Black Criminal Defense Lawyer Tells of Being Cuffed, Suspected as Getaway Driver
Houston criminal defense lawyer Jacquelyn Carpenter and a male friend were in the wrong place at the wrong time Monday evening.
She and the friend, who are both black, were on their way to go swimming after a trip to Walmart to buy swimsuits. Suddenly a swarm of police cars approached. She was ordered to put her hands in the air, to get out of the car, to follow one of the officers to his squad car. She knew without looking that a gun was pointed in her direction.
Police apparently believed Carpenter’s friend had just robbed a Cricket store and Carpenter was driving the getaway vehicle, and it was all because of a misidentification by a woman on the other side of a parking lot.
Just hours later, at about 4 a.m. Tuesday, Carpenter began to write about the experience on the Sustained! blog that is published by the name partner at her law firm, Davis & Associates. Carpenter, a 2003 magna cum laude graduate of Texas Southern University, had experienced firsthand the fear and confusion felt by many of the defendants she represents.
“My mind was whirling,” she told the ABA Journal. “There was so much stuff all at once, and I can’t believe this is happening.”
The story unfolds in Carpenter’s blog post. One of the officers who had stopped her, a Harris County constable, began to ask questions. Where was she coming from? At the time, Carpenter didn’t know why she had been pulled over, but she realized it was far from a routine traffic stop.
Carpenter, writing in the third person, explains what happened next. “She knew the answer; it was simple. She had no real reason not to tell him, but innocent people go to prison all the time because they cooperate thinking they are innocent and the judicial system will work. No, she refused to be part of that group. Besides, she knew better. She had to take her own advice on this one. She told the officer, ‘I don’t want to answer your questions.’
“The officer seemed surprised, but came back quickly, ‘Why not? If you don’t have anything to hide, you can tell me where you were.’ The officer was insinuating she had something to hide, but she did not. She was a criminal defense attorney. Should she tell him? Would it make a difference? Probably not. She responded to his inquiry, ‘I want my lawyer.” Another surprised look, a narrowing of the eyes, so she answered his unasked question, ‘Arrest me. If that is what you are going to do, then arrest me. But understand, I still want my lawyer.’ The officer put the handcuffs on her.”
Sitting handcuffed in the squad car, Carpenter could hear bits and pieces of the officers’ questioning of her friend, who didn’t display the same reticence about talking. He told about the Walmart trip and revealed that Carpenter is a criminal defense lawyer.
It turned out that Carpenter’s car was stopped at a light outside a Cricket store after it had been robbed, and a woman outside the store had told police that Carpenter’s friend looked like the suspect, even though he was a parking lot away. Another man at the scene wasn’t so sure. He accompanied police to take another look, and as Carpenter waited in handcuffs in the police car, he looked at Carpenter’s friend and told police, “That’s not him.”
But Carpenter’s ordeal still wasn’t over. A police officer continued to ask questions, Carpenter says, although she didn’t answer. Police took Carpenter and her friend back to the Cricket store, and had her car towed car there. She and her friend weren’t released until police reviewed the surveillance video.
“This experience was humiliating, insulting, demeaning, hurtful, scary—everything our clients tell us it is,” she wrote.
“It was so easy for this lady to randomly select a black male from the general public and have him and me scrutinized and interrogated, which is a scary thought in and of itself.”
Carpenter told the ABA Journal she also posted her story on Facebook, and since then she’s heard from a lot of black men who told her she now knows what it feels like to be one of them. She also spoke to a Hispanic lawyer who said he was wrongly detained on two different occasions, once with a police helicopter circling overhead.
She thinks her rights were violated, since she was detained even after the witness said her friend wasn’t involved and questioned even after she asked for a lawyer. But she doesn’t plan to sue.
“It wouldn’t be worth anything,” she said. “And I think that’s part of the sadness involved. You can violate somebody’s constitutional rights and at the end of the day you can get off scot-free because there are no damages in it.”
