I had a motion to suppress today in a case involving a search warrant. I argued an extremely narrow issue. The factual issue: the police report failed to mention a detail regarding how the warrant was executed.
I have no doubt that the search occurred the way it was written. That is, the detail was left out of the report because it never happened.
The prosecutor presented one witness; while the officer who testified was on the scene, he was not the officer who wrote the police report. Also, he was not the officer who purportedly did the thing that was never mentioned in the police report.
I told my boss this morning: "The cop'll take the stand, lie about what happened, I'll put my guy on to testify to contradict it, and then the motion will be denied."
It's not so much that I think police officers actively lie. Rather, I don't think they remember one case from the next. As this officer said, he's executed over a hundred warrants during the past two years. The purpose of the police report is to record the details because, really, cops can't be expected to remember the details on every single thing they do. Do some cops actively lie? Sure. But for the most part, I think they fill in the blanks and connect the dots during testimony. They know the standards and the rules; they know what they have to say to win.
Conversely, a defendant likely remembers pretty damn well what happened. He's had a single encounter that is pretty life-changing. The execution of a search warrant isn't just work to a criminal defendant. It's something out of the ordinary. It's something particularly memorable.
(The above should not be construed as a dimwitted notion that defendants never lie. That would be silly and naive. It's merely an illustration that a defendant is more apt to remember the details of an an interaction with police than a police officer is to remember an interaction with a citizen.)
The really irritating part? Even when the cops fill in the empty spaces (or just out-and-out lie), they're generally believed. People want to believe their police officers.
In the meantime, the judge took the motion under advisement. The trial is scheduled for Friday. I await my denial.
1 comment:
Recent neuroscientific research shows that all memory is constructed on-the-spot. We never really retain an imprint of an event so much as construct it in light of present circumstances during the process known as 'recall'. During each subsequent recall of an event, details shift related to the event.
A report which is made as close as possible to the event is likely to be a much more accurate reflection than any subsequent testimony.
This would make sense triply for police-officers who perform the same action again and again, and are therefore more likely to conflate similar circumstances during the process of recall. It's not their fault, it's simply the way the brain works.
I'm sure some neuroscientist at some point has been called as an expert witness to testify to this sort of stuff. Whether it made any sort of difference, of course... that's a whole 'nother story.
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