This is not a comedy sketch
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At least, we're five months away from April Fool's Day…
Lydia Wheeler, "Court rules request for 'lawyer dog' too 'ambiguous'", The Hill 10/30/2017:
The Louisiana Supreme Court won't hear an appeal from a man who claimed he told police during an interview to "just give me a lawyer dog,” with a justice saying the request was "ambiguous." […]
[D]etectives reportedly advised the defendant of his Miranda rights, and the defendant stated he understood and waived those rights.
The defendant, however, claimed he invoked his right to counsel in a second police interview when he said “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.” […]
“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,” [Louisiana Supreme Court Justice Scott Crichton] said.
A non-canine animal comes to mind in this connection.
Is it possible that Justice Crichton is really dense enough to believe what he wrote? Or that the defense attorney was too incompetent to explain clearly what a vocative is? And that the court, which voted 6-1 to deny the appeal, really didn't anticipate the reaction?
Ed Krayewski, "He Said He Wanted a 'Lawyer[,] Dog'; The Court Ruled That Was Too Vague", Reason 10/30/2017:
Even setting aside that this errs on the side of law enforcement rather than on the side of the accused, there is nothing in Demesme's statement that is ambiguous, assuming the officers involved understood Demesme's vernacular. (And they had to have understood—if they didn't, why would they have been assigned to the questioning?)
Cricton's argument relies specifically on the ambiguity of what a "lawyer dog" might mean. And this alleged ambiguity is attributable entirely to the lack of a comma between "lawyer" and "dog" in the transcript. As such, the ambiguity is not the suspect's but the court's. And it requires willful ignorance to maintain it.
Stephen Hart said,
October 30, 2017 @ 7:29 pm
"At least, we're four months away from April Fool's Day…"
"At least we're four months away from April Fool's Day…"
Explain.
[(myl) If the date were near April 1, I'd think that the story was a prank or a joke. But it's not, so I don't.]
Steve Morrison said,
October 30, 2017 @ 8:21 pm
Five months away, by my calculation.
[(myl) Right — fixed.]
Gregory Kusnick said,
October 30, 2017 @ 11:16 pm
Five months away is at least four months away, by my reckoning.
Lukas said,
October 31, 2017 @ 2:40 am
Are you kidding me. If this person is wilfully obtuse, he's too callous for his job. If he really doesn't understand the sentence, he's too dumb for his job.
Adam said,
October 31, 2017 @ 3:10 am
Impllication: People who don't speak prestige dialects don't deserve lawyers.
Keith said,
October 31, 2017 @ 3:16 am
I think that there is a lot we don't yet know about the interview (apparently this is a second event, and we know nothing at all of the first).
From the report at http://reason.com/blog/2017/10/30/he-said-he-wanted-a-lawyer-dog-the-court
From that article, it also looks like Demesme was not formally under arrest during the interview, but his Miranda rights were read to him. Could Demesme, at that moment, have believed himself to under arrest and not to be able to end the interview and walk free (i.e., was Demesme under custodial interrogation, rather than formal detention)?
To my mind, the interviewing officer should have heard a possibly rhetorical question of "why don't you just give me a lawyer" and responded with a request for clarification, along the lines of "are you asking for a lawyer?"
Adrian said,
October 31, 2017 @ 3:51 am
Judges who are this obtuse should be suspended.
Jamie said,
October 31, 2017 @ 4:38 am
Is the supposed ambiguity in the word 'dog' or the fact it was framed as a rhetorical question? (He asked, rhetorically.)
J.W. Brewer said,
October 31, 2017 @ 6:29 am
There is a lot of context we are missing. In particular neither the decision of the trial-court judge rejecting Mr. Demesme's motion to exclude the confession from evidence nor the decision of the intermediate appellate court affirming (or at least refusing to disturb) that decision seem easily accessible with a few minutes' googling. Nor do the briefs presented to the Louisiana Supreme Court, which might have presented other rationales for coming to that result that do not require parsing the sentence in question as ambiguous. But up to nine other judges (trial judge, five others on Supreme Court and a plausible guess of three judges on the intermediate court) agreed with the bottom-line proposition that the confession should not be excluded before trial without necessarily agreeing with Justice Crichton's rationale. In many jurisdictions this isn't even the sort of adverse decision by the trial judge a defendant can challenge on appeal until after the trial is over, so if Louisiana permits that sort of "interlocutory" (to use the jargon) appeal here, it may be in limited circumstances or with an unusually demanding standard. This piece from the New Orleans paper gives a little more context than the rest of the internet can be bothered to: http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2017/10/orleans_rape_suspects_lawyer_d.html
J.W. Brewer said,
October 31, 2017 @ 6:32 am
And it's separately not clear to me (to be fair to Justice Crichton, although he could have been clearer if this was the point) whether the dog-free sentence "if you think I did it, why don't you give me a lawyer" would be sufficiently more definite than "maybe I need a lawyer" to fall on the other side of the relevant line.
Martha said,
October 31, 2017 @ 7:10 am
Maybe I'm dense, but I actually wonder what Jamie is asking rhetorically (Is the supposed ambiguity in the word "dog" or the fact it was framed as a rhetorical question?) The whole "dog" thing is irrelevant if "why don't you get me a lawyer" is unclear. I agree with Keith that the question should have been responded to with a request for clarification (either "Are you asking for a lawyer?" or "what is a lawyer dog?").
Also, is it not spelled "dawg"?
J.W. Brewer said,
October 31, 2017 @ 10:28 am
FWIW, re the desirability of a request for clarification, what the Supreme Court (of the U.S. rather than Louisiana) said in the Davis case referenced by Justice Crichton was "Of course, when a suspect makes an ambiguous or equivocal statement it will often be good police practice for the interviewing officers to clarify whether or not he actually wants an attorney. That was the procedure followed by the NIB agents in this case. Clarifying questions help protect the rights of the suspect by ensuring that he gets an attorney if he wants one, and will minimize the chance of a confession being suppressed due to subsequent judicial secondguessing as to the meaning of the suspect's statement regarding counsel. But we decline to adopt a rule requiring officers to ask clarifying questions."
Jerry Friedman said,
October 31, 2017 @ 1:54 pm
I wonder whether the judge would have ruled any differently if the transcriber had put commas around "dog" and had, as Martha suggested, spelled it "dawg".
Justice Crichton's choice to quote the phrase "lawyer dog" is ambiguous and equivocal, since we don't know whether he was saying that phrase wasn't clear enough, or just referring to or mocking a striking phrase in the request, that is, a rather ordinary sequence of words that looked striking to him.
Martha said,
October 31, 2017 @ 6:32 pm
Now that I think about it, I think a big part of any confusion is the "if y'all think I did it" part. Combined with the "why don't you," it comes off a little bit "if you love it so much, then why don't you marry it." Which is not an actual suggestion.
ngage92 said,
October 31, 2017 @ 6:48 pm
Louisiana Supreme Court racist. Also, dog bites man.
Mike said,
October 31, 2017 @ 7:29 pm
@JW Brewer
My guess best guess is that the other judges decided the motion on other, possibly/probably reasonable grounds, and Mr. Crichton decided to add some snide, racist commentary: "if you don't speak in my approved dialect, you're in trouble."
chris said,
October 31, 2017 @ 7:31 pm
I agree with Keith that the question should have been responded to with a request for clarification
Sure, if the interrogators were acting in good faith and genuinely making an effort to not violate the suspect's rights. But why would they want to do that?
Dennis Paul Himes said,
November 1, 2017 @ 9:57 am
I don't understand the "at least" in "At least, we're five months away from April Fool's Day". To me, "at least" should introduce a mitigation, but then your meaning would be, "The fact that it's five months away from April Fool's Day means that this is not a bad as it appears", which doesn't seem to be your actual meaning. Perhaps you meant "We're at least five months away from April Fool's Day", but to my American English speaker understanding that's not the same thing.
stedak said,
November 1, 2017 @ 10:56 am
I read "at least" to mean: "I can't prove absolutely that this is not a joke, but at least I know for sure it wasn't done for April Fool's Day."
Judith said,
November 1, 2017 @ 12:11 pm
No question – racism and "dialectism" is a good part of this picture.
J.W. Brewer said,
November 1, 2017 @ 1:52 pm
Anyone interested in Justice Crichton's own (very markedly regional and distant from the national "prestige" norm) native dialect of AmEng might be interested in this clip, which features him being interviewed over the phone recently by a radio station in his home town of Shreveport. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dffSchh29V0
Jerry Friedman said,
November 2, 2017 @ 1:29 pm
Dennis Paul Himes: That "at least" is familiar to me. I'd paraphrase the comment slightly differently from stedak: "This is not a comedy sketch. Well, I'm not sure of that, but at least I have the argument that it's not April Fool's Day." The comma suggests that meaning to me.
Weakening the statement that it's not comedy strengthens the implication that it's ridiculous enough to be comedy.
Lance said,
November 2, 2017 @ 2:47 pm
Are you kidding? It's not clear? If you read Crichton's statement at http://www.lasc.org/opinions/2017/17KK0954.sjc.addconc.pdf, he makes it perfectly clear that, while he concurs in general in denying the writ for whatever reasons, his very specific problem with the sixth amendment issue is the phrase "laywer dog". Just to quote him once again:
He's very, very specific that it's the reference to a "lawyer dog" that makes this, in his view, not a clear and unambiguous request. And that he's filing a concurring opinion specifically to make this point.
Maybe the writ should have been denied anyway for other reasons. That doesn't change the fact that Crichton's opinion on the Miranda rights issue is ludicrous and obtuse.
Vulcan With a Mullet said,
November 3, 2017 @ 9:44 am
Has nobody considered the likely possibility that what he was saying was "Why don't you give me a lawyer, dog…"? using "dog" as colloquial "man/dude", which is VERY COMMON African-American slang?
Seriously? Or am I missing something?
ngage92 said,
November 3, 2017 @ 12:49 pm
Vulcan, that is 100% what he was saying but the court is racist and therefore was determined to rule against him one way or another.