Acting Supreme Court Justice Joel Blumenfeld (NY) ruled last April that Queens District Attorney Richard Brown’s program of interviewing suspects before arraignment violates New York State’s Rules of Professional Conduct. According to an article by Daniel Wise in the New York Law Journal (here), in People v. Perez, Judge Blumenfeld provided a sanction for the violation in ruling that the D.A.’s office could not use a statement given by Elisaul Perez in a pre-arraignment interview in its case stemming from Perez’s 2009 arrest for assault and robbery of an iPod and cash.
Judge Bloomenfeld found that the script used in interviews preliminary to arraignment gave suspects a “false sense of urgency” to speak up “now or never” about the suspect’s version of the crime, and a false promise that the office would investigate that version.
Bloomenfeld asked Ellen Yaroshefsky, Executive Director of the Jacob Burns Ethics Center at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and ethics consultant, to review the controversial program in which the Queens prosecuting attorneys meet with suspects before arraignment and utilize a script that encourages them to provide information prior to having the assistance of counsel. Yaroshefsky concluded that the program was misleading and in violation of the Rules of Professional Conduct.
The District Attorney’s office sought to bar Bloomenfeld from examining the ethics of the program, but an appeals panel turned down the DA’s request for a writ of prohibition. Brown’s office has appealed Blumenfeld’s decision in the Perez case.
According to Andrew Keshner’s article (here), again in the New York Law Journal, Acting Supreme Court Justice Jeffrey Lebowitz suppressed statements made by suspect Raymond Gillespie in connection with a rape case based on the same issues in the District Attorney Brown’s office, namely, the suggestion of urgency and the unfulfilled promise to investigate in an interview prior to the suspect’s receiving Miranda warnings.
According to the Wise article, Chief Assistant District Attorney John Ryan indicated that the office will continue the program begun in 2007. As of April 2012, nearly 10,000 suspects had been interviewed in the program. More than 60 percent of them either confessed or spoke about the crime in question.
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