Excerpts from "Good Cops, Bad Verdict"
From Chapter 9, “What Happened Out There?”
. . . About half an hour after EMS left the scene, Kijek and Gotelaere radioed that Malice Green was dead.
My instant reaction was that I didn’t understand. I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong. I knew Green would not die. Three or four forearm snaps when he tried to take my gun. Two or three forearm snaps when he swung at me with what turned out to be keys in his fist. He was still struggling after Bobby Lessnau dragged him away. How could he be dead?
I reacted with an emotion that is the opposite of emotion – shock. Something else had to have killed this man. Intuition told me Green’s death went hand in hand with his zombie-like resistance. In the months and years ahead, I would learn much about what happens when a coked-up body becomes subject to stress, especially the stress of struggling with an authority figure who is trying to take away precious junk. At the time, all I knew is what I had observed during a struggle a half-hour earlier. Months later, experts would fill in the blanks for me, for a jury, and for anyone who would listen. No one seemed willing to listen. Of all the things no one would listen to, this one is the most baffling. When I was in prison, the president of the national pathologists’ association would tell Sixty Minutes’ Ed Bradley, flat-out, that cocaine – not me – had killed Malice Green. But as we sat in (Booster Car) 3-31 along Warren Avenue, Freddie Douglas came over to inform me that this was now a homicide scene. I was more confused than anything. There is no greater confusion than feeling remorse when you know you haven’t done anything wrong, but know that something went wrong, somehow. People didn’t die when I arrested them. But Malice Green did.
From the moment the dope house was declared a homicide scene, it was like gravity started pulling Walter and me down into a very large and very deep pit. Protocol required Freddie Douglas to report Green’s death to Homicide and to headquarters via telephone, rather than radio. He drove off to find a phone, leaving a vice sergeant from (Precinct) Four in charge of the scene. I don’t know what this vice crew was doing there. They arrived after everything was over, departmental curiosity-seekers. I think they were the very first cops to suggest Walter and I were the bad guys. They would soon have lots of company at the highest levels.
From Chapter 12, “Poison in the Air, and in Print”
. . . Defense lawyers say you should never try your case in the media. Yeah, but what about when the other side is not only arguing its case in the media, but it’s the only story in town? Thirty-six hours after Malice Green’s death the public, and every potential juror, was in Day Two of getting bombarded by the myth of Starsky and Hutch. And now the newspapers were reporting the prosecution version of the story, top to bottom, as fact. Actually, it wasn’t yet the prosecution version of the story. The police investigation was barely under way. This case moved lightning fast, but no one had even been charged with a crime yet. And, apparently, the only story left to tell was whether seven cops, and two in particular, would be strung up high enough to prevent a riot. From Day One, it was a bunch of people pouring gasoline on hot coals and congratulating themselves that no fire started.
. . . the media let anybody – I mean anybody – say almost anything about us, and then print it or broadcast it without checking it out. It was endless.
Sometimes they circulated the most damning, flame-fanning lies without even identifying where the lies came from. When the Detroit News got its chance at the story on Sunday, it included an astounding paragraph.
Nevers asked the paramedics to see how Green was doing, bystanders said. After briefly examining the man, a paramedic said he wouldn’t survive. Nevers sent the ambulance away. Douglas called for a second ambulance, which arrived shortly.
Never mind that every single word of the paragraph is a lie. Never mind that no one in Homicide was remotely saying anything of the kind then, or ever. Never mind that I summoned that first EMS wagon to stop at the scene. Never mind that it’s impossible to dream up a more damning picture than a killer cop who tells an ambulance to drive away and leave his “victim” to die. How many readers stopped to ask: Where is this tale coming from? The best the News could do was to say “bystanders.” The News not only put a hysterical tale in print, but gave it credibility by saying more than one “bystander” saw this happen. Who, pray tell, were these bystanders? . . .
From Chapter 13, “Tunnel Vision in Homicide”
. . . After that somebody . . . wrote a new witness statement form and Pace signed it. No police officer of any rank signed the line indicating who took the new statement. Whether the statement writer forgot to sign (unusual, but it happens), or for whatever reason didn’t want to be a part of it, I don’t know. But the new statement was less than one page long, neatly handwritten, and not the kind of thing you’d take lightly and forget to sign. Stewart and/or Alston had talked Pace through her new version of events and ordered it written up. The two most important items from Pace’s first statement had miraculously changed . . . Stewart and Alston had run the table. Green was no longer “kicking and fighting.” And Pace no longer sees a rock (of cocaine), she sees a baggie. Besides that, she doesn’t see a rock in the baggie. And, just for good measure, she isn’t even sure she saw a baggie.
. . . One thing he saw was a meeting at the prosecutor’s office the week after Green’s death . . . At one point, the Wayne County medical examiner, Bader Cassin, tried to fill in the blanks of his botched management of Green’s autopsy. Cassin told assistant prosecutors Douglas Baker and Kym Worthy that the presence of cocaine in Green’s system was something the prosecution would have to address. Caudill was asked to leave the room. Maynard recalls Cassin saying: “I’m not so sure that had those injuries been on someone else they would have been fatal.” And Worthy saying: “It [the cocaine] doesn’t matter. They beat him to death.” Worthy, who wore green fingernail polish in court during our trial, never lost her facts-be-damned focus. Ignoring the cocaine was like ignoring a missing wing while investigating an airplane crash.
From Chapter 16, “$5 Million Says They’re Guilty”
. . . As far as our future jury was concerned, the most important thing that happened during our preliminary examination did not happen in the courtroom. It happened in a backroom. We were midway through the EMS testimony at the exam when a minor little story erupted on every TV screen and in every newspaper. The City of Detroit had settled the Green family’s lawsuit. While a district judge heard arguments as to whether we should be tried on a criminal charge, just a couple days after I was fired “for committing second-degree murder,” city hall negotiated the family’s $61-million lawsuit into a check for the modest amount of $5.1 million.
How astounding is this, in how many ways?
One way is that it was like all the sell-out penny-ante settlements I had watched the city make rather than chance the anti-cop sentiment of a Wayne County jury, except this one was on steroids. That’s probably the smallest, least important way of looking at it. But for twenty-four years I had watched it happen . . .
Another way it’s astounding doesn’t even require you to know anything about the law except what you read in the papers and see on TV. Four cops had been charged with a crime in this case. One likes to think that if we were innocent, we would be found innocent. What does it say about that modest proposition when the city pulls out its checkbook even before a trial was ordered for us? . . . Maybe the most important witness was a check that testified: “GUILTY IN THE SUM OF $5.1 MILLION.”
Can I possibly over-emphasize this? The police chief had declared us guilty of murder. The mayor had declared us guilty of murder. The press for the most part had declared us guilty of murder. The biggest non-sports celebrity in town, a TV news anchor, had slammed a Mag light on the anchor desk and declared us guilty. Every black preacher in town had declared us guilty. The NAACP had declared us guilty. What in the world could possibly trump all that? How about the City of Detroit making an unprecedented announcement that it would pay the biggest police-brutality settlement in anyone’s memory? How could any Detroit juror not file that away as, “Guilty. Signed, sealed and delivered? The city government said so. Money talks; no cop walks.”
As news reporters ran around gathering comment, pretty much everybody was astounded.
One of the most interesting comments came from William Goodman, a Detroit lawyer who specialized in going after police officers, handling – according to the Free Press – more than one hundred brutality lawsuits. The settlement, Goodman said, gave the defense “a stronger argument to change the venue” of the trial. Hey, no kidding. “I don’t know if anyone involved thought about that before agreeing to settle the case,” Goodman said. “It should have been a factor.”
Chief Judge Dalton Roberson of Recorder’s Court and Reader’s Digest’s “five worst judges in America” fame had other ideas. The Free Press reported with a straight face: “Roberson said he doesn’t think the settlement will make it easier to get a change of venue. Once the case comes to trial, publicity about the settlement will have died down and it won’t be hard to seat a (fair) jury, he said.” Sure.
From Chapter 15, “Cocaine and Common Sense”
. . . Brooks’s blood cocaine level was measured at 0.38, just three-quarters of the 0.50 cocaine level measured in Green’s blood. Keep in mind that (assistant medical examiner) Jiraki testified at our trial that the lowest level he had ever cited for cocaine as cause of death was 0.90. After we were in prison, however, the News story revealed that Jiraki had performed both the Brooks and the Green autopsies. Green’s cause of death – despite the 0.50 cocaine level – was listed as blunt-force trauma, and manner of death homicide. Just a few months earlier, Jiraki had ruled that Brooks – after struggling with police, with a 0.38 cocaine level, and no ethyl cocaine on board – died of cocaine abuse, and that manner of death was indeterminable. Ecorse is in Wayne County, adjoining Detroit’s Fourth Precinct, and is served by the same prosecutor’s office that came after Walter and me, and which fell in love with Kalil Jiraki – who refused to connect Green’s death with cocaine even though Jiraki had ruled a lesser amount of cocaine as the cause of another man’s death during a struggle with police.
The News reporters tried to interview Jiraki for their story. He faxed a reply: “I am not obligated to answer any questions to anybody except in court. If you agree to pay the fee for consultation, the format of the interview is determined by me: send written questions and you receive written answers.”
From Chapter 21, “One Judge Gets It Right”
. . . Almost two and a half years after the Court of Appeals ruling, the last day of July 1997 was also the final day of the Michigan Supreme Court’s session. Big cases have a history of being announced as courts recess, and it was widely expected that ours would be one of them. That would account for Channel 4’s Roger Webber hopping a plane for Texas, and for prison management notifying Walter and me that Webber was there and asking for an interview. Typically, I agreed and Walter did not. Then Walter and I were both summoned to the Fort Worth Unit office and – while being told nothing about what was going on – were asked to fill out forms with instructions for forwarding our mail back to Detroit. Is this exciting, or what? I was so wound up that I wrote down the address for the Bretton Drive home we had sold, then had to cross it out and write in my father-in-law’s address in Dearborn Heights. Three years and ten months in Texas was enough for me. Back home. New trial. All right!
Cops are skeptics, but that seemed like a reasonable attitude under the circumstances.
In a couple hours, I was summoned to the visitors’ room. The first words out of Roger Webber’s mouth were: “How does it feel that Walter’s getting out, and you’re not?” I’ve got to admit it was the legitimate question of the hour. I didn’t feel capable of answering, so I terminated the interview and walked back to my room. I couldn’t believe it.
