There is no law that says if a burglar or rapist you shoot doesn’t die on your property, then you’re guilty of murder. The police who think so are not willing to take responsibility for possibly making a wrong decision. It’s not like they can’t come back charge someone with murder later if more evidence comes to light. It’s a lazy lock-em all up and let the Court sort it out mentality.
Charleston, South Carolina used to be a home port for nuclear submarines. Submariners are a breed apart having to be crazy enough to live in cramped quarters for long periods of time without going crazy. Petty Officers are the naval equivalents of a Sergeants in the Army and it is their job to take care of the sailors who serve under them. A good Petty Officer seeks out good lawyers he can refer his crew to when legal problems threaten a sailor’s readiness for deployment. I once represented a submariner charged in municipal court for a drunk and disorderly and got his case first diverted, then dismissed. His Petty Officer’s took notice of my good work and soon became a regular source of referrals. Mostly minor stuff, car wrecks, landlord disputes, and traffic tickets but then, one day, to my surprise, he referred a murder case to me.
One of the sailors in his crew gave his wife a 25 caliber automatic pistol for her protection while he was on deployment. One night she was awoken by a man climbing through her apartment’s bedroom window in downtown Charleston. She sat up and asked what he thought he was he doing as the man gave her a look that said she knew exactly what he was doing. That was when she reached up under her pillow, pulled out that 25 caliber pistol her husband had given her, and pointed it straight at him. Seeing the gun the man ran out her bedroom and down her hallway leading to her front door where he was fumbling with the lock when the first bullet came down the hallway and struck him in his back. He fumbled the deadbolt open, turned slightly as he pulled thew door open as the second bullet entered his right side. 25 caliber bullets don’t have much stopping power and the man was able to flee the scene as the Navy wife called 911.
The man was nowhere to be found when the police arrived. The police took her statement and had forensics dust for fingerprints. They were getting ready to wrap things up when a neighbor down the street discovered a man crawled up under his pickup truck. While a 25 caliber bullet doesn’t have much stopping power, it does have a nasty habit of ricocheting round inside the person whose body it enters . The bullet that entered this man’s right side ricocheted around his rib cage before tearing through his mesenteric artery causing him to bleed out internally. He was dead long before the police pulled him out from under the pick-up truck and everything went south for my client. Next thing she knew was she was being charged with murder, read her rights, handcuffed, and put in the back of a police cruiser. One of the policemen almost apologized saying, “If only he’d died in your apartment, we wouldn’t have to charge you with murder.”
There was never any had to about her arrest. I didn’t have to be Clarence Darrow to know the case against her was a total crock and was never going to see the inside of a courtroom. But I also knew one of the most frustrating things about our criminal justice sysatem is how long it can take for things to get done, especially when a person charged is innocent.
Bonds in murder cases have to be set by a Circuit Court Judge. You have to file a motion for a bond hearing and serve the motion on the Solicitor who won’t want to do anything until they speak with the arresting officer. In the meantime you have to track down the law clerk for the judge hearing General Sessions cases to ask the judge to schedule a bond hearing. Your client can spend days in the County jail before a bond hearing is scheduled. For a Navy wife, who never did anything illegal in her entire life, to be stripped down, put in an orange jump suit with plastic sandals, and be thrown into a filthy cell with God knows who, is terrifying no matter how many times her lawyer tries to convince her he’s doing everything possible to get her out.
Fortunately, the facts and circumstances of this particular murder case were compelling. I was able to convince the law clerk to put in a good word in with the Judge to get the case scheduled which helped focus the Solicitor’s attention on the case. After the soliucitor learned the facts, he agreed to dismiss the case outright setting my client free. Getting her case dismissed didn’t feel like much of a victory, it felt more like a defeat being part of the system that wrongly incarcerated her in the first place.
The sad truth is, if her arrest hadn’t been quite so obviously wrong, it would have been just the beginning of a glacially slow process trying to prove her innocence. The Court administration and prosecutors today measure success by how many cases are moved through the system. The fastest way to move cases through the system is by guilty pleas. A defendant willing to take a plea bargain can have their cases brought up quickly. When the plea offer is for probation, which they most often are, the sad truth is too many people plead guilty just to get out of the stinking county jail. For people who don’t want to plead guilty, the Solicitor gets to decide which cases to call first for trial. They naturally choose the cases that are most likely to result in convictions and too often defendants who have arguable claims of innocence get shoved onto the back burners. Compounding the problem is the chronic lack of resources for our court system. There aren’t enough judges, clerks, bailiffs, court recorders, and courtrooms to move the backlogged cases.
Yes, the system worked in my murder case. My client got a lawyer, her lawyer got a hearing, and the murder charge against her was dismissed. Think about how important those fundamental rights of due priocess were to her. And think what their denial must be like for the immigrants being swept off our streets and held in ICE detention without them. Our rights aren’t meant to protect criminals, they’re meant to protect all of us. As one of my law professorsonce said fifty years ago, we have the worst system of justice in the world, except for all the others. Catchy, but we can do better.
trialadvocacy.blog 