Buffalo hunter.
He is renowned in the Police Department for his ability to extract confessions from murder suspects. When typed up by a court reporter, these confessions typically are seven to ten pages long, double spaced. Usually the person confessing answers questions put to him by an assistant state’s attorney. The state’s attorney begins by advising the suspect of his constitutional rights, including the right to remain silent and the right to have a lawyer of his own present. “Understanding these rights, do you wish to talk to us now?” the state’s attorney will ask, and the suspect will answer “Yes.” After the confessor details the crime, the state’s attorney will ask him how he has been treated by the police. “Fine” or “good” the confessor usually says. The interview rarely takes more than ten minutes. The resulting statement will likely condemn the confessor to 20 years or more in prison.
“When you say you ‘folded up,’ what do you mean?” Washington’s attorney, Karen Shields, asks.
The gallery is nearly empty. Judy Boykin’s mother, Julet, and one of Judy’s sisters sit in the second bench on the left side of the courtroom behind the prosecutors. Keith Washington’s mother, Emma, and one of his uncles sit in the second bench on the right behind the defense table. The mothers are mirror images of each other on the aisle end of the benches, eight floor-tile squares apart, in plain dresses and low-heeled shoes, hands folded in their laps. “I wanted to say something to Mrs. Boykin,” Emma Washington will tell me later, “but I didn’t know how she’d feel about me talking to her. I wanted to tell her so bad that I’m so sorry she had to lose her child that way–but, you know, my child didn’t do it.”
“What happened then?” Shields asks.
“Of who? What?”
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Yvonne Wooten, 14, said she heard the argument, looked out the window, and saw a dark-complected black man, about five feet eight inches tall, wearing a cap with a bill cocked to the right. He had curls stretching down his neck, she told Smulevitz. She heard another man yell, “Get in the car.” The man with the curls did, and the car pulled off.
