Omar Aguirre had been in this country for only two years and knew little English when he found himself being questioned in the slaying of a Chicago-area furniture store owner.
“I still don’t really know why they arrested me or what happened,” the 34-year-old Mexico City native said in Spanish recently, recounting how a police officer acting as his interrogator and interpreter told a state’s attorney he had confessed to the crime.
Aguirre served five years of a 55-year prison term before a 2002 federal probe determined others were responsible.
In the wake of his case, and others that they say are similar, advocates, experts and consular officials are calling for independent interpreters to be present during interrogations.
In Chicago, Spanish-speaking detectives with a stake in the outcome of interrogations often translate a suspect’s statement for a prosecutor who speaks little or no Spanish. Such situations not only produce unreliable confessions, experts argue, but they could be violating a suspect’s civil rights.
Mexican officials and their representatives have clamored for better protection for Spanish-speaking suspects as Chicago’s Mexican population has ballooned, and Northwestern University lawyers have recently begun cataloging what they consider to be problem cases.
All of them are eager to see what happens when authorities come under a new mandate to videotape interviews in homicide investigations.
Sandra Babcock, lead attorney for the Mexican foreign ministry’s Mexican Capital Legal Assistance Program, said the situation is ripe for change.
“The evolution should be for rules that say police cannot act as their own interpreters,” Babcock said. “They are not neutral, and many of them are not qualified.”
The detective who questioned Aguirre in Spanish said he had implicated himself in the crime. The officer’s English translation of the alleged statement, which Aguirre denied and could not even read, bolstered another man’s testimony that later was found to be false. No videotape documented the police interview.
Many suspects who find themselves in such situations are poorly educated, culturally impaired and often have an ingrained fear of police that they developed before arriving here. It’s a recipe for disaster when they are matched against aggressive detectives eager to close a case, experts said.
Northwestern’s Cathryn Crawford is leading a project to catalog such interrogations for the Children and Family Justice Center of the Northwestern Legal Clinic.
She said the issue gains attention whenever a high-profile case like the one against Aguirre comes to light, but she suspects there are many more. The Police and Community Data Collection Project will help identify patterns, Crawford said.
“Even an officer who is not deliberately engineering something can lead people toward a false confession,” she said.
When a non-English speaker finds himself in police custody, she said, it’s an unfamiliar environment.
“They know something’s wrong and then suddenly someone appears speaking their native language,” Crawford said. “You’re automatically going to be more trusting of those people. You’re going to feel like they care, and you might listen if they say, `If you go along with this, then everything’s going to go better for you.'”
Police and prosecutors bristle at any suggestion that detectives are untrustworthy, and they say there is a great deal of value in detectives questioning a suspect directly instead of through an interpreter.
“I trust the detectives to do the right thing,” said 1st Assistant Cook County State’s Atty. Robert Milan. “I don’t believe a detective is going to make up a confession and tell the assistant state’s attorney that this is what the guy said.”
Still, advocates said it would help maintain the integrity of the process for interpreters to be called in on cases. Such interpreters could be employed by the county but be available to cover the city as needed, they said.
A confession, even a false one, is nearly insurmountable in court, attorneys said.
“The one thing juries always ask is, `Why would the police lie?'” said Marijane Placek, Aguirre’s public defender.
Mexican Consulate officials said they could be called 24 hours a day to provide someone to translate, and in fact should be called as soon as a Mexican national is taken into custody in accordance with the Geneva Convention.
Illinois has at least 100 pending cases, most of them in Chicago, in which a Mexican defendant could face the death penalty if convicted, said Rita Vargas Torregrosa, Mexican consul in Chicago.
Mexican consul weighs in
Recently, Torregrosa was among those protesting the case against Veronica Diaz, who faces the death penalty after allegedly confessing to the 1997 murder of her son in a document written in English.
“We are seeing more and more of these cases year by year,” said Torregrosa. “The Mexican population is growing. They don’t know anything about the U.S. and the legal system and the kind of problems they’re involved in.”
Torregrosa said she often hears from inmates who contend police told them they could end interviews by signing statements, and no one was present to fully explain what the document said or to safeguard their rights.
Milan, the 1st assistant Cook County state’s attorney, said the new videotaping legislation signed by Gov. Rod Blagojevich will help with this issue. Juries will see and hear for themselves what a suspect tells police, even if experts argue over the translation in court, he said.
Police agencies have two years to begin complying with the law, but defense attorneys say it contains too many exceptions.
For example, suspects can waive their right to have their interviews videotaped.
Translations can be issue
Translation issues came up in court testimony in the case of Miguel Castillo, one of a handful of men pardoned by former Gov. George Ryan this year, even though his statement had not been taped.
Castillo was released two years ago, after spending more than 11 years in prison for murder, after jail records showed he was in custody when the crime was committed. Castillo supposedly confessed to a Spanish-speaking police officer, a contention his lawyers challenged.
Assistant Public Defender Kevin Smith explained that, “what we had was a second-generation Mexican (police officer)–and Spanish was his second language–speaking to a Cuban who was not speaking the same dialect.”
At one point in Castillo’s trial, his lawyers asked the officer to tell the court exactly how the officer had given Castillo his Miranda warnings in Spanish. A court interpreter then translated back into English what the officer said.
“What the interpreter translated didn’t come back as Miranda,” he said.
Perhaps the most controversial case now being watched by those calling for reform is that of Gabriel Solache, who was convicted in 2000 along with two others of stabbing a Northwest Side couple to death to take their 2-month-old daughter. Solache knew the woman, but no physical evidence linked him to the slayings.
A Spanish-speaking police officer who interviewed Solache said he confessed to the crime.
Solache’s death sentence was commuted in Ryan’s sweeping clemency move this year, but his conviction was affirmed on appeal recently. Lawyers from Northwestern University will handle Solache’s post-conviction petition, and they said they plan to raise the issue of what they call the unreliability of his alleged confession.
Whether a video camera would have spared Omar Aguirre from five years of wrongful incarceration cannot be known, but Aguirre said he is hopeful cases like his will spur more changes in Chicago.
A suit he has filed against Chicago police and the city over his false conviction is pending, and he plans to move out of state with a new girlfriend, hoping to build a life with her. “I give thanks to God,” he said. “I pray he gives us a good future.”
