A Naked Singularity: A Novel (2 page)

Another way you have to be careful not to pick up more charges is by resisting capture, even if only verbally, because such conduct can incite some of your lesser blue pacifists into a bit of retributory violence, with said violence then necessitating that you be charged with Resisting Arrest (PL §205.30) if only by way of explaining your injuries; which injuries better be minor lest they result in the added felony charge of Assault in the Second Degree (PL §120.05[3]), a more extensive explanation whereby a misdemeanor assault becomes a felony one by virtue of involving a police officer.

Still at the precinct, you are
printed
, each of your fingers rolled in black ink then onto vestal white paper. The resulting bar code is sent to Albany for the purpose of producing a
rap sheet
, an accordiony collection of onion paper that means everything where you are. It means everything because sentencing like Physics and other sciences builds on what came before so that the worse your past was, the worse your present will be, and no sane person doubts the rap sheet’s depiction of the past since it’s based on unalterable fingerprints and not relative ephemera like names or social security numbers. I say no
sane
person because when once confronted by an individual who steadfastly claimed not to recall in the slightest what I deemed to be a highly memorable conviction on his sheet and one that substantially increased his exposure, I asked him if he planned to launch a Lockean defense whereby he could not be held responsible for something he didn’t remember as such act was not properly attributable to his personal identity at which point he gave me the blankest of stares in response then started saying increasingly odd things in rapid succession until I realized that he not only sort of knew what I was talking about, which was weird enough, but that he was undeniably insane and my ill-advised Locke reference was like the thing coming after the final straw to tip him over the Axis-II-Cluster-A edge, as it were, so that I thenceforth stopped doing things like that.

Now there’s all this paperwork the A/O has to fill out and he’ll stick you in the precinct’s cell while he fills. But first, if the case has any seriousness whatsoever, he and his friends want to accumulate evidence against you and since the best evidence is quite often the very words you emit, they mostly want you to make a statement, and trust me when I tell you that by the time they’re through with you you’ll probably want you to make a statement as well. Because while the police operated under something called the forty-eight hour rule which stated that an officer charged with any kind of official misconduct
cannot
be questioned about it for forty-eight hours—giving him time to, among other things, retain a criminal defense attorney—you are currently operating under a different forty-eight hour rule. This one says the police can harass, intimidate, lie, cheat, steal, cajole, make false promises, and delay your arraignment (where you would be assigned an attorney who would most assuredly
not
allow you to speak to the police) for forty-eight hours if that’s what it takes to extract your statement. And it is following all that, not at the very instant you’re arrested as mass entertainment would have you believe, that they will advise you of your Miranda rights so your ensuing statement will be admissible.

And this is as good a time as any for you, gentle reader, to learn that I can wander a bit while storytelling so that the very imminent digressive passage on the judicial creation of Miranda warnings can be entirely skipped by the uncurious without the slightest loss of narrative steam.

Digression begins
. So Ernesto Miranda is the Miranda of the warnings and the same year a famous shooter(s) would later scatter John Fitzgerald all over Jackie he was twenty-three and creating smaller-scale mayhem. A high school dropout with the mental development of an eighth-grader, Miranda had already served one year on an attempted rape conviction. In a perpendicular universe, an eighteen-year-old Phoenix girl who I’m going to say strove to dress like the glossy girls she saw in magazines and to listen to the same records as her more desirable classmates indisputably acted as attendant to some movie theater’s candy counter, the true home of such an operation’s profits incidentally. She sold synthetic butter and liquid Real Things and when done tried to go home. Enter Miranda who interrupted her trip home. He grabbed her, dragged her into his car, and drove her out into the Red, Brown, and Purple of the Painted Desert where he raped her.

Fast forward one week when the girl briefly saw what she thought was the car driven by her assailant, a 1953 Packard. She reported this belief to the police, telling them the license plate of the car was DFL312. That plate turned out to be registered to an Oldsmobile but the police discovered that DFL317
was
registered to a Packard—a Packard owned by Twila N. Hoffman, Ernesto Miranda’s girlfriend. Off to 2525 West Mariposa (
Oeste
Butterfly) Street where Miranda was found to fit the description given by the girl. He was arrested and placed in a line-up. The girl said he most resembled the rapist but failed to make an unequivocally positive identification.

Detectives took Miranda into Interrogation Room Two where he was told he had been identified as the rapist and
asked
if he wanted to make a statement. He did, a signed written confession that took two hours to elicit following his initial denial of guilt and that included a section saying he understood his rights. Miranda was charged and assigned an attorney. The attorney, Alvin Moore, had plenty on his neck, however, and for a well-spent $100 he objected that the confession had been illegally obtained because no one told Ernesto, prior to his statement, that he had the right to an attorney. The trial judge said
no way
to that and after the jury consequently heard the confession, and was surely impressed by it, he got to prescribe twenty to thirty years in special housing as a remedy. Ernesto wondered if he could appeal and he could.

The ACLU grabbed the case and 976 days later they were in front of the court that never gets overruled with John Flynn saying, and this is a direct quote (no it isn’t): “look dudes, and I refer to you thusly because this is way pre-O’Connor/Ginsberg, your Fifth Amendment deal is only protecting the rich and powerful: those who are brainy enough to know what their rights are or who have the dough to rent a lawyer.” The Warren Supremes actually agreed and, in the kind of decision that makes maybe five people happy, held that before future police could torment some illiterate sap who nobody cares about into confessing his sins, real or imagined, they would have to inform him of certain rights not covered in your average eighth-grade Social Studies class. As is customary in these all-too-rare instances, Miranda’s conviction was reversed and his case set down for retrial—a trial to be conducted without his now tainted confession, without any physical evidence of a struggle, and with a dubious identification. In a stroke of all-too-common prosecutorial serendipity, however, Miranda’s common-law wife, the previously mentioned Twila, emerged to testify that Miranda had admitted the rape to her. The fact that she and Miranda were then involved in a
bitter
custody dispute—are these ever otherwise described?—was conveniently ignored and the new jury said something to the effect of where are your Supremes now because we agree with the first jury. Miranda was eventually paroled then, the same year his country celebrated its two hundredth birthday party, stabbed and killed in a Phoenix bar fight. As the police arrested one of his assailants they took care to read him his Miranda rights in English and Spanish.
Digression ends
.

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 TIES
although that doesn’t exactly guarantee you anything either.