Maricopa County Attorney
Richard Romley

Maricopa County Attorney RICHARD ROMLEY would have us believe history was served, along with justice, when jurors convicted DOODY of first-degree murder...

Sheriff's investigators are weary because this case ranks among the great law enforcement humiliations in Arizona history. Detectives let a mental patient lead them to the wrong suspects, they fed information to the Tucson men, then hounded them into false confessions. They failed to run tests on the murder weapon for weeks after confiscating it.

The County Attorney's Office is sick of it because, while cops made a joke of the police work, they made a farce of the criminal justice system. Without a link of physical evidence, they managed to win three grand jury indictments and an arraignment against innocent men. They elicited another false confession in the Cameron murder case.

This month, Maricopa County Attorney RICHARD ROMLEY rejected a request by a group of defense attorneys for an independent committee to examine the issue of false confessions.

The request stemmed from the case of PETERSON, a mentally disturbed man who spent fourteen months in jail after he was charged with killing a Cave Creek woman. He was released in January after a West Phoenix youth said his girlfriend killed the woman.

Romley expressed outrage over the case, and criticized the role sheriff's deputies played in obtaining confessions from four Tucson suspects in the 1991 Buddhist Temple massacre.

County Attorney RICHARD ROMLEY reportedly wanted to pursue charges against the Tucson men, according to a report. But WHITE told investigators, that changed when ROMLEY became influenced by growing bad publicity over the case.

MR. ROMLEY now says he will start looking 'with a jaundiced eye' at confessions taken by sheriff's deputies.

Despite protestations from the then Sheriff, TOM AHNOS, that the Tucson men were still involved, MR. ROMLEY'S office had little choice but to dismiss the charges - the only evidence against them had been their own confessions.

Those familiar with the criminal justice system are not surprised. False confessions are hardly a rarity in Arizona. Dating back to the ground-breaking MIRANDA vs. ARIZONA in 1966, the state has spawned several US Supreme Court cases chronicling law enforcement misconduct in obtaining confessions that violate an accused's constitutional rights.

Nor are they limited to Arizona alone. One 1986 study by scholar RONALD RUFF appearing in the journal, Crime and Delinquency, speculates that there may be as many as 6,000 false confessions annually in the United States. Another study in 1987, done for the Stanford Law review by criminal law scholars HUGO DEBAU and MICHAEL RADELET, both of them specialists on the death penalty, identified false confessions as the leading source of wrongful conviction of innocent persons.

At a time when Arizona and other states are applying the death penalty, the problem of false confessions is not a minor public policy issue. Few errors made by government official can compare with the horror of executing a person wrongly. As the late Justice THURGOOD MARSHALL wrote when the court struck down the death penalty as it was then constituted in 1972: "Death is irrevocable, Life imprisonment is not."

The MIRANDA decision held that being questioned by police when you are not free to leave is coercive in itself and led to suspects making statements against themselves in violation of the Fifth Amendment. The Supreme Court concluded in MIRANDA that compelled confessions were obtained by police because suspects were unaware of their constitutional right to remain silent, or they were unable, without a lawyer present to weigh the consequences of talking with police officers. The court specifically pointed out that contemporary police interrogation practices were laden with psychological coercion.

Although exceptions favoring law enforcement have been carved out of MIRANDA in subsequent years, the Supreme Court has never wavered from its basic holding that a request for an attorney prohibits further interrogation. The MIRANDA warnings, however, have had limited impact in prohibiting false confessions even when police faithfully implement them.

Regardless of whether police comply with MIRANDA, courts are also required to determine whether under the totality of the circumstances, a confession is voluntary. MIRANDA and voluntariness are two separate issues. Generally, a confession obtained in violation of MIRANDA - failing to inform suspects of their rights - may not be used by the prosecution in a trial. However, if the defendant testifies on his own behalf at trial, a previously given voluntary confession can be used as impeachment if he denies an earlier statement regardless of whether it violates MIRANDA.

Is it voluntary?

Hence the courts must also determine whether any confession is voluntary. As the Supreme Court noted in Hutto vs. Ross in 1976, a statement is involuntary when: "It is extracted by any sort of threats of violence (or) obtained by any direct or implied promises, however slight, (or) by the exertion of any improper influence." The purpose of the law is to dissuade law enforcement from using physical or extreme psychological coercion to obtain confessions. An involuntary confession can NEVER be used against an accused.

In Arizona, courts look to determine whether, ultimately, the defendant's will was overborne by the police. As many Arizona cases have noted, "confessions are presumed to be involuntary, and the state has the burden to show that a confession was voluntary and not the product of physical or psychological coercion."

Yet as the Arizona Court of Appeals wrote in one case, police are not prohibited from using "psychological tactics" to elicit statements from a suspect. They are also not prohibited from using deceit. The original Buddhist Temple suspects and George Peterson are only recent examples of the ethical dilemma of allowing law enforcement to obtain confessions by any measure of "psychological tactics."

July 13, 1993 THE PHOENIX GAZETTE:

"Mr. Romley publicly stated that he was outraged."

MR. ROMLEY publicly stated that the police tactics employed in Arizona are not what this system is about.

MR. ROMLEY publicly stated that he will start looking 'with a jaundiced eye' at confessions of questionable nature which resulted in arrests and convictions during the last four years [taped on the A/E Channel].

WE, THE PUBLIC, ASK THE FOLLOWING OF MR. ROMLEY:

• What happened to your proclaimed outrage?
• How many cases have been reviewed with your 'jaundiced eye'?
• What makes you think that there will not be a public outcry worldwide in the case of Debra Milke? THERE WILL BE!!!
• Are you satisfied with an not-witnessed, unsubstantiated and unsigned or even un-initialed narrative of one of your former police detectives and then tell us that that is what the system is all about?

THINK AGAIN, MR. ROMLEY!!!

While the following story does not mention Debbie Milke it does describe quite in detail how the office of the County Attorney has functioned since RICK ROMLEY took that position. In that sense it has had a direct impact on what has happened to Debbie Milke.

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New Times, May 22-28, 1991

"WHAT MAKES RICK TICK?"

Some people say it's the same things that make Rick ticked off

BY: DEBORAH LAAKE

Whe colleagues who have observed him closely, who agreed to be interviewed for this article, describe ROMLEY unanimously as an infinitely ambitious man whose insecurities and resentments towards others inspire him to seek vengeance. They say he has had difficulty confronting his detractors, a quality that is causing him to blur the lines of authority between the police department and the County Attorney's Office in a way that provides the police with greater clout.

Others suggest that ROMLEY'S inability to confront issues directly may be causing him, as County Attorney, to cave in to the demands of the police department. The charge represents a dangerous trend if true, since the County Attorney's Office is intended to serve as a check and balance on the powers of the boys in blue.

Hhis arm's length relationship may be breaking down because of something called the "complaint department." Under ROMLEY'S predecessors, the attorney who would prosecute a case in court also decided whether to file the original charges; under ROMLEY, one group of lawyers - the "complaint department" - decides only about filings and other attorneys are assigned to prosecutions.

Observers suggest that a filing system characterized by a 'complaint department' works against the autonomy of a leader like ROMLEY who deals poorly with criticism, since the police will always pressure him for more filings. Rather than standing up to this griping, it is a simple matter for ROMLEY to discipline or replace one small group of lawyers who's filing practices don't please the police, according to insiders. "It is easier for ROMLEY just to go along with the police and file everything," says one insider. "Then he gets the Sun City folks cheering him on." Says another source, "We are getting a lot of bad cases filed now." And a third, a prosecutor who quit under ROMLEY, is worried that a feeling of increasing influence within the County Attorney's Office may cause cops to behave more aggressively in the community, since they feel less scrutinized. "The last several years I was in the prosecutor's office, I began to be disturbed by the way the police officers do business," he says. "They have more and more power. They used to go in to keep the peace and see that nobody got hurt. Now they go in with their guns drawn."

If ROMLEY is cozying up to the police department, his motives may be another variation on the theme of personal ambition and not solely a lack of spine. Observers point out that a county attorney concerned with re-election alienates the police at his peril, a lesson that was learned in spades by CHUCK HYDER, who served a single term as county attorney in the Seventies. HYDER insisted upon a published set of standards for filing charges that the police understood and his attorneys adhered to. He also made certain that all police shootings were investigated independently by the County Attorney's Office and was, in short, a tremendous thorn in the police department's side. "My perception and the feedback I got from law enforcement people that were my friends was, 'The cops don't like you, you are too strong,'" says HYDER. Come election time, he paid for it too; he lost and the police had helped, having come out publicly against him he says. ROMLEY'S peers think it's not a risk he wants to take.

ROMLEY'S peers say he has made many decisions in the County Attorney's Office only according to his perceptions of how those decisions will be received by the press. Says an insider, "He is really going to push anything that is high profile."

ROMLEY continuously gauges his actions as County Attorney with his personal ambitions in mind. "He's a very ambitious guy," the source says. "I think he would like to be a senator or congressman."

"Normally you look at the state of the case and see whether you can prove it. You're thinking, 'What is the right thing to do?'" says the source. "But Romley's whole thrust was, 'What is the media going to do if I do this? And what is the media going to do if I do that?' He does that constantly." The source goes on to compare ROMLEY to his predecessor, TOM COLLINS. "Collins had a moral code that was tight and which some people didn't like, but he was always trying to do what was right. RICK ROMLEY doesn't have that internal code of his own. All his values are relative."

CONSIDERING THE ABOVE SCENARIO - WRITTEN ONE SHORT YEAR AFTER DEBRA MILKE WAS TRIED IN 1991 - IT IS EASY TO UNDERSTAND WHY DETECTIVE ARMANDO SALDATE ASSUMED THAT ANYTHING HE SAID OR FABRICATED AS A CONFESSION WOULD BE ACCEPTED.