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| The Spanish Inquisition - from Wikimedia Commons |
Under Suspicion
by Judith Cullen
© 2016
If you have not been, you do not understand. If you have not been stopped by the police,
or called in for questioning, or any of the other degrees of being suspected of
committing a crime, you have no idea what this process is like and what it does
to you. You have no idea what it is like
to know
that you are innocent, and be in the power of people who believe fervently that
you are not. We are all raised on the
notion that every citizens is innocent until proven guilty. It probably seems simple to you. If you are innocent, you have nothing to
worry about. Think again.
In reading the account in the Boston Globe, and artist SteveLocke's own account of being stopped by the police ("I Fit the Description", Dec 5, 2015) last year on his way to
work at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design where he is on the faculty, I was
reminded that "innocent until proven guilty" is a figure of law in America , not a
figure of practice. It is something
lawyers remind citizens during voir dire,
something that judges remind seated juries.
It is not something that happens on the streets in the midst of a crime investigation. I am sorry to disillusion you. It does not
matter who you are, being a suspect messes with your head.
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| Steve Locke as dressed the day he was stopped complete with his faculty ID |
It would surprise a lot of my friends and a few family
members to know that I was a suspect once.
It was the spring of 1985, and I was wrapping up my first year of
graduate school. It had not been a great
year. Purdue was not the right choice
for my graduate studies. All sorts of
things cropped up over the year to reinforce that point. I rented an "efficiency" apartment
where I shared a landing and a bathroom with a domestically violent couple and
a large platoon of roaches. I contracted pneumonia at the beginning of the
second semester and spent weeks sleeping in a recliner. Then, just as I was looking
forward to moving home and regrouping (I was not being continued for the second
year), I became a suspect in an arson case involving a school warehouse.
I had not set that fire. An undergrad work-study student, who was also leaving the
school at the end of term sans degree, and I had been among the last persons on the scene. We had been returning furniture
pieces to the department storage. We'd
heard about the fire when we got back to campus. I received a phone call late
that afternoon. Would I come in for
questioning? Thinking I had nothing to
fear, because I had done nothing wrong, I went.
What followed was four hours of questioning, including a
polygraph test. The detective tried
everything in his arsenal to wedge open the slightest chink in my story of
innocence. You know that stuff you see
on TV and in movies about clever maneuvers when questioning suspects? It's not bullshit. At one point the questioning Detective even
said, suddenly, "So, you like ice cream, do you?" I was stunned, and admitted I did. Turns out he had seen me earlier in the day
walking down a main street off campus eating ice cream with a
classmate.
"I saw you eating an ice cream cone with a tall girl in
a jeans jacket."
"Detective, it was an ice cream sandwich and my friend
was wearing coveralls."
Despite my seemingly self-possessed answer, after about 90
minutes I started to wonder if maybe I had actually done it. If it had been an accident. Matt had backed up the University van as we
left, and hit the garage door. Had a
spark from the contact hit something and set it ablaze? The Detective felt my wavering and pressed
for a crack.
After the polygraph test, while being questioned again, I
finally said, "Look, I didn't deliberately set the fire, but after the
last three hours I can't with all certainty say that something we did might
have accidentally, unknowingly caused this."
"Why would you say that?"
"Because, after all this I am beginning to doubt my own
possession of truth. I watch TV, I have
an imagination!"
After four hours I was released. It was my 23rd
Birthday. That also explains the ice
cream. I made it clear that I was
planning to leave the state in the next two weeks and that I wasn't returning.
The Detective blustered his way through everything but the cliché "don't
leave town." He said he would be in touch
before I was scheduled to leave. He implied that his permission was required for me to do so. He never said it directly.
I flew home to Washington
with no intention of returning to Indiana ,
ever. A few months later I sent the
detective a postcard of Mount St. Helens erupting
with the words "I didn't do this one either," scrawled across
it. That was when I found out that they
had solved the crime. They were able to establish that a couple of
University maintenance employees had set the fire. The motive was not shared, and I did not pursue it.
I understand entirely that Matt and I looked like prime
suspects - students leaving the University with an ax to grind. Except that's not me. I am not, nor have I ever been, the
vindictive-revenge type. I was angry and
disappointed at my failure to succeed, and I may have blamed the department or
individuals at the time. But the whole
year had been mostly a bollix from start to finish. That's what happens when you walk down a path
and find out it is the wrong one - nothing works for you, nothing clicks. At
some level I understood that. I was
happy to be going home, and smart enough not to put that approaching liberty in
jeopardy. Getting 2000 miles distant
from a place where I clearly did not belong, was plenty of resolution for me.
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And When Did You Last See Your Father, by William Frederick
Yeames
1878 oil on canvas - public domain
|
But the doubt that was sewn during that four hours at the
Lafayette Police Station was very real.
Sitting alone in a neutrally painted room for over 20 minutes, hooked up to a polygraph
machine, my brain was churning and I was genuinely afraid. I was afraid that they would not let me go
home. I was afraid that, despite my absolute
certainty hours earlier, maybe somehow I had done it. I was afraid that my life was turning into
one of those cases you hear of on the
late news where an existence is demolished for years before innocence is
proven, just because someone was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
So when I read the account of Steve Locke's encounter, I had
some small understanding of what he went through. I understand what it feels like to know you
are innocent, and to have your word not be treated with even minimal respect, much less as
truth. I understand the frustration of
having to stand up for your own good character, while someone questions it repeatedly.
How much worse must this have been for Professor
Locke, because he's a black male and I am a white female. The account on his blog clearly expresses
this. He was afraid, as I was. His fear was not of demolition and
defamation, but of total destruction and death.
That is the tragic reality of our times.
It should not be that way. I must
not be that way. "Innocent until
proven guilty" should be more than a courtroom platitude.
If you have never been under suspicion, you do not
understand. A part of me hopes that you
never, ever understand. I do hope, for
the good of us all, that you believe.
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