Breaking the rules of interrogation

No one was more surprised than the judge when the prosecutor said in the middle of the courtroom that David Alexander Bostick’s confession was false and wrongly provoked.

Assistant State Attorney Pete Magrino, during a motion hearing in August 2010, advised Hernando County Circuit Judge Jack Springstead to disregard everything he remembered about Bostick’s arrest two years earlier.

“Basically, Bostick said that he was scared during the interview,” Magrino said in open court.

He also said Bostick had parroted, under duress, what the detective said happened when Pat and Evelyn DePalma were killed in their home Oct. 29, 2006. The detective, in turn, took it as a confession.

Springstead recalled presiding over a hearing about the case soon after Bostick’s arrest.

“It was so clear-cut when we had that hearing,” Springstead said. “I’m just taken aback.”

Springstead made those statements less than a week before the trial of Robert Jardin, who would be convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the DePalma slayings.

“It just seemed to me that it was (Bostick’s) information and his cooperation which led us to where we are today,” Springstead said.

“Judge, it had absolutely nothing to do with why we are here today,” Magrino told him. “(Jardin) is here today because of a cold case DNA hit four months later with the defendant not being on the radar screen at all.”

Bostick, who was 16 years old when the DePalmas were murdered and 18 years old when detectives interviewed him, was the first person arrested for the slayings. His charges were expunged.

From 2 p.m. April 10, 2008, until 2 a.m. the next morning, he sat inside the interview room, mostly face-to-face with Detective Phil Lakin. He was transported to a juvenile detention center in Ocala where he remained jailed for almost three weeks on first-degree murder charges. The case never went before the grand jury.

No one from the sheriff’s office is allowed to mention Bostick’s name publicly. Requests for any information on his arrest – including video footage of the interrogation, media releases and various other reports – were denied.

Those denials were based on Bostick’s age at the time of the murder and his expunged charges, according to the sheriff’s office.

Hernando Today obtained the interrogation video from another agency.

Manipulation with a soothing voice

“If a tactic caused an innocent person to confess, it is gross police conduct,” said former prosecutor, FBI agent and police officer Don Barbee, who has taught courses on the legal side of police interrogations.

While detectives have legal latitude when interviewing a suspect, including being permitted to lie in an effort to induce an incriminating statement, several boundaries remain.

No props are allowed inside the interrogation room. Religion can’t be mentioned. The same goes for threats to take away children.

“Even deception can cross the line,” said Barbee.

In general, the rules for police interrogations are “amorphous” and open to interpretation, he said.

In order to violate Bostick’s rights to due process, Lakin would have had to do “something so strong to cause this kid to break,” said Barbee.

He was the lead prosecutor in Hernando County when Bostick was arrested, but he was not assigned to the case. He recalled the arrest and remembered the detectives’ decision to send Bostick to jail in spite of his office’s objections.

“Phil Lakin must’ve seen something to make him believe he was right in moving in this direction,” Barbee said.

The sheriff’s office prohibited Lakin and his former supervisor, Capt. Billy Beetz, who also took part in the Bostick interrogation, to comment on this story.

“At this time, current and past investigators are unable to speak about the DePalma case due to the possibility of further investigations, additional suspects and/or matters emanating from a reversal on appeal,” said Deputy Wendy McGinnis, a sheriff’s spokeswoman.

Lakin didn’t raise his voice while he interrogated Bostick. He often whispered. He started the interview discussing how determined he was to solve the case of Bostick’s dead aunt and uncle. To build more of a rapport with Bostick, the detective joked with him about smoking pot, shooting and skinning his first deer and his mother’s crazy ex-boyfriend.

He also asked leading questions. He frequently used profane language. He said several times he had someone in mind to use as a pawn in the investigation – an accomplice who witnessed the killings, but could be manipulated to confess and flip on the others.

Lakin speaks with a slight lisp and a heavy New England accent.

“The window of opportunity is about to slam shut for the one person because I don’t even need that (expletive deleted) one person with the rest of the (expletive deleted) I got with the physical evidence I’ve got with the other things I’ve got surrounding the case,” Lakin said while maintaining a soft voice with hardly any inflection. “I’m not even gonna need that one person. I’m gonna be able to shut this down without them … and just tell everybody shut the (expletive deleted) up. I don’t need ya. Your time has passed.”

Bostick liked what he heard.

“I think that’s fair,” he told Lakin.

A modern lie-detector test – known as a computerized voice stress analyzer – was used on Bostick. Based on the results, Lakin proceeded with more tenacity.

Six hours into the interrogation, he showed photographs to Bostick, which he said were images of the skinny teen inside a gas station a few blocks from the DePalma house the night they were murdered. To Lakin, it was proof that Bostick, who lived 30 miles south in Lutz, was in Masaryktown the night of the murder and knew how to get to the DePalma house.

Bostick admitted the kid in the photos looked similar to him, but he pointed out he didn’t own a pair of hiking boots with flaps. He also said on the interrogation video he never owned a denim jacket nor did he ever grow his sideburns so long.

For hours an emotional Bostick told Lakin he had only been to the DePalma house one time. He insisted he barely knew them and he would never kill them.

Exhausted from his verbal tussle with Lakin, he lay his head down and described a dream-like scenario – one in which he never witnessed the murders, but had been at the house while two other men had killed Pat and Evelyn DePalma.

He used only their first names during the interview.

It was good enough for Lakin. It was good enough for the sheriff’s office. It wasn’t good enough for Magrino.

“Even if Bostick’s statement had been free and voluntary, it was legally insufficient for him to be charged with anything criminally,” he said.

“He never should’ve been arrested,” Magrino continued. “They did it anyway.”

‘Play the crime down
no matter what it is’

“That’s a bad technique,” said Albert Joseph Jr., a retired police investigator with the Rochester, N.Y., Police Department and author of “We Get Confessions.”

Joseph, after reading many of Lakin’s quotes from the interrogation transcript, said the detective made a series of missteps.

He took umbrage at Lakin calling Bostick a liar.

“You play the crime down no matter what it is,” said Joseph. “You just don’t walk up to someone on the street and say you’re lying, so don’t do that during an interview. If you wouldn’t like it, they aren’t going to like it. All that’s going to do is start them off.”

He said Lakin’s liberal use of obscenities was “bad” and “inappropriate.”

Showing Bostick the photographs, telling him he knew he was in the house the night of the murders and telling him DNA evidence was inevitably going to link him to the stabbings was “putting thoughts into his mind,” which is a recipe for a false confession, he said.

Joseph stopped short of calling it a confession by coercion, but Richard Leo, author of “Police Interrogation and American Justice,” believes coercion doesn’t always come in the form of temper tantrums and obvious threats.

Leo, a Professor of Law at the University of San Francisco, wrote in his book that “compliant false confessions occur” whenever a detective persuades the suspect he has been “indisputably caught” and that the “most viable way to mitigate his punishment and escape his situation” is through admitting guilt.

Interrogators, Leo stated, frequently resort to manipulation to “induce distress by attacking the suspect’s self-confidence, by not permitting him to assert his innocence and by causing him to feel powerless and trapped.”

Based on his research, oftentimes when an interrogation lasts several hours – or in Bostick’s case, for most of the afternoon, throughout the entire evening and into the following morning – it can be impactful by “weakening a suspect’s resistance, inducing fatigue and heightening suggestibility.”

Bostick’s former attorney, Michael Maddux of Tampa, called it a classic case of a “false arrest on a forced confession.”

It continued beyond
the interrogation room

In Florida, formal charges need to be filed in 21 days or else a jailed suspect must be released.

After Bostick spent nearly three weeks in the Juvenile Detention Center in Ocala, investigators still tried to keep close tabs on him.

They also interviewed his high school friends, including at least one who moved out of state.

“I know subsequent to the release of Mr. Bostick that certainly a concerted effort by law enforcement was done to local individuals who had contact with him to see if they had any information,” said Magrino.

One day, Bostick discovered a global positioning system device underneath his car. The sheriff’s office used it to track him.

It infuriated him and his lawyer. Maddux returned the $3,000 gadget only after Magrino made the request, he said.

Bostick was a senior in high school when he was arrested. He spent most of April behind bars. He graduated on time, but had to complete most of his schoolwork remotely.

Meanwhile, his classmates, teachers, neighbors and some relatives thought he was a murderer.

Magrino wrote a letter to the Hillsborough County School Board in May 2008 explaining he had not been formally charged and he had no plans to bring the case before the grand jury.

Bostick wanted to enlist in the U.S. Army, but his murder charges disrupted his plans.

In 2010, Magrino voluntarily wrote another letter, this time to a U.S. Army recruiter in Tampa.

“The arrest of Mr. Bostick was against my advice after having discussions with members of HCSO,” stated Magrino. “Subsequent to the arrest, no evidence which supported any involvement of Mr. Bostick in the homicides was discovered. Additional investigation by this office revealed documentary and witness testimony that supported a lack of involvement of Mr. Bostick in the homicides.

“Given the total lack of evidence inculpating Mr. Bostick, I am of the opinion that he should NOT be penalized in any way, shape or form for his arrest in the case,” Magrino wrote.

The judge noticed a pattern

In July 2008, a few months after Bostick was interrogated, Lakin faced off with another suspect, 33-year-old Robert Jardin.

He was brought in after a DNA sample from a container of milk linked him to the murder scene. A search warrant also uncovered items in his possession that previously belonged to the DePalmas.

The aforementioned evidence was enough to convict Jardin, but a confession was thrown out before jurors could hear it.

Jardin, during his interrogation, stood up and told Lakin, “I’m done … I would like to go please.”
He repeated himself several more times and each time Lakin told him to stay.

“OK, do me a favor,” Lakin told him. “Do your best to help us resolve it because it’s in your best interest to help us resolve it.”

Jardin said he had been in the room for more than three hours, according to court records.

The interrogation lasted 14 hours. Most of what Jardin said to detectives was never disclosed during trial. A defense’s motion to suppress Jardin’s confession was granted.

Joseph said, based on his experience, it is rare for a judge to throw out a confession in a murder case. It happens when a detective egregiously violates a suspect’s Miranda rights, makes unfulfilled promises in exchange for a confession or uses coercion.

“It just appears to the court that when a person says, ‘Can I go please,’ he’s acknowledging that these people control him at that point and he wants to leave and doesn’t want to talk to them anymore,” said Judge Springstead.

Jardin’s defense attorney, Alan Fanter, tried to suppress more statements, including moments during the interrogation when Lakin drew the conclusion the suspect was high on drugs during the murder.

Fanter didn’t want the jury to hear it. Springstead denied the motion, but took a moment to criticize Lakin’s interviewing methods.

“It does appear that, in many instances, not only in this case, but other cases, there are times when the officer we’re discussing makes many types of comments about things that don’t amount to a question,” said Springstead. “I guess that is the best way to phrase it.”