According to the Washington Post, Warren Demesme (then 22) was being brought in for a second interrogation in relation to two women reporting that he had sexually assaulted them. He had denied the crime repeatedly. It was during that second interrogation with New Orleans detectives that Demesme said, “This is how I feel, if y’all think I did it, I know that I didn’t do it so why don’t you just give me a lawyer dog ’cause this is not what’s up.”
Demesme subsequently made admissions to the crime, prosecutors said, and was charged with aggravated rape and indecent behavior with a juvenile. He is being held in the Orleans Parish jail awaiting trial.
The public defender for Orleans Parish, Derwyn D. Bunton, took on Demesme’s case and filed a motion to suppress Demesme’s statement. In a court brief, Bunton noted that police are legally bound to stop questioning anyone who asks for a lawyer. “Under increased interrogation pressure,” Bunton wrote, “Mr. Demesme invokes his right to an attorney, stating with emotion and frustration, ‘Just give me a lawyer.'” The police did not stop their questioning, Bunton argued, “when Mr. Demesme unequivocally and unambiguously asserted his right to counsel.”
Orleans Parish Assistant District Attorney Kyle Daly responded in his brief that Demesme’s “reference to a lawyer did not constitute an unambiguous invocation of his right to counsel, because the defendant communicated that whether he actually wanted a lawyer was dependent on the subjective beliefs of the officers.” Daly added, “A reasonable officer under the circumstances would have understood, as [the detectives] did, that the defendant only might be invoking his right to counsel.”
The Louisiana Supreme Court denied Demesme’s lawyer’s request to dismiss the statement Demesme made. Louisiana Associate Supreme Court Justice Scott J. Crichton wrote the decision which basically said that using the term “dog” made Demesme’s statement ambiguous.
The motion to suppress Demesme’s statement was denied by the trial court and the appeals court. Last Friday, the Louisiana Supreme Court also ruled against Demesme, voting 6-1 to deny his motion.
In his concurrence, Louisiana Supreme Court Justice Scott Crichton concluded, ““In my view, the defendant’s ambiguous and equivocal reference to a ‘lawyer dog’ does not constitute an invocation of counsel that warrants termination of the interview.”
Now, some may believe that this guy confessed and so fuck him. But let’s not forget the lessons of coerced confessions that was taught by the Central Park Five in New York City back in 1989. As Saul Kassin, Psychology Professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Williams College and an expert in false confessions, explained in an interview published on the Psychology Report website:
The reason why people confess to crimes they did not commit is because they are subject to pressures of interrogation, a highly aggressive form of social influence. In the interrogation, especially in American style interrogation, people can become so stressed and so broken down and they start to feel so hopeless about their current situation that they come to believe in a rational way a confession is in their best interest. In some cases, they get so confused by the fact that American police are permitted to lie about evidence — and I mean lie about DNA, prints, surveillance footage, polygraph results — that in some cases people accused of crimes, particularly kids and others who are limited intellectually, become so confused by the lies that they actually come to believe they have committed this crime they did not commit. They wonder why it is they can’t recall it. They are led to believe that it is possible for people to transgress without awareness, for people to do something terrible and repress it. So they develop basically an inference that they must have committed this crime.
[...]
Years ago, my colleague (Larry Wrightsman) and I identified two types of false confessions that come from police interrogation. One we called coerced-compliant false confessions. These are cases, like the Central Park jogger case, where innocent people, who know they are innocent become so stressed, so broken down, and so confused as to what their best means of escape is that they confess fully knowing they’re innocent. In these cases they typically recant the confession almost immediately as soon as the pressure of the situation is lifted. The other type of confession is what we called coerced-internalized false confessions, and these are the cases where individuals actually come to believe in their own guilt as a function of the lies and their own suggestibility.
Is Mr. Demesme innocent or guilty? I do not know. None of us do as none of us have seen any of the actual evidence against him—except this confession, and that’s a big problem when trying to make sure you are judging something as serious as rape.
It’s virtually impossible for judges and juries to see past confessions whether they’re true or false. You’re absolutely right about the Central Park jogger case. Most people don’t realize, as a matter of history, that these five kids were coerced into confession in the spring of 1989 within 72 hours of the crime. That summer, before they went to trial, the DNA results came back from the FBI lab. There were three sets of semen samples picked up from the victim and the crime scene. All three samples were linked to a single person, and that person was not any of the five. The prosecutors knew that at the time and had to make a decision. The decision they made was, despite the DNA, they could still get [convictions] on the theory that just because we didn’t get all of them, doesn’t mean we didn’t get some of them.
Of course in that case the DNA ended up involving someone none of them had “confessed” to even knowing—meaning they just created completely false confessions. Is Mr. Demesme’s confession false? No idea. But we have laws and rights in order to protect us, as we are all innocent until proven guilty and clouding the issues doesn’t lead to more truth and justice, just the perpetuation of injustice.
I left the comma out, as it has been reported and transcribed without the comma. I feel that the fact that just about everyone puts the comma in in their mind when reading it is yet another testament to how awful this ruling is.