And a doctor who examined Jackson after the arrest found him to be uninjured. Darvish was not responsible for describing an incident he did not witness, or one which in any case did not result in injury. As for Morse, when he picked up Jackson from the ground, Jackson let his legs hang limp and refused to stand. This left Morse with the option of letting him fall back on the ground or tossing him onto the trunk of the car. He chose the second option, although with perhaps a bit more gusto than standard procedure would dictate.
There will be much to argue about as the case heads to court, and one of the first things to settle is where to hold the trial. A superior court judge sent the case to a court in Inglewood, but felony cases are not ordinarily heard there. Inglewood felonies are tried at the Torrance courthouse, where juries are regarded as being friendly to prosecutors. But such expectations should be turned upside-down in this case, as Morse and Darvish might expect more sympathy from middle-class Torrance jurors than they are likely to find in Inglewood. Let's face it, they won't find any in Inglewood, where the mayor, Roosevelt Dorn, has already declared Morse to be guilty. Also calling for the cops' hides to be tacked to a barn door have been Congresswoman Maxine Waters and a number of other local race baiters, so it seems unlikely that a request to have the case heard elsewhere would be denied.
Yes, the no-justice-no-peace chorus is back and in full voice. Even Al Sharpton, sporting a few less chins these days, flew in for the festivities. The last time this bunch got so worked up the city burned for three days. If you happen to be in L.A. when the case comes to an end, I'd advise staying away from the corner of Florence and Normandie.
— Jack Dunphy is an officer in the Los Angeles Police Department. "Jack Dunphy" is the author's nom de cyber. The opinions expressed are his own and almost certainly do not reflect those of the LAPD management.