This excerpt from Burnt Earth accompanies last week's entry well, as after one is pulled over for running a stop sign, it helps to know your rights, but knowing your rights can backfire with the wrong police officer.
If you have any questions concerning your rights subject to arrest, please ask them in the comments.
*
Slim Cassidy crossed the street and aimed toward her house on the
other side of Civic Center Park. The park was starting to lose some of the oak
leaves, and there were kids huddling about the statues as if the cold bronze
figures were all raging hearths. She decided to detour through the park. She
regularly enjoyed wandering through the proscenium of the little concrete
amphitheater and admiring the frescoes painted underneath the columned turrets.
She went around the back of the amphitheater, stepped up on
to the proscenium, and glanced at the fur trapper painted on the wall above
her. She looked out over the stage to where the audience sat for Shakespeare in
the park, and stopped short. In the orchestra, two police officers were
hovering over a high school kid who was seated on one of the marble steps.
Damn it, she thought, I should just walk away. He’s just a
kid. At most he’s holding pot. It’s just a juvenile offense. He’ll be out before
supper. Slim whirled around and pointed herself toward home when she overheard
the conversation.
“You can’t arrest
me for having pot. Pot is legal in Colorado. Why don’t you guys
just leave me alone.”
The teenager’s angsty plea frustrated Slim. She wanted to
tell the little brat to shut his mouth. Anything he said was just leaving an
opening for the cop to get the confession he was looking for. However, if the
kid had any kind of drugs on him, he was going to be busted. Colorado may have legalized recreational marijuana, but this kid was clearly underage, and even if he wasn't, it was still illegal to toke up in a public park.
My beautiful walk on
this beautiful fall day ruined by an idiot kid with a grass habit. She knew
that she didn’t have to turn around. She knew that she was only asking for
trouble. She knew that it was her time off, and she had to get to her Thursday
evening prayer circle in a little more than an hour. But she turned around,
athletically hopped the outer rim of the amphitheater, and started a direct
rapid march toward the two officers and the kid.
As she crossed the last bench, one of the officers looked
up. The kid was sitting on a stair a few feet further behind him. All three of
them were looking at the woman in her trial suit with dreadlocks and short
heels practically throwing herself down the stone benches lining the
Greek-style amphitheater. Part of her remembered what it felt like to act in a
play, grabbing your audience in a grand entrance.
It seemed to her that the entire world stopped except her
little French scene with the police and this pothead kid. A skateboard was
strewn where the kid had dropped it. Slim started to piece together the scene.
She had to make some assumptions.
Her mind rushed through her ethical obligations to the
police officers… to the teenager… to the defenders office… to the court… She
had no Colorado Attorney’s License, so she couldn’t do anything that implied
that she could practice local law, unless in an “emergency” situation.
This was exactly the kind of a situation that was classified as an “emergency,” where the attorney stumbles upon a client whose rights are in
immediate threat of violation, and whose actions could severely inhibit any
future representation. All right, she
thought, at least I’m not violating any
Professional Rules if I help out.
By the time she thought that through, she felt like she was
literally standing at the trooper’s feet, because he was a towering individual.
Her nose came up to his badge, which was not a good location for her. Not only
did he probably think that his badge garnered respect, but she thought there
were few things in the world so overrepresented as men with badges. We hand out so many guns that we have to
hand out a lot of badges to go with them, even though most of the idiots
wearing them don’t deserve them.
“Gentlemen,” she pronounced. She felt like she was
their captain back at the station rather than some interloper from the street,
the way that all three of them were staring at her. “I am this child’s attorney.”
She wasn’t sure what any of them expected her to say, but
she was quite sure that none of them expected her to say that. They all looked
a little taken aback, but none so much as the teenager himself. He had a streak
of red in his hair and he wore sagging pants and a large baggy flannel. She
thought there must be a resurgence of the nineties. I wonder if he has Nirvana on an iPod somewhere.
The trooper took a moment to recover, and then stammered
something about her identification. Slim realized that she had already
transferred her wallet to the top of her purse on the treacherous walk into the
orchestra. She pulled it out, whipped out her driver’s license, Federal
Defender’s ID and her business card and threw them at the trooper. Without
giving him any time to examine them, she officiated, “I need to confer with my client,” and walked around the tall man as though he wasn’t even there.
The shorter trooper did not leave the teenager’s side. He
patiently awaited Slim’s arrival and then stood up to separate the teenager
from her. “Hold on, lady.”
Slim growled, “My
client has a right to counsel at this or any stage of an investigation and I
want to see you try to impede that right.”
This cop was smarter than the tall one. He was Latino, and a
little bit round. He gave the impression that he had seen a lot, and while Slim
was pretty sure he had never seen anything like this before, he didn’t show it.
She instantly respected him because he wasn’t to be rushed.
The best police officers are always those who take their time and act as a
calming force on the tense situations in which they find themselves. These were
the cops who would actually tell the truth. The truth was not usually a good
thing for Slim’s clients, but there were times in every case where it was.
There was always a witness that was a little too eager to tell his story and
exaggerate how close he was, or how unobstructed his view was. A cop like this
round one standing between her and the pseudo-grunge kid, was the kind of cop
who believed in the truth for its own sake. His admission on the stand that
this witness or that witness was not where they said they were, would make his
testimony all the more reliable. From then on, juries ate up anything those
cops said.
Slim could tell she was in trouble. She could handle a bad
cop. They were a dime a dozen and all of them put together were worth no more
than a nickel. This was a good cop. Bravado wouldn’t work on this guy. With
this guy, she actually needed the law on her side.
“That all depends…” mulled the round faced officer.
Slim knew what was coming next, so she attempted to preempt
it, “If he believes that I am his
attorney, than I am. That’s how it works,”
she said and tried to look around the officer. He moved his body slightly. Not
enough that most passers-by would notice, but enough that Slim couldn’t get
really good eye contact with the kid.
The good cop turned away from Slim to face the kid, which
gave Slim a chance to look him in the eye. “What’s
this woman’s name, kid?”
“The name doesn’t
matter,” interrupted Slim. “What matters is his belief that I speak
on his behalf, and if he reasonably believes that, than I have an obligation to…”
“Cut it woman,” said the big cop, “or I’ll bring you in for impeding the conduct of an officer of the
law.”
This was the argument that Slim wanted to be in. She didn’t
want to have to wait for the smart cop to ask the kid if she was his lawyer or
not. If that happened, the kid could say ‘no.’ He didn’t know her from a hole
in the ground. For all he knew, in the way that these kids’ brains worked, she
could be a cop trying to get him to confess. She wanted to have the ‘impeding
with an investigation’ argument, because she knew that she could win that
without any help from the kid.
She spun around and launched on the big trooper. “I am not impeding in an investigation.
I speak on behalf of my client. If you intend to ask my client questions than
you have to ask those questions of me. From here on out, nothing that he says
means anything unless it goes through his attorney, get it? I can no more
impede an investigation than this kid can impede an investigation by invoking
his Miranda rights.”
“Well then we’ll
just arrest your client and see you at the station house.”
“What’s your
probable cause? What are you arresting my client for?”
The big cop was taking the bait. He thought about it. “He admitted that he had pot.”
“He admitted
nothing of the sort. He told you that you couldn’t arrest him for having pot.
That was simply a legal debate with a police officer.”
The big guy’s chin dropped a little as he took this in. He
seemed at once shocked that she had overheard the conversation, as though she
was some kind of a mind reader, and determined to arrest the kid even if he had
to fight through Slim with his nightstick. Eventually, he dried the drool from
his chin and said, “He was riding a
skateboard. Skateboards are not permitted.”
“Fine. You have
the skateboard. You witnessed him riding the skateboard, but you do not have a
right to search him.”
“We have to frisk
him.”
This lummox cop was going down the exact rabbit hole that
Slim wanted him to go down. “Terry
frisks are only allowed if you have reason to believe that this kid is
dangerous. You already have all the evidence of his alleged crime. You have the
skateboard. What possible evidence do you believe that you could find by
searching him any further? Do you have any reason to believe that this kid is
carrying a weapon?”
The big cop thought about it and said, “Because he was committing a crime.”
“No sir, that is
not enough. Unless you want to be on the butt end of a big fat law suit, you
have to have some reason to believe that this kid is packing heat.”
The other cop slowly spoke up. “Walters. Stop it. We can always search when we arrest him.”
“Arrest him for
what?” Slim said urgently, realizing
that she had to be delicate with the good cop. This put her in the tight spot
of appealing to one of the troopers as a intelligent and rational human, while
bullying her way through the other one because she knew that reason would not
work.
“For riding the
skateboard in the park.”
“That’s a little
extreme, don’t you think, Officer?”
she asked with honey on her tongue.
“I don’t know if
it’s extreme or not, but we could do it and that would give us the right to
search, yes?”
“Only if you are
willing to arrest the poor kid for riding a skateboard. Come on, that’s really
not necessary. He was riding a skateboard in a park…” she tried to bring the officer into her confidence with a ‘boys
will be boys’ tone of voice, “…what’s
so wrong about that? A ticket maybe, but do you really want to arrest anyone
who wants to ride their skateboard in a park? You guys have real criminals that
you could be going after.”
The round-faced Latino cop looked over Slim’s head at the
big dumb white cop and shrugged. Slim turned around to see the big guy, a
little rebuffed by his confrontation, shrug back. The smart cop looked at the
kid and sarcastically said, “You have
a good lawyer there, kid.”
The kid just shrugged as Slim’s phone rang. Both police
officers turned to look at her. When she saw it was Thom, she blocked the call
and put the phone back in her pocket.
“I’m not going to
write you a ticket,” said the big
cop, “because knowing lawyers, you’re
going to get a bill from her next week, and it’s going to set you back a lot
more than any ticket I could write.”
The big cop put himself into hysterics at his joke, and even elicited a chuckle
from the Latino cop.
Slim let herself laugh along until she saw the kid open up
his mouth as if he was about to say that she wasn’t his lawyer after all. She
reached out a hand to the kid and shook it. “This
one’s on the house, but next time…”
They all laughed again, and then the cops started walking away.
“Yeah… Laugh it up
pigs,” said the kid a little too
loudly. “Laugh it up you fucking
cocksuckers.”
That was all he needed. The lummox turned around, ran at the
kid, and tackled him seemingly without effort. He started wrestling with the
skinny kid who was fighting the cop every inch of the way and shouting, “What da fuck man? Leave me the fuck
alone!”
Slim felt a ball of rage rise up in her gut and had a very
strong urge to leave the psuedo-grunge idiot in his mess. The lummox trooper
and the moron punk deserved each other. She watched while the trooper got the
kids hands behind his back. She knew that normally an enraged cop would be
twisting arms a little more, and pushing a little harder, but every once in a
while the oaf looked up at Slim and then back down at his handy work to see if
she was going to complain.
Finally, Slim was able to calm down enough to realize that
once she started representing the punk kid, it was incompetent not to see it
through. “What are you arresting him
for?” sighed Slim.
The Latino cop stood between her and his partner, obviously
content to spend the next couple hours booking this kid into the station house.
He said, “You know what we’re
arresting him for,” and looked at her
pointedly.
They both knew that the kid was in handcuffs because he just
called a cop a cocksucker, but she said, “Skateboarding?”
“That’s right.”
“I thought we just
established that you weren’t going to do that?” she smiled and raised her eyebrows as even she realized how
ridiculous the objection was.
The good cop thought about it for a moment, while the lummox
continued searching the kid, and Slim’s phone rang again. “I thought so to, but apparently Rick wasn’t convinced.”
Slim let the phone ring. “Hey,
Rick!” she said.
The big dumb guy looked up at her, but the Latino cop simply
said, “Let him finish his search. We
can talk at the station house.”
“Hey, Rick,” she said anyway, “he doesn’t consent to a search!”
“We figured that
much,” said the Latino again as the
dumb cop continued his frisk. “And I
presume that he’s lawyered up and that he is choosing to remain silent.”
“You got it. No
interrogation unless his lawyer is present.”
“I thought you
were his lawyer.”
“I guess I am…” she said ruefully, realizing that her
life just became more complicated. Her phone rang again. “I’m sorry about that,” she
uttered as she blocked the call and turned off the phone.
“Paul… Look what I
found.”
Slim set down her bag, took out a notepad and started taking
notes. She didn’t even need to look up to know what they had found. By the time
she looked up with her pen in hand, Troopers Paul and Rick were handing around
a baggie of pot with a pipe in it. The lummox was already cuffing the kid.
The Latino cop looked at Slim and said, “You still want him as your client?”
Slim refused to acknowledge his sarcastic remark. “Where are you taking him?”
“We use the DPD
station.”
“What’s his name?”
The big cop answered by asking, “What’s your name kid so that your “lawyer” can find you?”
When she wrote down his name and confirmed that she had
spelled it right, she informed them that she would be meeting them at the
station and reminded the cops that he was represented, so they were not to
interrogate.
As she walked toward the station, which was only a couple of
blocks away, she turned her attention to the voice mails on her cell phone.
*