Abuse Suspects, Your Calls Are Taped. Speak Up.
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
The men charged with beating, stabbing or burning their wives or girlfriends have plenty to say. Lately, their words have been used against them in New York courts as never before.
“I need you to prepare the kids to start lying,” one man said to his girlfriend. He had been charged with burning her face with a hot iron as she knelt in view of their children.
Another cooed “baby” to the girlfriend he was charged with grabbing by the hair and scratching with keys. “Whatever you do,” he directed, “do not speak to the D.A.”
A third insisted to his brother that he was surprised at all the blood after he used a kitchen knife on the woman he had been with since they were teenagers. “I just stuck her like a little,” he said.
Since last year, every prisoner telephone call at every New York City jail, except calls to doctors and lawyers, has been recorded. And prosecutors have been mining the trove in all kinds of cases — they asked for copies of the recordings 8,200 times last year, city officials said. But there is one area where the tapes are beginning to play a central role: cases of domestic violence.
The reason is simple. Once those accused in domestic violence crimes get on the jailhouse telephone, it turns out, many of them cannot seem to stop themselves from sweet-talking, confessing to, berating and threatening those on the other end of the line, more often than not the women they were charged with abusing.
The tapes overcome one of the biggest hurdles prosecutors face in such cases: that 75 percent of the time, the women who were victimized stop helping prosecutors, often after speaking to the men accused of abusing them.
Scott E. Kessler, the domestic violence bureau chief in the Queens district attorney’s office, said the recordings “revolutionized the way we’re able to proceed.”
In the Queens Boulevard courthouse where Mr. Kessler’s assistant district attorneys handle more than 6,000 domestic violence cases a year, the jailhouse recordings have become an appalling kind of reality radio, a fly-on-the-wall guide to the chilling intimacies of domestic violence.
“We have the ability now,” Mr. Kessler said, “to prove what we’ve always suspected, which is that the defendants in domestic violence cases are in constant contact with their victims, and they use various means and methods to try to have the case dropped.”
The jailhouse calls are almost always flagrant violations of court orders directing men charged with domestic violence not to contact the women who were attacked.
Deirdre Bialo-Padin, the domestic violence bureau chief in the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, said the tapes gave jurors a vivid understanding of men who can be masters of manipulation.
In one Brooklyn case, she said, the defendant has called the victim from jail 1,200 times.
In the cases in which victims stop cooperating with prosecutors, the recordings plug crucial holes. District attorneys use the recordings partly to explain why injured women are not testifying for the prosecution.
In those instances, the law often permits prosecutors to introduce statements — that would otherwise be barred — made by the victims to the police or hospital workers before they stopped working with prosecutors, including identification of attackers and descriptions of the attacks.
Around the country, jail recording systems vary greatly in their sophistication. Domestic violence prosecutors in some states are far behind their New York colleagues, said Casey Gwinn, a former California prosecutor who is president of the National Family Justice Center Alliance, which provides training and assistance to domestic violence prosecutors.
“When you’re talking about domestic violence cases,” Mr. Gwinn said, “this policy of monitoring every jail call is probably the single most important investigative procedure put in place in the last decade anywhere in the country.”
On the recordings used in Queens cases, the men proclaim their love. They tell the women to disappear when it is time for the trial. They beg and plead.
The Queens courthouse tapes gathered for this article include one of Mohamed Khan, who was charged with slicing his wife’s head and shoulder with a meat cleaver. He was recorded from Rikers Island telling her that he was a “brand new” man and had been under the spell of a “passion of love.”
She ended up testifying that she did not remember who her attacker was. Because the recordings showed what the prosecutors called “a campaign of coercion,” they were able to introduce her statements at the hospital and to the police.
Mr. Khan was convicted and was sentenced last May to seven years in prison.
The men have been heard complaining to the women about what they see as unfair charges.
“I need you right now in my corner,” begged Eric Persaud, the man charged with branding his girlfriend’s cheeks with the iron. He had a strategy, he said: she should vanish for the trial. “I’m smarter than you,” he said in one of what prosecutors have said were 437 calls from Rikers Island.
On Wednesday, he pleaded guilty, and he is to be sentenced next month to 13 years in prison.
The men obsessively explain their crimes to anyone who will pick up the phone.
A defendant named Juan Mighty explained that it was jealousy that had led him to knife the woman “a little.” But he conceded that the scene had been gory. “There was mad blood in the house, T.,” he said in a call to his brother. “There was mad blood in the house.”
He was convicted in June and sentenced to 12 years.
And the tapes have caught the men trying gentle charms. Ishaaq Rahaman, a 28-year-old with big brown eyes, kept saying “baby” to the woman he was charged with scratching with keys, urging her not to tell the prosecutor anything useful.
“Basically tell him things like this: ‘It was just a misunderstanding. I love him. We want to get married and we want to have children together,’ ” he suggested. “Say something nice like that, anything like that, you know what I’m saying, baby?”
Then, forlornly, Mr. Rahaman added: “Even though you probably don’t want to marry me and you don’t want to have kids. But it’s all right. It’s all right. It’s no big deal. We’re not going to talk about that now.” He pleaded guilty this month.
Over the objection of prisoners’ groups and defense lawyers, the city jails changed policy in 2007 to permit the recording, which was already routine in some New York State and federal prisons. Installation of the digital system, which began with some recordings in 2008, was completed in 2010, said a spokesman for the city’s Correction Department, Stephen Morello.
Queens prosecutors have often been among the first to embrace new ways of handling domestic violence cases, including working with the police a decade ago to use digital photographs that provided clearer images of injuries than did old instant photographs.
Defense lawyers around the city, including the lawyer for Mr. Khan, the meat-cleaver attacker, rail about prosecutors’ use of the recordings. “The whole system is patently unfair,” Mr. Khan’s lawyer, Warren M. Silverman, said. He called it a trap for men who were cut off from the world.
The Queens district attorney, Richard A. Brown, argued, “There really is no issue of fairness.” He noted that inmates were told that their phone calls would be taped.
