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PLAYBOY . { \ : effect, permit any, questioning, aw e situation is becoming ‘intolerable. ac a recent case in Washington, D.C., for example, both the District police and the FBI were checking on a bank robbery. They gota hot tip On a suspect and in- formation good cnough to justify issuing a warrant for his arrest. After his arrest, on the way to the police station, the arresting officers stopped under a street light and questioned the suspect for a few minutes. He told them freely that he had committed the robbery, even told them where to find the gun and loot. They went there and found that he was teHing the truth. But the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. acting in ac cordance with the McNabb-Mallory rule, held that the confession and the gun and the money could not be used as evi- dence against the bank robber because of the delay of mere minutes in getting him before a Federal magistrate. Com- mon sense says the McNabb-Mallory rul- ing cripples law enforcement, and this is one factor that accounts for the increase in crime in the District of Columbia— and elsewhere. LEIGHTON: Fred. you cite the increase of crime in Washington since che McNabb. Mallory decision as though one flowed from the other, but you haven't shown any cause-and-effect relationship between these two facts. Since I've been sitting on the bench of the criminal division of the Cook County Circuit Court, I have dis- posed of 135 cases, but in not a single one has the right to interrogate suspects been important to the prosecution of the case. In any event. these decisions are now the law of the land, and the police have no choice but to obey. INBAU: That's the very fact I'm Jament- ing. PLAYBOY: Would you favor passing legis- lation fo grant the police broader inter- “rogational powers than the courts now permit? INBAU: Indeed T would. We urgently need legislation permitting police a reasonable Opportunity to interrogate criminal sus- pects before arraignment—and without a lawyer present; for his attorney, as I said before, is going to tell him to keep his mouth shut. LEIGHTON: But he has a perfect right to keep his mouth shut. lawyer ar no law- yer. The only purpose there could be in keeping him from sceing his lawyer at that point is to keep him from knowing and-exercising his constitutional right to keep his mouth shut. The major point behind these criticisms of the McNabb- Mallory. Gideon and Escobedo decisions is that the pro-police people don't want any laws of any kind to govern the con- duct of the police. Do you deny that a suspect has a right to remain silent, lawyer or no lawyer? INPAUL EF feed iat aes aeenend wan chal tion begins—but by the police, not ar attorney. LOHMAN: As a former police oflicer, I Must weree Una many cases Warrant brief questioning before bringing the suspect 10 a Magistrate. Once a niu has been informed of. his rights to counsel and to remain silent, the police should be per- mitted to interrogate him exactly as they wish. So long as the suspect knows of his right to remain silent. it’s senseless to forbid his being interrogated. INBAU: Let me give you an example of the atrocious damage that results from a strict application of these rules against police interrogation without the pres- ence of an attorney. In New York several years ago a doctor was murdered and his wife was almost killed by a man who was burglarizing their house. She was taken 10 a hospital. In the doctor's house. police found a discarded bloody shirt. One of the doctor’s white jackets was missing. Police also found a set of keys on the floor. By checking the Jaun- dry marks in the shirt, police tracked down a suspect. He had the doctor's jacket. The keys found at the scene fied the suspect's locker. When he was taken to court and charged with the murder, he was carefully informed of his tight to counsel and asked if he had a lawyer or wanted the court to appoint one. He asked for time to think it over. The judge gave him a day. Right after that court session, the police took the defendant to the hospital. where the doctor's wife identified him as the killer. He was later tried and convicted, but the Federal Court of Appeals ruled that the state had to try the man again, be- cause the police had violated his rights by taking him to the hospital when he didn’t have a lawyer to advise him. That kind of excessive judicial nicety is dan- gerous nonsense. PEMBERTON: You seem to regard the civil liberties granted by the Bill of Rights as nit-picking technicalities. Well, they ex- ist to protect our concept of what is de- cent in a civilized society. On one hand, the government represents a tremendous power with immense resources to investi- Rate and prosecute. The individual, even the wealthiest and most powerful indi- vidual has no comparable financial ar other resources, and the indigent suspect has so little comparable power as to call it nonexistent. It is unseemly that such a powerful government should rely on an individual's own words: to justify what the government has already done —that is, take him’ into* custody and deprive him of his liberty. Let that im- mense power find probable cause for arrest before the suspect is picked up, not after. It violates our sense of decency for a powerful government to send its agents out on a dragnet sweep ofa com- ee ae eh ee een fe et et eee as aouths. The accused—especially the in nocent and, henee, presumably inex peri- enced accused—are ata disadvantage in acontest with the potice amd prosecutor. Without the help of an attorney learned in daw and sophisticated in the ways of police tactics, the innocent suspect can be tricked into convicting himself with words from his own mouth. RUSTIN: Let me tell you something about that cop mentality. In Harlem at least. police officers are judged in part by their record of arrests and percentage of con- victions. For that reason, many juve- niles, unprotected by the constitutional safeguards that adults enjoy in normal courts, are often persuaded by police to plead guilty to a lesser offense than the arresting charge even though they're completely innocent of any wrongdoing. Because urese youngsters don't know their rights, they're tricked into building up the police record of arrests and convictions. TURNER: Mr. Rustin’s experience in Har- lem is not unique. Virtually all-law- enforcement agencies feather their nests with statistics. It’s a known fact that trafhc officers work on a quota system of arrests, expressed or implicd. It's not as well known, but so do criminal in- vestigators. PLAYBOY: Do the rest of you gentlemen agree with Mr. Rustin’s contention that juvenile-court procedures deprive tcen- agers of constitutional safeguards en- joyed by adults? PEMBERTON: It’s a very real problem. The American Civil Liberties Union is cur- rently investigating the case of a juve- nile in Pennsylvania who was jailed on hearsay evidence without an attorney and without being told what the charges against him were. LOHMAN: Many agencies are studying youth courts Jo introduce reforms to en- . sure that juveniles will enjoy the same safeguards as adults. But I] would not go so far as to suggest, as some have. that juvenile courts be replaced by adult courts. A few adult courts, in fact. are adopting some juvenile-court procedures. The juvenile court has shown us that wrongdoing is not always willful. We don’t want to deprive vouthfal offenders of their civil liberties, but we must con- tinue to treat the problem of criminil responsibility of the very young as quite different from the responsibility of the mature. Indeed, we should emphasize the difference even more than we do now. PLAYBOY: Do you agree with those who feel that socially and economically un- derprivileged adult defendants are de- nied their constitutional rights to an even greater degree than juveniles? LOHMAN: It is precisely to protect the lib- erties of the weak and the indigent that these new court decisions are being werent he ne OY SE | | |