Part II: Historic Perspectives on Racial Discrimination
Co-editor Brian Howe continues his discussion of disturbing human rights violations when US defendants are denied racially balanced jury pools. Writes Brian:
In 2009, McLynnerd Bond Jr. confessed to a murder he claims he didn’t commit. That year, a Gary, Indiana detective sat down to interrogate Bond, in connection with a 2007 murder. Bond, who is black, repeatedly denied any involvement in the crime. About two hours into the interrogation, the detective turned up the pressure:
“Don’t let twelve people who are from Schererville, Crown Point—white people, Hispanic people, other people that aren’t from Gary, from your part of the hood—judge you. Because they’re not gonna put people on there who are from your neck of the woods. You know that. They’re not gonna be the ones to
decide what happens to you. You know that. I know that…”
The ploy was effective: Bond confessed less than an hour later. He very quickly recanted the confession, however, and moved to suppress it as involuntary. The issue wasn’t actually whether Bond would have received a fair trial, but whether the threat of a biased jury was unconstitutionally coercive. Bond argued that the detective’s threat– to put him before an all white jury and implicitly deprive him of a fair trial– was improper. Although the trial court explicitly condemned the detective’s threats as inappropriate, it failed to find any precedent explicitly on point, and therefore refused to throw out the confession. The appellate court also upheld the confession. Although it also disapproved of the “racial overtones” in the detective’s interrogation, the appellate court noted that most varieties of police deception have been upheld. According to the court of appeals, because Bond had been read his rights, and was a reasonably intelligent person, the deception here could not have directly caused an involuntary confession.
The decision prompted a brief but scathing dissent from Court of Appeals Judge Kirsch. It reads, in its entirety:
“A police officer sworn to enforce and uphold our laws in a fair and impartial manner calls an African American man an obscene name and screams at him that he is not going to get a fair trial in Crown Point, Indiana because there will be white and Hispanic people on the jury who are not from Gary, Indiana—his ‘part of the hood.’
The trial court stated that the officer’s comment ’causes great concern to the Court, and is strongly discouraged.’ My colleagues ‘do not approve of the comment.’ Our Supreme Court has stated it does not condone ‘deceptive police conduct.’
Yet, each time courts allow such conduct, they implicitly sanction it and encourage the next police officer in the next interrogation to go a bit further, to be more offensive, more racist and more deceptive.
I would go beyond expressing “concern,” “discouraging,” “not approving” and “condoning,” and I would expressly condemn the police conduct that occurred here. Accordingly, I would reverse the trial court’s decision to deny the motion to suppress and remand for further proceedings.”
Bond appealed to the Indiana Supreme Court, which on May 13, 2014, reversed the court of appeals and held that the confession should have been suppressed as involuntary. The decision, well-written and sharp, is here: http://www.in.gov/judiciary/opinions/pdf/05131402SHD.pdf.
Multiple parts are quote-worthy, but this one reaches to the core of the matter:
“So today we do not find ourselves reviewing a case in which an officer misled or deceived a suspect as to the evidence held against him, or one in which the police falsely claimed that the victim of a murder still lived, or one in which police had a good faith basis for making a technically false statement. We have upheld the voluntariness of confessions despite the police deception in such cases.
“Instead, in this case Bond was intentionally deceived as to the fairness of the criminal justice system itself because of the color of his skin. Regardless of the evidence held against him or the circumstances of the alleged crime, he was left with the unequivocal impression that because he was African American he would spend the rest of his life in jail. Unless he confessed. And in unfortunate days gone by, this might have been the case. But no one wants to go back to such a time or place in the courtroom, and so we will not allow even the perception of such inequality to enter the interrogation room.”
It’s hard for me to know how to react to this case from a human rights perspective. Should one be relieved that the Indiana Supreme Court held these threats to be unconstitutionally coercive? Or upset that two lower courts were prepared to let the conduct stand? It’s comforting that a detective in Indiana can no longer use the threat of an unfair trial against a black man to coerce a confession. But it seems more disturbing that this was even a hard question in 2014.