October 21, 2015

Gregg McCary took the stand on the twelfth day of proceedings in the Fairbanks Four bid for exoneration and testified that the original police interrogations were deeply flawed. McCary is a former FBI agent, who was with the burea from 1969-1995. While with the FBI McCary worked as a criminal profiler and was a contributing author to the FBI’s primary manual – Crime Classification Manual. McCary’s resume is lengthy and he is considered on of the country’s leading experts in criminal profiling and false confessions. The petitioner’s attorneys pointed to McCary’s testimony to argue that the statements of Frese and Vent, the cornerstone of the convictions, were classic false admissions produced after flawed and unethical interrogation. McCary attacked the original police interrogations from nearly every angle, asserting that the tactics employed in the investigation were so troubled that the flawed outcome was predictable.

“They didn’t hunt for any other suspects,” McCary said, “They limited the universe of suspects to these four individuals and never went beyond that.”

McCary focused heavily on the flaws in, and overemphasis upon, the interrogations conducted by Fairbanks Police. He noted that Eugene Vent and George Frese were both in a suggestible state with suggestible personality attributes, and reiterated that the aggressive interrogation style know to lead to false results was essentially the bulk of the investigation.

“The investigators here substituted an interrogation for an investigation,” McCary said.

McCary noted that the interrogations were based false-evidence ploys, and that the interrogations were conducted with intoxicated and sleep deprived subjects. Throughout his testimony he essentially listed the known factors in false confession, explained them, and identified how every single one of them impacted this case.

Prosecutor Ali Rahoi  on behalf of the state objected to the admission of the testimony on the grounds that McCary (the guy who literally wrote the book) was not a qualified expert, that behavioral criminology is not a real profession. So….we cannot really mock that. It kind of does the job itself.

Eugene Vent took the stand for his extended cross-examination by special prosecutor Adrienne Bachman. Ironically, after a morning of testimony by a renowned expert in the field that aggressive false evidence based questioning is not effective, Ms. Bachman essentially took that approach in her cross-examination of Vent. Bachman stacked compound leading questions on screaming accusations on disjointed lines of questioning.

Vent maintained a calm demeanor, even as questioning escalated to a level some observes found so unbearable they left the room, one describing it as the most horrific bullying she had ever seen.

Vent seemed less rattled by the behavior than most others in the courtroom. Here are few highlights from his interrogation  cross-examination:

• Bachman accused Vent of being too drunk to remember whether or not he was scared during interrogation based on his blood alcohol test, yet maintains he was sober enough for interrogation.

• State introduced some notes that Eugene Vent passed to a girlfriend while he was a sophomore in high school. In once, Vent said of his weeked that he and his “boyz” got “smoked out and loced out.” Bachman insisted that the “boyz” referred to were his codefendants and that “smoked out and loc’ed out” means to smoke marijuana and carry a gun. Bachman has tried her hand at gangsta slang quite a few times during the proceedings and the results are mortifying to watch. Like one of those moms who shops in the junior’s section and says “OMG” too much. Vent clarified that loc’ed out does not mean to carry a gun. Eugene’s writings were a trip down 90’s-slang memory lane. For those of you who missed the decade, “loced out” was a term derived from the Spanish word “loco” and was used essentially to mean….well chilled out? Stoned? Super stoned? Maybe crazy? We don’t know. We didn’t really know then, either, we were pretty far away from the rap scene that proliferated the expression but it was a cool thing to say in a time when we were trying really hard to be cool, and so we used it, almost always associated with getting stoned. And it definitely had no relationship to guns of any kind. Through introduction of this evidence the state reminded us all of a time when people didn’t have text so they wrote notes, and when people got “blazed” and this line of questioning would be called “bunk” and we could give “mad props” to anyone who kept a straight face through that, and of a time long past where apparently Eugene wrote some super dorky notes. Make that hella dorky.

• Bachman established that while Eugene Vent was being interrogated in 1997 he burped without saying excuse me. The audio introduced reflects that Eugene is likely guilty of the crime of burping without saying “excuse me” in 1997, but we feel that eighteen years of hard time may be a tad overboard for the crime of mediocre manners in a seventeen year old drunk boy.

• Bachman hammered Vent on his poor manners. “I wasn’t being respectful,” Vent answered, then referring to Detective Aaron Ring, “Neither of us were being respectful.”

• Bachman also established through a gotcha-vibed series of questions that Eugene Vent had gum in the night in question. “And you left that gum at murder scene at 9th and Barnette, didn’t you?” she said. In a serious anti-climax, Vent replied that no, the gum was collected from him at the police station, and logged in his property report.

The cross-examination was not funny. Human lives are at stake here. If this wasn’t so horribly, tragically, relentlessly tragic, it might be funny. At the least it is a parody of itself because the conduct of the state attorneys is just so painfully ridiculous. What is becoming evident is that these tactics are probably effective on juries (a scary thought) but play poorly to rooms filled with professionals.