- Murder
on a Sunday Morning | Patrick McGuinness |
Butler
lawsuit
-
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- Brenton Butler
Duval will videotape
homicide confessions: Teen's case prompts sheriff's decision
By
Paul Pinkham and Rich
Tucker, Jacksonville Times-Union staff writers, April 2,
2002
Jacksonville police will begin
videotaping homicide confessions, Sheriff Nat Glover announced
yesterday, a day after an Oscar-winning documentary about a local
teenager falsely accused of murder premiered nationally.
Despite the timing, Glover
said he decided about a month ago to begin videotaping the confessions
but initially not the interrogations that lead to them. He said
he didn't know when the videotaping would start.
"I wasn't certain that
we needed videotaped confessions, but I've come to the conclusion
that we need to try it," Glover said during a news conference.
Videotaped interrogations were
a chief recommendation in August by a Duval County grand jury
that probed the arrest and prosecution of Brenton Butler, a 16-year-old
acquitted in the 2000 slaying of a Georgia tourist at a Southside
motel. The teen testified detectives, including Glover's son
Michael, beat a confession from him. Two men were later arrested
in the shooting and are awaiting trial.
Butler's case was the subject
of Murder on a Sunday Morning, which won the Academy Award for
best feature documentary last month and premiered Sunday on HBO.
Chief Assistant Public Defender
Bill White said Sheriff Glover's action doesn't go nearly far
enough because the risk remains that something improper will
be done outside the public eye.
"It may even end up making
the Sheriff's Office look worse," said White, whose office
represented Butler. "They need to tape the interrogations.
I don't think it's a step forward."
Chief Circuit Judge Donald
Moran said videotaping will help judges decide whether confessions
were freely and voluntarily given.
"For a judge, it's always
better to have more evidence, and I don't think you can have
more evidence than that," Moran said. "I don't see
a downside."
Prosecutors said videotaping
would strengthen their cases but warned that recording defendants'
confessions could still leave room for allegations of abuse or
coercion during times when the camera was off.
"Sometimes the best statements
are made spontaneously," said Assistant State Attorney Angela
Corey. "You can't have a cameraman running behind the suspect
all the time."
Chief Assistant State Attorney
Jay Plotkin said police have been moving toward videotaping since
well before Butler's arrest.
"What the Butler case
did was it gave the public some concerns about practices during
interviews by the Sheriff's Office," he said. "By having
this on videotape, the belief is this takes care of the public's
concern."
Prosecutors worry that videotaping
confessions will capture police interrogation tactics that, while
legal, might appear unsavory to jurors.
"There are certain things
that the U.S. Supreme Court has said are all right to do in an
investigation," Corey said. "It's OK to lie to a defendant
to test their story. ... But that's something that might be hard
for a jury to see on a tape and understand."
Glover said he took prosecutors'
concerns into account.
"Ultimately that's my
call to make," he said.
Wiring the two homicide interview
rooms at the Police Memorial Building will cost about $38,000,
and Glover said police are just beginning the process. Chief
of Detectives Frank Mackesy said he polled detectives in the
homicide unit and most favor videotaping.
Glover said he also will review
how detectives are scheduled, to ensure that none works extremely
long hours without a break, and has established a process where
cases are reviewed every 15 days by detectives and supervisors
"to make certain that nothing was left undone."
Both were issues in the Butler
case; the lead detectives had been on duty 16 hours when assigned
the case and were criticized for never searching the contents
of the victim's purse.
As for the documentary, the
sheriff said it was difficult to watch because "it focused
on an investigation I called woefully inadequate." He said
he taped it and watched it yesterday morning.
"It's not indicative of
the caliber of work, the caliber of officers, we have down here,"
Glover said. "The documentary did not spend much time on
subsequent events," such as the grand jury probe or his
apology to the Butler family.
The film already was affecting
jurisprudence in the courthouse yesterday morning. In the same
courtroom where Butler was acquitted, prosecutor Rich Mantei
asked a group of prospective jurors for a drug trial if they
had seen the documentary.
A few hands went up and most
jurors said they had heard about the case.
"It was something I sort
of had to ask," Mantei said. "We need to see what kind
of exposure jurors have had."
This story can be found
on Jacksonville.com
Some wary of videotaping confessions:
Watching tactics may disturb jurors
By Rich Tucker Times-Union
staff writer, April 18, 2002
Whether he put cameras in interrogation
rooms or not, Jacksonville Sheriff Nat Glover knew he was going
to make people unhappy. So he made a compromise.
And in the weeks since he announced
his plan to tape only homicide confessions, critics of the policy
have accused Glover of going only halfway. They say his failure
to order complete video records of the entire interrogation process
leaves the door open for police abuse.
Videotaping became an issue
mostly because of the Brenton Butler case, in which the Jacksonville
teen said he was beaten by police during a murder investigation
in May 2000. As a result of his allegations, the grand jury recommended
the Sheriff's Office consider videotaping.
Glover says taping only confessions
is the logical first step.
"What's best for Jacksonville
now is to start at this level," he said. "This decision
was made consciously."
Jacksonville is one of a growing
number of American cities dabbling in taping confessions. But
even as technology becomes increasingly central to law enforcement,
cameras in interrogation rooms still are viewed warily by police
and prosecutors.
Only two states -- Minnesota
and Alaska -- mandate interrogations be recorded from start to
finish. In Florida, a handful of police departments have formal
policies requiring officers to tape.
The hesitation comes from concern
that a videotaped confession may be more vulnerable to attack
by defense lawyers than one that is written and signed but unrecorded.
Robert Rios, a retired Broward
County police officer who authored a textbook on interrogation
techniques, said in cases with taped confessions defendants can
cite specific actions by police and argue those actions made
them feel coerced. Such accusations can lead to confessions being
thrown out so juries never hear about them.
And even if the judge allows
a taped confession into evidence, harsh but legal interrogation
room tactics often do not play well to jurors.
"The things police do
may be legal, but they shock most people," Rios said. "They
see the yelling, the intimidation. To the average person, this
tends to be revelation."
Rios said any taping is a hindrance
for law enforcement, whether of the confession or of the entire
interrogation.
Jacksonville prosecutors expressed
similar concerns about taping. Besides alarming jurors, taping
entire interrogations would lengthen trials because juries would
have to watch the tapes from start to finish, prosecutors said.
"Criminal trials are about
momentum," said Chief Assistant State Attorney Jay Plotkin.
"Making a jury watch several hours of interrogation can
destroy that momentum very quickly."
Plotkin said the nature of
conversations in the interrogation room makes videotaping impractical
because interrogations rarely are sequential discussions.
Instead, they often are meandering
conversations where, at least initially, the suspect tells more
lies than truths. In addition, suspects or police may make reference
to things juries cannot hear, such as prior convictions, which
are typically inadmissible during trials.
Plotkin said such realities
of interrogations can be confusing to jurors and damaging to
the state's case.
But in Minneapolis, where police
videotape interrogations in their entirety, prosecutors say the
process moves smoothly. Though juries sometimes have to sit through
long videos, pretrial agreements between the state and the defense
eliminate many such lags. And inadmissible statements made during
the interrogation are edited out so the jury cannot hear.
"When it first came into
effect there was concern from police and prosecutors alike, but
to the contrary, we've found it very helpful," said Amy
Klobuchar, Minneapolis' head prosecutor. "It allows juries
to see the demeanor of the suspect immediately after the crime
and protects the police from claims of coercion or abuse."
Richard Ofshe, a social psychologist
and national expert on confessions and interrogation, said juries
can get a complete picture of the interrogation only if it is
recorded from start to finish.
"The only reason not to
tape the entirety of the interrogation is to preserve for the
interrogator the ability to break the law and use dangerous and
improper methods," Ofshe said.
Glover said the decision to
tape only confessions is not grounded in any desire to conceal
how police conduct interrogations.
He said taping the summaries
will accomplish the same thing as recording the whole interrogation
because jurors will see a defendant's mood and judge for themselves
if the confession was voluntary.
Glover hopes to implement the
new videotaping policy in three to four months.
But State Attorney Harry Shorstein
is skeptical about how much good taping will do.
"In the end, it's still
going to come down to how much credibility the officer has in
the eyes of the jury," Shorstein said. "Videotape is
not going to change that."
Riveting tale, but questions
linger
By Matt
Soergel, Times-Union movie writer, March 29, 2002
This year's Oscar-winning documentary
feature, which plays on HBO Sunday, begins with a scene of The
Jacksonville Landing and the downtown skyline.
Then come the words, in big
white print: "The following events took place in Jacksonville,
Florida."
The city looks great, like
a beauty shot in a Monday Night Football broadcast. But what
happens next in Murder on a Sunday Morning, which follows the
2000 murder trial of 15-year-old Brenton Butler, isn't exactly
Chamber of Commerce material.
In fact, it paints the Jacksonville
Sheriff's Office, in its handling of this particular case, at
least, in a decidedly uncomplimentary way.
Under the courtroom questioning
of public defenders, the documentary forcefully reaches this
conclusion: The police in this case were almost mind-bogglingly
inept.
Granted, Murder on a Sunday
Morning is advocacy filmmaking, told from a one-sided perspective.
That's both its strength and its weakness: It becomes gripping
as we watch Butler's public defenders rise to his defense, but
something nags. What's the other side thinking? Are we getting
the whole picture? Murder would have been a better film if it
had tried to tell the story more completely -- or at least told
us why it couldn't.
But it does have a plot fit
for a paperback best-seller. And it does finds a couple of real-life
heroes in two Duval County public defenders, Patrick McGuinness
and Ann Finnell -- along with jurors who eventually did the right
thing.
McGuinness and Finnell defended
Butler, who was charged with killing Mary Ann Stephens, a Georgia
tourist, outside her Southside motel room. The victim's husband
identified Butler, who later signed a confession. The documentary
tracks the trial to its conclusion, when jurors decided the eyewitness
was wrong -- and that the confession had been beaten out of Butler
by detectives, including Sheriff Nat Glover's son, Michael.
Butler was acquitted in less
than an hour.
Murder on a Sunday Morning
was made by a French film crew led by director Jean-Xavier de
Lestrade and producer Denis Poncet. They were in Jacksonville
making a documentary on the American legal system when the Butler
case came along. Displaying good instincts, they jumped all over
it and stuck to it doggedly.
Murder on a Sunday Morning
benefits from great access to the courtroom maneuverings of the
case, in which the public defenders were able to dismantle much
of the testimony of police.
The filmmakers had access to
Butler's family, who are shown as they pray at home and as they
pray at the jail with their son. But the bespectacled 15-year-old
at the heart of the trial remains an enigma: He is not interviewed
by the filmmakers. (In fact, he's declined comment on the case
since his acquittal.)
It also goes behind the scenes
to show the two public defenders doing their legwork in Butler's
defense: talking to police, talking to Butler's family, walking
the crime scene, planning their courtroom moves.
The documentary closes with
a wicked twist to the case that looks as if it's right out of
a good crime novel. But this, as it makes clear, really happened.
|
Truth can never be
told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd. William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell
