When What You Say And What The Police Say Don’t Match
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Top Chicago Criminal Defense Lawyer Robert J. Callahan: Call (312) 322-9000
VO: What are the things you find most interesting about being a Criminal Defense Attorney?
Bob: There are so many things that I find interesting about what I do. A lot of it was unexpected. One of the things that kind of, really started to grab my interests was kind of the human psychological component about what's going on. And both from the criminal side, the actual defendant, to the police side of the investigation, to what's happening with the prosecutors office. One of the things that I actually hear a Chicago police officer say one time is, "There's three sides of every story. There's what the accused says happened. There's what the victim says happened. And then there's what actually happened". And they hardly ever connect. So one of the things I noticed let's say with regard to the police. We're doing our investigation, we're talking to witnesses about what happened and we've got the police report right in hand. And we say, well let's see the police officer saw this event happen from you know twenty feet away-he was right on top of it. And he says that he saw you with a baseball bat in your hand. We talk to five different people about what happened and they say, "No, no. There was no baseball bat anywhere near here". What those police officers are perceiving is affected by their own expectations. It's affected by their own motives, their own bias, their own interests. What they're expecting to see, they see sometimes. And Woody Harrleson just said somethin along the lines of this in True Detective series, which was amazing. He says, "You attach an assumption to a piece of evidence and what you do is, you start to bend the narrative to fit that assumption." And I've seen that over and over again. I've had cases where people are on videotape and the police officer's report says, "He did this. He started to shake. He started to sweat a little bit. He seemed nervous". And I have a videotape of that person being interviewed and there's no sweat. There's no nervousness. There's nothing. I've had to play things like that in front of juries and even with the police officer there he'll say, "You see there's a little drop of sweat right there. He's shaking right here". But the camera is not really picking that up. That's one of the things that's really interesting about what I do.