NewsOK

A good interrogator can get a confession out of an innocent man in many cases -- particularly when the suspect isn't playing with a full deck of cards.

Yeah cops suck, we know this.

A Maricopa County Superior Court judge found a Sheriff's Office deputy chief in contempt of court Wednesday for his office's repeated inability to deliver jail inmates to court dates on time.

In his order, Presiding Criminal Judge Gary Donahoe wrote that the sheriff's court-security division is "chronically understaffed," which he characterized as a consistent and conscious decision on the part of the Sheriff's Office...

Donahoe ordered that Trombi pay "remedial relief" totaling $10,575 to the court, prosecutors, the defendants, their lawyers and even the jurors for the inconvenience...

Making sure inmates make court dates is one of the primary responsibilities of a sheriff under state law. In 2007, the office transported nearly 150,000 inmates and this year expects to transport more than 160,000.

The indirect civil-contempt findings focus on four incidents in which defendants either arrived late - or not at all - to court hearings over four days in August.

In one instance, a detention officer informed a court commissioner that because of a shortage of experienced officers, only 64 of 123 defendants would be delivered to a single court that day.


Under the law if you don't deliver the inmate to court on time, you are breaking the law and showing contempt to the judge, the court and the legal system. Where I come from, law enforcement recognizes the authority of the courts. I guess they do things differently, and incompetently, in Maricopa County's sheriff's office. I guess somehow Joe Arpaio doesn't care about the law.

"No comment. I want to speak to my attorney first."

They're everywhere.
This is way we need to focus on the idiots and tear them down.
Target them for election defeat.

My first thought on this was that Mr. Jim wanted to come out of the cold.........

It seems that whenever I read about something like this it just gets shrugged off. Why?

Easy -- the folks getting thrown in jail because they confessed to something they didn't do are convicted felons, probably poor and also likely to be racial minorities.

In other words, legislators and the voting public don't give a damn about these folks. Right or wrong, there are bigger fish to be fried than wrongful convictions.

It's a crappy, cynical view of the system I have, but prove me wrong.

It's just amazing to me that I can read through threads where people in this state will blindly follow a law because gosh-darn-it it's the law, or want to go after and string up DA Prater because he's ignoring a commandment from the AG, but little things like local law enforcement forcing an innocent man to confess to a crime he didn't commit get completely ignored. Oops! No harm no fowl!

Your politicians aren't going to address this because they don't want to be seen as soft on crime. The fact is that the interrogation setting itself is very one-sided.

For example:

Anything you say that helps your case is hearsay, not admissible.

Anything that hurts your case is an admission against interests -- an exception to the hearsay rule -- and it comes in.

Also -- the police can lie to you in order to obtain a confession. Say there are two suspects being held. It is perfectly okay in this setting for the officer to tell both suspects that the other suspect has confessed and has implicated his alleged co-conspirator, that it's basically all over, and did you have anything to say about that? Or, the officer might say "I know you didn't do it, but the victim is very angry, and it'd make them feel a lot better if you'd write an apology note to them just to make them feel better.. do it as a favor for me..." (etc.) All of that is a-okay.

And no one will do anything about it because if we do something about it, it means taking away valuable law enforcement tools. I must admit, as shady as some of that is, and while it results in wrongful convictions, it also gets bad guys off the street.

So how many wrongful convictions will we tolerate? In the grand scheme of things, convicted criminals are not high up on the list of people the citizens want to divert resources to whether they be truly innocent or not.

If you're being interrogated there is very little you can do in that situation (absent rare circumstances) where you'll help yourself.

dismayed, you write as one who continues to cling to a belief of a presumption of innocence. I can't recall the day it died in people's minds, but it's been a while, regrettably.

Today, unless someone looks, talks and thinks like X, then it matters not to X if the person did it or not, someone needs to pay, and if a durn fool is willing to confess, X can sleep better for it. Besides, even if the durn fool dinna actually do it, he or she probably did something else anyhows so as long as we gots him or her, it's all good.

bottom line - there are people who deep in their hearts wanna lynch the current OK Co DA over how he has charged and proceeded on the pharm shooting and some of the same think a former DA walked on water and a former OKC lab rat were both infallible and got a raw deal via the press.

At times, it's a odd mush we've evolved into.

I think Midtowner is mostly right.

It was funny reading the above while we're here discussing coerced confessions. There was never a better tag team for wrongful convictions than Bob Macy and Joyce Gilchrist. Macy was a disgrace to justice the nation over with his wanton disregard for truth in Oklahoma County. I saw when he was put in some Hall of Fame recently that Sheriff Whetsel called Macy his "hero." I certainly hope he was just being nice to an old man. The money the city had to pay out in the Pierce lawsuit should have come straight from the pockets of Gilchrist and Macy. How they aren't both in prison shows what fear there is when it comes to Macy and his crowd.

While it's not completely impossible to convict a public official, elected or otherwise, impossible is definitely blood kin to whatever would be necessary for it to happen.

Although OK Co has had its share of bad publicity, and expense, on convictions based on bad airplane theorys, bad science and bad vouching of state witni, it's not completely unique in how matters were approached.

But as this is a topic that can wind folks up, I'll take my leave rather than wind anyone up tight.