While it’s never supposed to be uttered, judges sitting in criminal courtrooms presume the defendants who come before them to be guilty. It’s just a matter of probability, knowing full well that the vast majority will plead guilty and, indeed, are guilty. The question isn’t whether they deserve to be hauled into the dock, but how bad they are. That’s the range of thought.
What one never quite sees when looking down from a criminal court bench are the ones who never made it to court. Little thought is given to the more than half a million people in New York City who are subjected to stop and frisk every year, then go about their day because the cops found nothing. The connection between how the system treats those in custody from those who were rousted and cut loose is tenuous. They weren’t arrested; isn’t that enough?
Then comes a guy like 54-year-old Tomas Torres, another “isolated incident” as Radley Balko sarcastically calls it. So what if it happens regularly, as long as we can chalk it up to an anomaly that allows the rest of us to sleep well at night. Torres’ home was the target of a search warrant, and the Connecticut State Police exploded in and did their job. The job included beating Torres and ripping his home to shreds.
That’s what it looks like when you’re an isolated incident. No drugs were found.
Judges can accept the violent nature of a search warrant, the boot firmly planted on a man’s face to make sure that no cop will be harmed, because they only look into the faces of the presumed guilty. In the back of their heads, they hear a little voice that whispers, “he made the choice to be a criminal, and this is the consequence.” There may be a pang of empathy, but it’s overcome with the righteousness of taking a criminal off the streets.
The problem is that Tomas Torres’ face won’t be seen by a criminal court judge. The judge who signed the warrant, maybe even skimmed the warrant, won’t see the fruit of his labor. The people who aren’t arrested disappear in the mist.
The judge who signs the warrant trusts that the police who seek it have done their homework, paid attention to details and have good reason to break down a person’s door. There is no hearing to consider the evidence behind the warrant. There is no deep deliberation that goes into the decision to authorize police to do what they did to Torres. It’s quick and dirty. It’s trust. No contrary voice challenges it, reminds the judge that these cops are about to rip apart a life, to stomp on a person without a second thought, without the slightest concern for the pain he will feel or the scar he will carry.
And judges go along with the plan, because they see only the people who commit crimes. No one walks Tomas Torres in for arraignment, to tell the judge how they beat him and destroyed his home, then came up empty. No one explains to the judge how they could have been so wrong as to do this to a person who committed no crime, made it a thousand-fold worse by the utter disdain of the sole of their boot imprinted on his innocent face. No judge has to stare into the eyes of the man whose life was affected by their signature.
There is no room in the system for anyone other than the parade of criminals to walk before a criminal court judge to remind them that not everyone is guilty. To the extent innocence enters into the mix at all, it’s the outlier who beats the charges. No thought is given to the person you never see.
Of course, this criticism is unfair and naive. The warrant was sufficient, saying all the words that were needed to authorize the raid. You have two minutes to consider it in your busy day. The words blur, become pro forma. There’s no one to challenge the warrant, and most of the time they find what they’re looking for. And if you were to raise a doubt, you would become a pariah in the courthouse. Or worse, the target would murder someone tomorrow and you would be on the front page of the New York Post as the worst judge ever. Go with the odds. Trust the cops. They’re right more often than their wrong. Mistakes happen. Somebody has to take one for the team.
Explain that to Tomas Torres. I’m sure he’ll understand what a difficult job you have. I’m sure he won’t mind being sacrificed to the odds. After all, it’s not like you will have to look down from the bench and see his face before you. In your world, they’re all bad guys. They’re always bad guys.
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There needs to be a statuatory remedy for situations like this. And if it comes out of police pension funds, so much the better.
As it stands now, there is no accountability worth mentioning. “Army of Occupation” indeed.
Perhaps you noticed that this post focuses on a very specific aspect of this problem, rather than the generic problem. Perhaps not.
The standard for a search warrant is probable cause, not beyond a reasonable doubt, and not “100% sure that there’s something there,” so the cops not finding something and moving on is not an injustice. I would be curious to know what the probable cause was based on, and what Torres’ alleged connection to the drug trade is, I imagine there’s quite a bit we don’t know here.
Officers do have to produce a sworn affidavit, which carries legal weight just like a sworn affidavit from a citizen does. Officers can and earn good and bad reputations with judges, which affects probable cause determinations (and when that starts happening, the cops are gone in a hurry – there is a ton of turnover because this is a HARD job and most aren’t cut out for it). It’s be more than counter-productive to give a criminal defendant a week notice and a hearing to determine whether they might be searched or arrested.
As for the execution of the warrant, if its really as simple as “beating”, and “ripping his home to shreds”, there should be firings, lawsuits, and consideration of criminal prosecution. But I’m somehow suspicious of that too – did the cops really go in and beat up whoever they found there and destroy stuff for fun? Do we know that to be the case? Or was there physical resistance, and an actual search for drugs (which is always going to be an intrusive search, because people tend to hide drugs).
Finally, I know the concept that police officers and others in authority have to be trusted to make a system work is a horrifying one. But it’s true. The entire concept of authority and law requires responsibility and trust. There’s no way around that. It’s not a bad thing. There are some who will always resent, and be suspicious of, anyone with any kind of authority over them whatsoever, but that’s always going to be a frustrating, losing battle for them. Our system, rightfully, does trust police, teachers, politicians, , the military, mailmen, firefighters. That’s not a system error. Our remedy to those that break that trust is to fire them, sue them, expose them, vote them out. That’s the best we can do. Distrusting all of them simply because they HAVE that necessary authority is much less helpful.
Despite the length of your comment and your belaboring the obvious, it really says one thing: Your preference is to give the cops the benefit of the doubt. You prefer to assume that Torres must be guilty of something or he wouldn’t be in this position. And even if Torres is completely, totally innocent, you still prefer to give the cops the latitude to do their job because that’s how crime is fought, and that’s the most important thing.
There is always a rationale, even where, as here, there is no factual basis whatsoever behind it, that allows someone to justify harm done by police. And that is why the culture that allows this sort of behavior continues unabated, because of apologists like you. Unfortunately, suing is a remarkably ineffective response. As you’re aware of probable cause, you’re no doubt also aware of qualified immunity.
The obvious question is whether you would feel the same if it was you or yours that got his face stomped, but it’s a silly question until it happens. Only then are you forced to face reality instead of badge-licking fantasy. So no, trust is earned, not due. Cops get the benefit or detriment they deserve, not a free ride.
You left out the part about my wife/sister/daughter being raped and/or murdered, but for the police.
Where I live it is a felony to assault and injury a police dog. If a police dog were to bite and injury a citizen there is no penalty. If there is no penalty if a police officer injures a citizen I guess the officers are treated the same as dogs.
There’s a good rationale for protecting police dogs. There’s a good rationale for most of the things that end up protecting the first rule of policing. If only these rationales didn’t continue to produce harm for the rest of us, without a moment of doubt in cops or their supporters.
Sorry about that face. Tomas, but you know, you might have been dangerous. We didn’t know, so we had no choice but to stomp you. Just lucky they didn’t bring a dog along for the ride.
Does Tomas have any recourse at all?
“I imagine there’s quite a bit we don’t know here.”
Why do I get the feeling that you’ve assumed that the things we don’t know would make the victim look bad? “He looks bad/guilty” is still not reasonable cause.
If he had fought the cops, he would’ve been charged with assaulting an officer. He hasn’t been. That’s indicative. If there had been anything that could’ve been bagged and tagged as “drug-related”, it would’ve been.
Mr. Torres is actually relatively lucky, compared to others–no evidence was planted. If certain people are willing to presume guilt even without evidence or charges…
As for there being no criminal charges for his beating and the destruction of his property… Who do you go to if you are assaulted and your property vandalized? The police. The colleagues of the alleged perpetrators. Any judge involved will likely be a colleague of the one who signed the warrant. Unless, of course, you can afford (or are lucky enough to get pro bono) a lawyer willing to undertake what is likely to be a quixotic, possibly (probably?) law-enforcement and/or judiciary-irritating, and ultimately unprofitable case.
As for trusting police officers… I heard that rationale the one time I served on a jury. “Oh, well, there’s absolutely no evidence; but the cop testified against him. I think he’s guilty, and he hangs out with the wrong sort of company… even if he didn’t commit this crime, he’ll definitely do something bad later. We can’t let this person out on the street!”
Judges are, at least, the lesser of two evils.
There may be a penalty in the most particularly egregious of these cases. [Edit. Note: Link deleted per rules.]
(Fair warning and apology: The Times-Picayune website is prone to Netflix pop-ups, but the news doesn’t seem to exist elsewhere on the internet.)
Meaningless, in my opinion, because judges enjoy absolute immunity and that will never change short of French Revolution. When cops are punished for brining this kind of crap to the bench we will see a sea change.
This being my home, it doesn’t get more meaningful. Or to put it another way, you don’t get a vote. There are a lot of posts at SJ, most of which address discrete aspects of a particular problem. As I have a passing familiarity with most of them, I focus on aspects or issues that haven’t been addressed a thousand times before. Even though a commenter may see an issue in a post that, from their seat, needs commenting, consider that the commenter’s perspective is his own, and that others (including me) see things differently.
Or to put it yet another way, this is my soapbox, not yours. I hope you understand my point.