Breaking Rank (15 page)

GIDEON
v.
WAINWRIGHT
(1963). Clarence Earl Gideon was an impoverished ex-con who'd been in and out of prison most of his adult life. He broke into a pool hall in Florida, was arrested, tried, and convicted of burglary. At the time he was charged he asked the state to provide legal counsel. The state refused. Anthony Lewis's book
Gideon's Trumpet
(and a movie by the same name) tells the story of what happened next. Gideon appealed his conviction all the way to the Supreme Court where, represented by court-appointed counsel Abe Fortas (later to become a Supreme Court justice), the plaintiff prevailed. The Sixth Amendment provides that, “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right . . . to . . . the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.”

ESCOBEDO
v.
ILLINOIS
(1964). Arrested by Chicago cops in the shooting death of his brother-in-law, Danny Escobedo refused to talk to the police. Through his attorney he filed a writ of habeas corpus, Latin for “you have the body,” asking a judge to release his body from jail. The judge granted the writ and Escobedo was freed. Eleven days later, following additional investigation, he was rearrested. Escobedo refused to answer questions without his lawyer present. The cops kept his attorney from him throughout the night, during which time Escobedo confessed to the killing. The Supreme Court ruled in this case that the right to counsel extends to those
detained
, as well as those charged with a crime.

MIRANDA v. ARIZONA
(1966). Ernesto Miranda, a poor, mentally disturbed twenty-two-year-old, was arrested for kidnapping and raping an eighteen-year-old woman. The arrest and post-arrest fact pattern was not
dissimilar from the preceding cases as it relates to a defendant's right to “lawyer up.” But the Supreme Court's ruling on
Miranda
was the most sweeping and inclusive yet. It led to the police warning you've heard for years, as TV cops pull cards from their shirt pockets, or recite from memory:
You have the right to remain silent . . . anything you do or say can and will be used against you in a court of law . . . you have the right to be represented by an attorney . . . if you cannot afford an attorney one will be provided to you before any questioning.
Often not heard on the cop shows is what comes next:
Do you understand each of these rights as I have explained them to you? Keeping in mind these rights are you willing to answer my questions?
A “yes” response to each constitutes what's called an “intelligent waiver.” If you don't have it, you can't interrogate.

These aren't the only landmark Bill of Rights cases (which cover everything from abortion to flag burning, pornography to the death penalty), but they
are
the ones that most often piss off the cops. Decided in almost every case in a five-to-four vote of the 1960s Earl Warren Supreme Court, they divided and continue to divide conservatives from civil libertarians. And lazy or incompetent police officers from conscientious, law-abiding police officers.

CHAPTER 6

GETTING A GRIP ON GUNS

O
N A HOT
F
OURTH
of July, 1967, I tried to arrest an assault suspect inside Belmont Park in Mission Beach. He pushed me and fled. I gave chase. He was awfully fast for a big man (six feet two, 240 pounds), and had no compunction about barreling into boys and girls of all ages on the jammed midway. I was losing him as he sprinted by the plunge and headed toward the water. When he reached the boardwalk he made the mistake of turning south instead of north (or vaulting the three-foot wall and continuing on into the Pacific). In his path, forty yards away were two San Diego police officers, Bob Manus and Oscar Tron, assigned to patrol the holiday festivities in plainclothes. The suspect was headed right for them. I saw Tron and Manus look at each other, nod, and, as old linebackers will do, get down into a three-point stance.

You could hear the collision above the roar of the surf, the rollercoaster, the barkers on the midway, the shrieking gulls overhead. We still had to fight him at the scene, and I had to mace him when he kicked out a back window of my police car on the way to jail, but to jail he went. I figured that was the last I'd seen of Wilburt Lowe.

Six months later I got a call of a shooting on Central Avenue in City Heights. A large man had broken into a house. I walked up to the porch and peered in through the open door. Lying on the floor was the body of Wilburt Lowe, dead of a shotgun blast to the chest. Knowing what I knew of Mr. Lowe, if he'd broken into my home I'd have shot him—
if
I'd had a gun in the house. And knew how to use it.

I struggled with shooting in the academy. At the twenty-five-yard line I put as many rounds into adjoining targets as my own. One day, as I was on the verge of being fired for this particular problem, my classmates and I trooped down the concrete stairs into the target pit. We pulled our spring-loaded targets down and started scoring them. Sims, shooting next to me, looked from his target to mine, and laughed. His score was five points higher than possible. “Here,” he said, handing me a pencil. “Poke a couple of ‘.38s' in the ten-ring.” The donkey. Cheating was the fastest path to the unemployment line. I'd just have to work at it, and with the help of the rangemaster, come up with a passing score.

When that happened, it transformed a feared, onerous task into an almost enjoyable one. I never did come to love target shooting—even with ear protection the sound of a gun firing still makes me flinch. But I can see why a whole lot of Americans like nothing better than to spend a Sunday afternoon at the pistol range, pumping rounds into targets of concentric circles (or into images of Osama bin Laden).

Collecting guns? Why does anyone “accumulate” anything? Because they enjoy it. (I was grateful when in ninth-grade math, we could get Mr. Wynn, an avid stamp collector, to talk about his precious “first-day covers.” He'd spend the whole period talking not about algebra but his latest philatelic acquisition.)

I once took a burglary report from an old man in Golden Hill who'd reported in tears that his collection of military handguns and antique percussion pistols had been stolen. I asked him in the course of the investigation whether he'd fired any of the antiques. “Oh
heavens
no! I'm a collector, not a shooter.” He hadn't fired a weapon since the 1920s.

And hunting? As a boy I'd longed to have my own gun, and go hunting with my pal Gary and his father. I imagined cleaning my kill, eating it, and, as Gary's father put it (even back then), helping to control wildlife populations that threatened delicate ecological imbalances. I did make a couple of “hunting” trips—to Gary's grandfather's chicken ranch to shoot sparrows with a pellet gun at age ten, and to the backcountry with high school buddies to kill rabbits caught in the glare of our headlights. The experiences soured me on the sport, and I could never do it again. But I have no trouble
understanding why people enjoy taking down elk or pheasant or duck (so long as
someone
eats the poor creatures).

All these legitimate reasons for gun ownership notwithstanding, I am an unyielding proponent of gun control—because of what I saw and experienced as a cop.

For every armed home invasion robbery prevented by a firearm, there is at least one homeowner who has had his gun taken from him and used on him. Or who's shot his sixteen-year-old daughter or fourteen-year-old son trying to sneak back in to the house through a bedroom window. Or killed himself accidentally while cleaning the weapon. Or turned impulsively to a firearm to settle a domestic “dispute.” Or picked up a gun when seized by a suicidal impulse.

Guns, with people attached to them, are responsible for roughly 30,000 deaths a year in this country. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)'s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control reports that of 29,537 gun deaths in 2001, 2,937 were of children between the ages of 15 and 19, 414 between 10 and 14, 160 between 5 and 9. And 81 between zero and four. Babies. Almost 17,000 of all annual gun deaths are suicides.

According to Arthur Kellerman in the
Journal of Trauma
(1998), a gun is eleven times more likely to be used to commit suicide than for self-defense. A home with a gun in it is five times more likely to experience the suicide of a household member than homes without guns (Kellerman in the
New England Journal of Medicine,
1993; Peter Cummings
, American Journal of Public Health,
1997).

Every year, according to the CDC, hospital ERs receive approximately 200,000 victims who've survived gunshot trauma. The average cost per patient? Fourteen thousand dollars. The cumulative lifetime cost of a year's worth of gunshot trauma is $911 million. Plus another $13.4 billion in lost productivity.

Who's getting shot? Young black men, disproportionately. African-American
males have a gunshot mortality rate of 41.6 per one hundred thousand people. White males? Less than half the rate, 16.2. The rate of gunshot deaths for women, of all races, is 3.3. The gunshot death rate in Western European countries is 0.1–0.5 per one hundred thousand citizens.

It's personal with me, it always has been. I've seen the ravages of gun violence up close. I killed a man because I thought he had a gun. I wept for a colleague in San Diego whose five-year-old son shot himself to death with daddy's service weapon. I spent a night in Seattle's Harborview Medical Center, praying that one of my cops, shot by a stalled motorist he'd stopped to help, would make it. He didn't. A friend and colleague, an assistant U.S. attorney in Seattle and gutsy president of Washington CeaseFire, was assassinated as he sat at his computer one night. I'm sick to death of guns, of the needless pain and suffering they cause.

I've had it with the National Rifle Association—not its membership but its leadership. I've got even less use for the United States Congress, which consistently caves in to NRA lobbyists. The relatively few lawmakers who actually pay attention to the will of the people on this issue understand that
most
Americans are fed up with guns. Harris Polls in September 2004, conducted both before and after Congress permitted weapons banned in 1995 to once again be sold legally, produced these results (expressed in percentages):

            
QUESTION
: A ban prohibiting the sales of assault rifles and high capacity ammunition magazines expires on September 14. Would you favor or oppose continuing this ban?