Unjustly imprisoned people

[Evan]

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i was once falsely imprisoned and it was the worst feeling. complete helplessness.

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I was once falsely jailed (in a NYC police precinct jail and central booking, not prison). I'm assuming this is similar to what happened to you. Yea, it sucked.

[MicroBob]

WTF??

You guys are telling us of these situations with no details?

TR's please.

[Evan]

[ QUOTE ]
WTF??

You guys are telling us of these situations with no details?

TR's please.

[/ QUOTE ]
The story of how it happened is actually not that interesting. The story of my experience might actually be kind of entertaining, but it will probably be kind of long. Sorry in advance. For those that just want the story of how I ended up falsely jailed: some chick said me and 2 guys sexually assaulted her when we didn't. For those that want a somewhat interesting, hopefully funny story, keep reading...


Freshman year of college I get back to my dorm one night after going out with some friends. We stop by a couple people's rooms to see what's going on, including one chick I met the day before, we'll call her A. When we knock on her door she tells "come in" and I open the door (unlocked) and go in. She's lying in bed, lights off. I introduce her to my two friends (who don't go to school there) then decide this is kinda boring and leave. Do whatever for the rest of the night, end up running into A's roommate and hooking up with her in a TV lounge in our dorm.

Fast forward to a couple days later...I get a call on my dorm phone (which never rings and I don't even know the number too) from someone in residential living or something like that. He tells me I have to come in to see him today. I tell him I'm kind of busy at the moment and I can come in an hour and ask if I'm in trouble. He just says I have to come see him. Awesome. This was back at the height of college kids getting harassed over file sharing, so I'm guessing that I got caught downloading music on [censored] (whatup 2003!).

An hour later I go over to this guy's office in some other dorm. I'm waiting in the lobby for him and I notice A sitting there too. Weird, but I don't really think much of it. Eventually I go into this guy's office and he tells me that me and my two friends have been accused by A of some form of sexual assault. I don't remember the exact terminology. I am shocked, as should be clear by now since even seeing this girl two minutes before I was told this didn't make a connection for me. I explain to him what happened and he tells me that the protocol here is basically guilty until proven innocent. Well, damn.

As a result I am temporarily banned from university housing. This means I can't even set foot in a dorm, including my own, so I'm headed to my parents' house an hour away for now. He also tells me that she "may or may not chose to pursue legal action on her own" and he has no control over that. Hmm, okay. Anyway, I tell him that my whole life is in my dorm, so it would really be helpful if I could at least go there now to get some stuff. He says that's fine and to let him know when I've left within a couple hours.

So I go back to my room and tell my roommate what's going on. We have a couple beers and kind of just repeat "that sucks" over and over. I pack up some clothes, my computer and whatever else I want in an hour or so. I'm checking train schedules home when someone knocks on our door. I'm guessing there's not a lot of suspense left here, since I essentially began at the end of the story, but for those of you left wondering, it's the cops. They ask me if I know when they're here, I say yes, then they ask me to turn around and put my hands behind my back. WTF!!!! is about all I could think here. Are you seriously going to handcuff me right here? Yea, they did. I tell them that there's a staircase that comes out in the back of the building and ask if we can take that. The last thing I need as a college freshman is to be paraded out the front of my dorm in handcuffs.

As we're walking out, one of the cops is talking to the dorm security personnel with us about how he gave them too much of a hard time getting in the building. I guess he saw my backpack all loaded up because he then tells him, "This guy was about to run just when we got up there!" Oh god, I'm thinking, now this guy thinks I'm some kind of fugitive because I was following the first guy's orders. Great.

We get to the police station, they take my belt and shoelaces and then put me in a cell with 2 other guys I think. One was a white dude that got caught with some obscene amount of cocaine. The other was a black dude calling the white dude a cokehead. The black dude got caught with a smaller amount of cocaine. He asks me what I did and I remember hearing about how you should never say you're in jail for anything related to rape/sexual assault/whatever. Now, this is only precinct holding cell, but I figure it's best not to take any chance. I make up some story about selling drugs to fit in. Eventually they fingerprint me, take mug shots, etc and move me upstairs.

At this point we jump into a scene straight out of Law & Order. They put me in a room with a table, handcuff me to a railing, and tell me to write out everything that happened on the night in question. I fill up 3 legal sized sheets of paper, front and back. I am going to be nothing, if not thorough. Now the detective comes in to talk. Apparently they actually do good cop/bad cop in real life, except it's the same guy, sort of a Dr. Good Cop and Mr. Bad Cop thing.

He starts off telling me that he wants to help me and I just have to cooperate. I say no problem, after all, I had just cooperated for six pages, now is no time to stop. He asks me a few simple, irrelevant questions: where we had gone that night, where I'm from, etc. Then out of nowhere he starts screaming, calling me a rapist and asking how I'd like for someone to rape my sister. I am pretty taken aback here and I don't know if I'm supposed to yell back or stay calm. I got a little caught up in the moment and definitely raised my voice. All of the sudden, he's back to being a sweetheart and trying to work with me or whatever. There were a few revolutions of this little charade, but I don't remember many details.

After the interrogation they put me in a another, smaller cell, by myself. At this point he lets me use my cell phone to call my parents, who still thought I was on a train coming home. Ever had to make the "hey dad, I'm in jail" call? Lucky you. It's probably somewhere around 8:00 at this point. They tell me that nothing can happen until they take me to central booking (where everyone goes in NYC when they get arrested) and that will happen at 5 am. Kill me. So for the next 9 hours I try, mostly unsuccessfully, to sleep in this freezing cold cell on a rock hard bench. I think at one point I counted all the cinder blocks on the walls and then all the linoleum tiles on the floor. I should also note that the cops that were there, including Detective Schizophrenia, were really nice guys. They offered to order me food from a diner, but I didn't have much of an appetite so I declined. Why didn't I have much of an appetite you ask? they told me I was being charged on two counts: misdemeanor sexual assault and felony burglary (apparently burglary means entering a premises without the owner's permission, and she claimed we broke into her room).

Okay, so 5 am comes after what felt like 4 days and I get cuffed again, then driven down to central booking. On the way one of the detectives tells me to "shut up and keep my money near my balls" while I'm there. Sage advice. I get my belt and shoelaces taken, again, and then I'm placed in a cell with 10 or 12 other guys. I don't know how long I'm here, maybe 3 or 4 hours. I spend most of the time sleeping on the floor (it's much warmer here). At some point they brought "lunch," which was a disgusting baloney sandwich and a tiny plastic cup of some kind of sugar water. I pick the bread off of the sandwich and eat it. The baloney was unbelievably gross, I was pretty hungry by this point but I couldn't force myself to eat it.

Some guy comes along with a list and calls the names of each guy in my cell. The next step in this process is to go upstairs to get arraigned, so I figure we're up. Haha, n00b. We are not even close to up. In fact, to demonstrate how far from up we are, they simply move us across the walkway to a giant cell with 50-60 guys in it. All of those guys were here when we showed up, so I figure at best I'm #51 in line. So far I think I've heard 4 people get called to be arraigned.

I find another spot to sleep on the floor in my new cell, only to be awakened by some guy shaking me because the dude sleeping next to me pissed himself. It smelled horrible and I guess the jail had just run out of Febreeze. Now I'm up and end up chatting with some people. One guy asks me what I did and I decide to stick with my drug dealing story. I tell him I was selling pot in Wash Sq Park and boy is he excited. He tells me he "works" in the park but he doesn't remember seeing me there. I tell him I'm new. He's not deterred, as he goes on to tell me about how he knows the owners of some club in the neighborhood and has VIP rooms in the back where you can get high. He tells me to wear my hat (I'm wearing a pretty noticeable blue Titleist hat) when I come by and tell him we were "inside together" and he'll hook me up. Great, I'm thinking, now I can't wear this hat anywhere near Wash Sq Park ever again.

Somewhere in here I forgot to mention that my mom was working on getting in touch with a lawyer. It turns out her best friend's husband's blah blah blah is some super pricey lawyer and he agrees to help me out on the cheap. So the guard comes around and tells me my lawyer is here and takes me to talk with him. The talk is pretty basic, "Hang tight, I'm working on it, looks okay." The thing I didn't know is that when you're in NYC central booking, letting 60 guys know you have a lawyer will make you friends faster than if you'd told them you just had your a-hole bleached and you need a prostate exam. I end up talking with this one kid who's 16 years old who begs me to let him talk to my lawyer. I explain that I can't, at which point he tells me he's being charged with murder for putting a machete through some kid in a gang fight uptown. He assures me, though, that it wasn't him; it was someone else in his gang. Well, sorry bro, can't help you. But, uh, wanna not kill me? Kthx.

A couple more hours go by, largely uneventful other than the guy that pissed himself waking up, realizing he pissed himself, and then going back to sleep. Eventually I get called to go upstairs with 7 other guys. We are all in a line with a court officer at the front. Everyone is being led into a door, until he gets to me and tells me to just go straight. "Straight," as it turns out, leads to the courthouse lobby and exit. I would later find out that through some combination of my lawyer doing his thing and the girl talking to the cops again all of my charges were dropped.

Lesson: jail sucks

[billygrippo]

evan,

did you ever find out wtf was up with girl A claiming you raped her or w/e?!

also they let you keep money/phone/possessions in there?

[Evan]

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evan,

did you ever find out wtf was up with girl A claiming you raped her or w/e?!

also they let you keep money/phone/possessions in there?

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I never saw the girl again. I ended up having to move to another dorm so I never ran into her. I'd kind of like to look her up now and see what she's doing but I don't remember her name.

I kept all my stuff with me, except my belt and shoelaces, which they returned to me when I left.

[El Diablo]

Evan,

So what happened after you were back living at school?

[Evan]

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Evan,

So what happened after you were back living at school?

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Pretty much nothing out of the ordinary. I had been there long enough that I guess most people already trusted that I wasn't a rapist. This happened just before Thanksgiving iirc, so that's about 2.5 months. I moved to another dorm and told my roommates what happened, but they didn't make a big deal of it and other than that no one really asked.

The only real inconvenience was that I wasn't allowed to go in the original dorm, which is obviously where a lot of my friends lived. But that just meant that when we hung out it had to be somewhere else, which is not a big impediment in NYC. I was also not allowed to sign in guests for either the rest of the semester or the rest of the year, I don't remember. I would just use my roommate's ID to do that though.

Overall I was very pleasantly surprised at the minimal effects that came of getting handcuffed and escorted out of my dorm by police.

[El Diablo]

Evan,

I'm somewhat surprised you didn't push for a formal retraction/apology from that chick.

[Evan]

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Evan,

I'm somewhat surprised you didn't push for a formal retraction/apology from that chick.

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One of the really bizarre things about it was that despite being cleared by an NYPD investigation, the university definitely continued to treat me as though I was some degree of guilty. I suppose I could have been more active in pursuing a fairer treatment on their end, which probably would have facilitated some kind of retraction. To be honest though, I was a lot more concerned with the legal consequences of having any shadow of this on my record. So most of my clean up efforts were spent on getting any traces of this situation expunged from wherever it was documented, which eventually happened but took like a year.

I was recently told by a former NYPD detective that I should sue the NYPD and I'd have a very solid case. I don't remember the exact grounds of the suit he told me about, something along the lines of "wrongful arrest" although I don't think that's the proper terminology, or at least not what he said to me. I recently started gathering documentation and looking into who I should contact about that, but nothing has really happened yet.

Anyway, back to your point...between the university imposing strict rules about me contacting her, namely that I couldn't, and just trying to not end up getting life-screwed by the whole thing I never really thought about any sort of action on her end. It would be nice though.

[Cornell Fiji]

Evan,

When you were brought in for interrogation the first time did you realize that your first words should have been "lawyer please" regardless of your innocence?

Also, why didn't you try to get a retraction from the girl so that you could return to your dorm and so she would get the boot?

edit: 2nd question already answered