Police video case is wrapped in important legal principles

It was Christmas Eve. The gifts were laid beneath the Christmas tree at the home of Merlin and Nelda Powers in Urbandale.

But the family’s holiday celebration ended abruptly that day in 1968 when the Powerses’ 10-year-old daughter Pamela disappeared from the YMCA in downtown Des Moines while the family attended her brother’s wrestling meet.

Two days passed before the family received the horrible answer to their “where is  Pamela” question. Police located the girl’s body in a roadside ditch just off Interstate Highway 80 near Mitchellville.

The discovery came after Cleatus Leaming, a legendary Des Moines police detective, delivered what forever will be known as his “Christian burial speech” to a part-time lay minister, Robert Anthony Williams, who lived in the apartments above the YMCA. Leaming gave Williams that speech as they returned to Des Moines from Davenport, where Williams had surrendered to police.

Knowing of Williams’ deep religious faith but directed not to question him about the girl’s disappearance, Leaming said in his now-famous soliloquy: “I want to give you something to think about while we’re traveling down the road. They are predicting several inches of snow for tonight, and I feel that you yourself are the only person that knows where this little girl’s body is. … If you get a snow on top of it you yourself may be unable to find it … I feel that we could stop and locate the body, that the parents of this little girl should be entitled to a Christian burial.”

Miles on down I-80, Williams directed police to the location where Pamela’s body had been discarded. That evidence, and Williams’ actions at the Y, were crucial to his initial conviction on a first-degree murder charge.

Why, you ask, is a 57-year-old murder case on my radar today?

The Williams case, and the legal precedents it established, have an odd link to a decision a Webster County judge will make this month. The new case, though vastly less momentous than that of Robert Anthony Williams, involves important government transparency principles that should not get swept aside during a court hearing on January 26 in Fort Dodge.

In the Powers case, Williams’ attorney asked the court to exclude from Williams’ murder trial evidence of his client’s role in guiding police to the girl’s body because Detective Leaming improperly obtained that information. The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately ruled Leaming’s Christian burial speech violated Williams’ right to have an attorney present for any interrogation.

Williams’ murder conviction was thrown out — though a later trial, conducted in 1977 without benefit the Christian burial evidence, led to a guilty verdict, too. Williams was sentenced to life in prison, where he died in 2017 at age 73.

Although the judicial system excluded Leaming’s speech from the retrial evidence, the courts did not seal the powerful speech from the people of Iowa.

That brings us to the State of Iowa vs. Matthew Bemrich and the police video that figured prominently in this Webster County case — until the judge excluded it from being presented to a jury during Bemrich’s prosecution for driving while intoxicated.

The case involves an incident last September 10 in which a Fort Dodge police officer stopped Bemrich, the city’s mayor at the time, on suspicion of drunken driving. The officer wrote in his criminal complaint that he saw Bemrich crossing the center of a road many times and making an improper turn. Once stopped, Bemrich smelled of alcohol and failed a breathalyzer test, which showed an alcohol level more than twice the legal limit, the officer wrote.

Bemrich’s attorney asserted the traffic stop itself was improper and evidence gathered from it should be inadmissible because it was not lawfully obtained. The attorney argued the police video recording does not bear out the officer’s claims about Bemrich’s driving.

The judge agreed, writing in his order, “The mayor of Fort Dodge cannot be treated differently than one of his townspeople. He should not be treated more leniently or more harshly based on his station in life. His case must be analyzed as if he were just another citizen driving home on a Wednesday night.”

The drunken-driving charge was dismissed last month.

Now, Bemrich is asking the judge to seal from public view the police video recorded after the traffic stop and during those sobriety tests — even though police videos regularly are deemed to be open public records, and even though the judge reviewed and relied on the recording in ruling to exclude that evidence from Bemrich’s trial.

Bemrich’s lawyer wrote in the motion to seal inadmissible evidence, “Public dissemination of video evidence obtained after the traffic stop would constitute an ongoing violation of the Defendant’s constitutional rights against unreasonable search and seizure.”

The theory used by Bemrich’s lawyer raises an important question about the Detective Leaming’s Christian burial speech. Should the speech text be forever sealed because information about Robert Anthony Williams’ role in helping find the girl’s body, and the tacit confession it encompassed, was suppressed for being unlawfully obtained?

The admissibility of evidence in the Williams case, and in Matt Bemrich’s case, pertains to its use at trial — not its availability as a court record.

The so-called exclusionary rule relates only to whether prosecutors are barred from using illegally obtained evidence at trial. That rule does not provide court and defendants with an erase button to wipe out facts withheld from a jury as a penalty for illegal police conduct.

Put more simply, improper conduct by police cannot itself be policed if the fruits of their conduct are both excluded from public trials and are then sealed away from public inspection forever. Yes, courts can protect defendants’ rights by excluding unlawfully obtained evidence, the courts should not turn public records and court rulings into state secrets.

Doing so would deny the public its rights to open and accessible court records and would impair citizens’ ability to assess the conduct of law enforcement officers and fully understand the legitimacy of court rulings to exclude evidence.

That was why the famous Christian burial speech was on my mind in recent days.