Sergio De La Pava - A Naked Singularity

Of course so famous have these warnings become that it seems they’re no longer really heard in any meaningful way so that although someone with a gun is pointedly telling you you have the right to remain silent, that is, you have the right to make their job harder, to make it more difficult for them to accumulate evidence and later proof against you, the right to decrease the chances that you will end in jail, you will still almost invariably decline to exercise that right. Instead when someone like me later asks you if you spoke you’ll affirm then say things like: he said I would get out if I made a statement or they knew I wasn’t the shooter so he said I would get a misdemeanor if I told them about the robbery or maybe I had to tell my side of the story or my mother said to tell them what happened or else I told them what happened but I didn’t write it so it’s not a statement right? or even they said once I got a lawyer there was nothing they could do for me and other similar, painful nonsense. You tell me these things and my chin drops because I’m not interested in what’s good for your soul only what’s good or bad for my case and your statement is bad for it.

And in what is possibly another mini-digression, here is, more specifically, why your statement is always bad or at least your classic no-win deal, regardless of its content: Realize that if what you said was good for you, you can reliably expect that it will never be repeated because the prosecution needn’t present it at trial or even tell anyone about it. On the other far more likely hand where what you said damages your prospects, then you likely just reduced me to arguing that the cop misinterpreted or improperly influenced the content or, worse, just made it up out of whole cloth. Only I’m arguing this in Manhattan not the Bronx or Brooklyn meaning a substantial portion of the listening jury has graduate degrees and nannies and they don’t think Police Officers do things like that and aren’t about to be disabused of that notion by a criminal like you. So thanks. All by way of saying that statements are good evidence for the prosecution so the cops know to get them and thus do, with occasional help from an assistant district attorney sitting in front of a bargain videocam if the case is serious enough.

Back to that paperwork the A/O’s filling out with you in a nearby cell. He’s scribbling and hunting and pecking while asking you the occasional question (these are mostly pedigree questions like name, address, etc., which everyone in a robe agrees don’t require preceding Miranda warnings) and you may not know it but your future’s in them pages, those police reports. Because those reports are Rosario material and as such must be turned over to your attorney at some point, usually seconds, before trial. And even at that late stage believe me that these reports are usually his only true friends within the cruel, lonely world he operates in. Friends because in all their babblative beauty they make claims early and often that the cop now has to mirror perfectly or else gift him the inconsistency so that if it suits you he will stand there at trial and wave them at the cop like holier verity was never written boy. And the Rosario List that comes with the material will look substantially like this (well, without the explanatory parentheticals):

1. Online Booking Sheet: (mostly pedigree info but also details your capture including specific time and place).

2. UF61 or Complaint Report: (principally useful for the narrative of events it includes as relayed by the cop and/or those pesky civilian eyewitnesses).

3. Sprint Report: (transcription, in scarcely legible form, of all communications made via 911 operators and police radios including the infamous one-under that signals your descent into The System).

4. Memo Book Entries: (every uniformed cop has to record in a little pad everything of note that happens during his shift).

5. Aided Card: (only if someone was hurt requiring medical attention).

6. Vouchers, Property Clerk Invoices, Invoice Worksheets: (about any property recovered and most importantly by whom and from where).

Only longer.

Now the paperwork’s complete and you’re on the move because the A/O is taking you to Central Booking. Central Booking is located at One Police Plaza and is the first of three post-precinct levels you must inhabit before meeting an attorney who will guide you through the final formal steps by which those who stay in are separated from those who get out . (Speaking only figuratively, these levels are concentrically circular and either expand while ascending or constrict while descending, depending on your vantage point). On this first level, you are handed off to cops previously, and likely disciplinarily, extracted from the street to work desks. They take charge of you while the A/O leaves to meet with one of the assistant district attorneys working in the Early Case Assessment Bureau, or ECAB, or Complaint Room, of the District Attorney’s Office. Here, the newly-assigned DA, after interviewing the A/O, writes the criminal court complaint that formally charges you with a specific crime(s) and which includes a short narrative of the incident written in law-enforcementese and signed by the swearing cop. Note that this is why I earlier called precinct charges something like informal even though nobody else calls them that, my justification being that these arrest charges don’t really amount to much in the final analysis since this DA is actually the one who decides what crime to charge you with or whether to even charge you at all. Consequently, it’s the most common thing in the world to see charges that were inflated and overly optimistic, from the officers’ standpoint, reduced to something far more realistic by the party actually being asked to prove the damn thing, making these arrest charges something more along the lines of a recommendation really. Anyway, the DA additionally fills out a DA Data Sheet that also becomes Rosario and that includes more facts about the case and what his colleague’s bail request should be at the upcoming arraignment.

Back at Central Booking, your rap sheet returns from Albany and the cops check it to see if there are any outstanding bench warrants, arrest orders judges issue whenever a defendant stands them up at a court date. Now you can graduate to the next level located across the street in the building where this entire mess will come to fruition. This intermediate level is buried beneath your ultimate pre-arraignment destination and is colored to make you feel you’re inside a lime. Here, you sit in a cell and wait to meet a representative of the Criminal Justice Agency who wants to interview you to produce a CJA Sheet . This sheet informs the judge of the extent of your community ties and thus presumably the likelihood of your return to court, a critical factor allegedly used by the judge in determining whether or not to set bail on your case and if so how much. What you’re rooting for here is a CJA verdict of RECOMMENDED VERIFIED TIESalthough that doesn’t exactly guarantee you anything either.

When this and other delays have been exhausted you’re ready for the pens directly behind the arraignment courtroom. To get there you’re walked down a perfectly symmetric hall that overhead, every eight or so paces, has metronomically intermittent, dimpled-plastic rectangles containing two tubes each of flickering light that end well before the dark base of the stairs. At the top of those stairs is a short hallway that leads to those two identical but transposed cells where you are told to wait until a lawyer like me calls you ad nominem into one of the six interview booths.