Ira Glass

Previously on Serial.

Sarah Koenig

From this American Life and WBEZ Chicago, it's Serial, one courthouse told week by week. I'm Sarah Koenig.

A while back, Emmanuel and I went to a meeting about community policing in Cleveland. The police department had invited people to a banquet hall for a workshop. Big round tables filled the space. Representatives from the police department were sprinkled throughout, and each table had a moderator to keep things moving.

The group is supposed to answer a bunch of questions about what kinds of problems they wanted police to deal with. My table was populated with rule followers. They dutifully worked their way down the list of questions. If kids are hanging out at an abandoned house in your neighborhood, what should the police do about that?

Sarah Koenig

Oh, boy. Thank god for Emmanuel. He was sitting a few tables to the east of me. And he summoned me over there because his table, brass tacks.

Sarah Koenig

This guy was an attorney, does civil rights cases. A police commander sitting at the table lamely responded to him.

Sarah Koenig

This was the struggle of the table. The citizens wanting to talk historically, culturally, structurally. The cops wanting to talk specifically, personally, procedurally. The table's moderator was stalwart. She tried her level best to keep everyone on task. There was just no way.

Sarah Koenig

This woman saying it, Miss Rice, is Samaria Rice. Her son was Tamir Rice. You've probably heard his name before. He was shot and killed by Cleveland police a few years back, when he was 12 years old.

He'd been playing around with a fake gun in a city park. Someone called 911. The police drove up on him, shot him in the stomach within a couple of seconds. Whenever you talk about police or to police in Cleveland, Tamir Rice is right there, not below the surface, on the surface. His killing caused a civic spasm between police and the public that's still painful and still unresolved.

So when Samaria Rice shows up at a meeting about the community's expectations from police, she speaks with dreadful moral authority. At first, I didn't understand what Miss Rice wanted from this meeting. She didn't seem interested in the stated mission of the workshop, the list of questions.

Sarah Koenig

One of the two police officers at the table jumps in. He says, which I completely get—

Sarah Koenig

She's laughing. That's when I got it. That there's something absurdly wrongheaded to her and to a lot of people in Cleveland, mostly black people, with this earnest sounding question—how can you help us do that?

Samaria Rice is saying, why are you turning this back on me? Why is it my job to help you do your job the way you're supposed to? You're the ones with the cruisers, and the handcuffs, and the tasers, and the guns. She's saying, for God's sakes, physician, heal thyself.

A persistent slogan in Cleveland, even four years after his killing, is justice for Tamir. The case was investigated by three different agencies—city, state, and federal. The mayor appointed his own panel for a fourth investigation. None found that the officers broke the law.

The then county prosecutor handled the case with the delicacy of a lumberjack, calling it a quote, "perfect storm of human error, mistakes, and miscommunications." It should have come as a surprise to no one when a grand jury declined to indict. Technically, you can argue, and many police officers and prosecutors do, that justice was applied in Tamir Rice's case.

But it doesn't feel that way. Instead, it feels like an open question haunting the courthouse. If you're harmed by police, what does it take to find justice in court that feels like justice? One way to try is by filing a lawsuit, suing the police.

Sarah Koenig

I'm in a car with Paul Cristallo, civil rights attorney. Ten days earlier, he'd sent me a text. It was photos of a guy in a hospital bed. His face hugely puffed up on one side. His skin so taught from swelling that you could see the hospital lights reflected in his cheek. His left eye was submerged by the distortion.

The guy's mother said, he had been beaten up by two police officers. She'd found Paul's number, called him up asking, is there anything we can do? Paul talked to her, talked to Erimius, who, he said, sounded cogent and sincere. He had no criminal record to speak of, a few misdemeanor convictions, but nothing violent. Paul decided, this is a good case.

Sarah Koenig

Erimius's face hadn't fully healed. One eye was still blood red. He had a scab above his eyebrow.

Sarah Koenig

Euclid is safer, cleaner, calmer than a lot of neighborhoods in Cleveland, especially if you're from a dangerous neighborhood. Say you've got a teenager you're trying to keep out of the streets, you might send him to his aunt or his grandma in Euclid, put him in school there.

Erimius's building is called Richmond Hills. It's an apartment complex built in the 1960s, looks a little tired out by now. Erimius lives on the fifth floor. He walks me through his version of what happened that day. The police have a different version, which I'll get to later.

But Erimius says, he'd come downstairs to bum a cigarette from a friend on the fourth floor. And a couple of cops were coming down the stairwell at one end of the hallway. And they saw him standing there knocking at his friend's door.

Sarah Koenig

Erimius had seen cops around the hallways before, so that wasn't a surprise. They work security here, moonlighting. Technically, they're off-duty, but they're in uniform, and they have full police powers. And that's normal, by the way. Lots of cops do this in Cuyahoga County.

And Erimius had had run-ins with the police before. And mostly they'd gone OK, not counting the time, he says, he was jaywalking in East Cleveland, and a cop stopped him, and he ended up getting whacked in the knee repeatedly with a billy club, and arrested, and put in jail for the night. But mostly, he felt like he knew how to successfully navigate these interactions.

With the Euclid cops that day, he figured his best strategy was to cooperate and get it over with. He wasn't doing anything wrong. He didn't want to give the cops any reason to suspect otherwise. So he says, he showed them his ID, told them he lived upstairs.

He said, they asked if they could search him for weapons, which means a pat down. They're feeling around for a gun. And Erimius allowed it. He didn't have a weapon on him. He wasn't worried.

What he did have on him was a blunt, a marijuana cigarette, in the pocket of his jeans, which the cops found, and which I'll get back to because this measly blunt will become an outsized player in this story. Anyway, next thing Erimius knew, the officers went to arrest him.

Sarah Koenig

At that point, Erimius says, he stiffened his arm—the arm that one of the officers was trying to put behind his back. So he's resisting, technically. And he's also asking, why are you arresting me? What did I do? No answer. No discussion.

Sarah Koenig

The kicking, Erimius says, is what caused the damage to his face, broke his orbital bone. That's the bone around your eye. A public defender in Cleveland told me, eh, everyone's always whining about a broken orbital bone. But in Erimius's case, it was bad enough that the Euclid ER folks transferred him to a bigger hospital in Cleveland to make sure his eye would be OK.

Anyway, Erimius was down on the ground. One cop is kicking him in the face. Another cop is holding back his right arm. Erimius's left arm is pinned underneath him. He can't get it free.

Erimius got down on the gross hallway carpet to show me. I didn't need him to do that. But it seemed as if he wanted to replay each step, which I could understand. It had only been ten days since it happened. He hadn't gotten his mind around it.

Sarah Koenig

There was a smear of blood with a big drip going down the wall at exactly the height of Erimius's eye, which isn't very high by the way. Erimius is about 5'6", 5'7", I'd say, and slight. The police tased him about seven times, not the full deployment each time where the wires come out and everything, the lesser taser setting where it shocks and burns. Erimius said, he could feel electricity shoot down his legs.

Erimius pointed to some spots at our feet where the carpet fibers were melted and clumped together.

Sarah Koenig

Erimius said, while all this was going on, the police were cursing at him. He was cursing back. He said, I just kept asking them, why? Why are you all doing this? What did I do to deserve this? He says, they would not answer.

When I asked Erimius if he'd been scared or enraged, the word he used was uncomfortable. He said, the whole thing made him feel uncomfortable, which seemed like an oddly muted way to express being kicked in the head by a cop.

He also said, he was trying not to let what happened distract him mentally, not let it take him out of his everyday life. He said, he'd just turned 30 a few days earlier. His family and his girlfriend had gathered around him to cheer him up. He tried to celebrate, he said. I got the sense he wasn't ready to stare too hard at what had happened. For now, he'd leave it at uncomfortable.

There's a security camera in the hallway, right near the door he was knocking on. But it was pointed straight down when we saw it. So it seemed quite possible that, even if it were working at the time, and apparently it wasn't, it would have produced footage of the floor.

As the cops walked Erimius out of the building, he says, they were talking shit to him. He doesn't remember exactly what they said. But something like, one more false move, I'm going to make it even worse for you the next time. Then they put him in an ambulance.

Back up in Erimius's apartment, we talked about that marijuana cigarette he'd had in his pocket. To Erimius's thinking, the police had no right to arrest him in the first place. That's why he stiffened his arm because, he says, he genuinely did not understand what was going on

Sarah Koenig

Paul explained, gently as he could, that Erimius is incorrect. In Euclid, Ohio, any amount of weed can be charged as an M1, first-degree misdemeanor, possibility of $1,000 fine, six months in jail. Just over the city line, back in Cleveland, Erimius would be correct. One blunt probably would be a ticket, at most, but not here in Euclid.

Ohio takes home rule very seriously. Cuyahoga County has 59 different municipalities. Each one has its own set of ordinances. Most of them align their city codes with Ohio state law, which treats less than 100 grams of marijuana as a minor misdemeanor. But two of them treat any amount of marijuana as an M1—Broadview Heights, a little town down south, and Euclid.

Euclid made its ordinance harsher in 1998. I'm not sure why. But it's worth noting that the city's black population was growing then. For a few decades, white people had been moving out, and black people have been moving in. Now, the city is about 60 percent African American.

Euclid's city government though—city council, six out of nine members are white. Mayor is white. Police chief is white. City prosecutor is white. City law director is white. City judge is white. And it's got the harshest weed law in the county, just saying.

The best Paul can do for Erimius, really the only thing he can do, is to try to make everyone involved in sending Erimius to the hospital pay. On the drive back to Cleveland, Paul talked about what he would do next. He also anticipated what the city's lawyer would likely do next, which he can do with confidence, because Paul used to be that lawyer.

He used to work the other side of these cases, defending the government and the cops. He worked for the city of Cleveland. And then he was a partner at a law firm that contracted with insurance companies to defend against civil rights claims.

Paul was good at his job. And he made good money. He had two BMWs—a convertible and a hard top. But after a while, he couldn't stomach it. He says, he'd felt like he was working for the wrong side. And it started to affect his health, so he switched over.

He'll frequently mention that he drives a Hyundai now. And then he'll say, and I'm fine with that. But he's not totally fine with that. Erimius's case won't be huge money. Erimius wasn't permanently injured, not physically. But Paul thinks he can at least get him something, maybe in the tens of thousands.

There's a complication they have to take care of first though before Paul can get a lawsuit going. And that's the not small matter of Erimius's criminal charges. The Euclid police cited Erimius for four crimes—drug abuse, resisting arrest, theft, and criminal damaging. Paul said, that list, pretty typical.

Sarah Koenig

I was confused, as were Erimius and Paul, about what the theft and criminal damaging were about, until I read the police report. There's a page long narrative. In it, the cops describe an event with roughly the same contours as what Erimius told me, but very different details.

The officers didn't talk to me for this story. And just to say, neither of them has been disciplined for what happened that night. But anyway, in their report, they say, that after they confiscated the marijuana, Erimius tried to take it out of one officer's hand. They say, Erimius was fighting with them, pushing them, that everyone was getting stung by the taser in the process.

They say, Erimius tried to take the taser away from them—that's the theft, apparently—and that the taser's cartridge got pulled off and the blast door broken off, that Erimius knocked one officer's glasses off his face, breaking them. They never mentioned kicking Erimius. They do describe kneeing him in the crotch and quote, "closed fisted strikes to his face and head."

Erimius has got to get out from under these charges strategically and quietly. Right now, Erimius doesn't think he should have to plead to anything. But Paul thinks, it might actually be better for the civil case if he does plead to something minor.

Sarah Koenig

Last thing Paul wants at this stage is for Euclid to know it is being sued. Because if they know, they will dig in on the criminal charges. So first step, delay. Erimius was supposed to have his initial court appearance today, actually, but they got it postponed by a couple of weeks to give his face time to go back to normal.

Sarah Koenig

The prosecutor might notice. Euclid police officers who happen to be in court that day, they might notice, start asking around. Paul wants Erimius to be unremarkable. He's just there to take care of these charges and go on home, no big deal.

Second step, hire a beard. Paul himself has to lie low while the criminal case moves through the municipal court. He will not be shepherding Erimius through. Instead, he's hired a dependable local attorney who won't raise any eyebrows in Euclid.

Paul's farming it out, in part, because his specialty is not criminal defense. But more to the point, if the folks in Euclid see Paul's name on the docket, the jig is immediately up. They will know they're facing a civil lawsuit, and possibly a big fat civil lawsuit, because they will have heard of Paul already. Or else they'll google him, and they'll see, oh, right, Brelo case, also known as the 137 shots case.

Back in 2012, two people in a car, a man and a woman, both African American, both homeless, were driving past the Justice Center downtown. Police said the couple fired a gun out the window toward them. A subsequent investigation suggested the noise the officers heard might have been the car backfiring. They never located a gun.

In any case, the police began to chase them, which isn't that strange, except for the debacle that ensued. The chase wove through residential neighborhoods, then onto the highway, and back off the highway. Twenty miles and 62 police cars later, the chase ended in an East Cleveland parking lot, where police fired a total of 137 shots at the car, killing both people inside.

One officer, alone, Sergeant Michael Brelo, shot at them 49 times. He scrambled onto the hood of the car, and he shot down at them through the windshield at close range. Sergeant Brelo was indicted for voluntary manslaughter.

A judge found him not guilty. There was no proof Brelo had actually killed them, the judge explained in his opinion. It's possible they were already dead by the time he got onto the hood.

The families of the two people who were killed sued. Paul represented one of them. And the city of Cleveland settled for $3 million. It was Paul's biggest media case, also his biggest payout.

Lately, he's been struggling a little. He's not into the hustle. He doesn't show up at memorial gatherings looking solemn. He doesn't slip a weeping relative his card. He doesn't have a website or do social media. He's white, which isn't always helpful in this business.

Erimius's case is an order of magnitude smaller than the 137 shots case or the Tamir Rice case. No one's going to shout his name during a protest. Paul told me, the smaller cases, they matter because they ricochet.

He's watched a lot of people go through incidents like this. He says, this beating will knock around inside Erimius's head, and then it will rebound off of him out into the city.

Sarah Koenig

A study published in 2016 found that reports of police brutality not only contribute to a quote, "spirit of legal cynicism," they also cause people to not call the cops when they need them. They make entire cities less safe.

The researchers looked at 911 calls before and after an infamous case in Milwaukee—the 2004 beating of a guy named Frank Jude. They found that for a year afterwards, there were 22,000 fewer 911 calls in Milwaukee, and that residents in black neighborhoods especially were far less likely to report crime. And at the same time that people were reporting fewer crimes, murders in Milwaukee rose by 32 percent.

The goal of Paul's lawsuit, aside from getting Erimius some justice and some dough, is to force police to account for their behavior—to answer for it. And I asked him, setting his own livelihood aside, isn't it possible that his involvement could actually be hampering progress?

Say Erimius went to the police department and complained to the supervisors, or the use of force in the officers' report triggered an internal investigation, and say that process were allowed to play out without the specter of a lawsuit, isn't it possible the department would fix itself?

Sarah Koenig

This is what bothered Paul the most when he worked the defense side, he said. The city's disdain for the plaintiffs. A person would file an excessive force claim, and right away, Paul says, everyone would attack the character of the complainer. Not just publicly—even among themselves, privately.

The lawyers, the adjusters, the insurance companies, the police officers, the police chief, the mayor—their attitude was—what kind of loser, what kind of scumbag would sue the police? That's after the break.

Right now, these past few years, is an era of law enforcement soul searching. Or it's supposed to be. All over the country, police departments are meant to be considering, deeply and anxiously, whether they are using force properly, whether they are operating without bias, whether they're listening to and hearing the citizens they police, in Albuquerque, in New Orleans, in Portland, Oregon, in Ferguson, Missouri, in Baltimore, and in Cleveland.

After the 137 shots case, the one where the couple was killed by police after the chase—first the Ohio Attorney General investigated, and then the feds came in, Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. Less than two weeks after Tamir Rice was killed, they issued their report. The Cleveland Police Department was engaging in a pattern or practice of using unlawful, excessive force, among many other problems.

The articles about the breadth and depth of the overall findings exhausted all the usual words—scathing, embarrassing, staggering, jaw dropping. The report was not all that different from the previous DOJ investigation of the Cleveland police, a decade earlier. This time, the city promised, things would be different.

In 2015 they entered into a consent decree with the federal government. A federal judge would oversee massive reforms in the CDP. If citizen complaints don't bring change, if internal investigations don't bring change, if criminal charges against cops don't bring change, if Paul Cristallo's lawsuits don't bring change, perhaps a federally mandated consent decree—a decree, just one click from a fiat—would persuade police that change is nigh. Perhaps not.

Sarah Koenig

This is Detective Steve Loomis. Until recently, he was the president of the Cleveland Police Patrolmen's Association, the police union here.

Clevelanders of a certain political persuasion, including some cops, I'm sure, just slapped their foreheads and groaned, please, no, not Steve, because they know bald-headed meaty-fisted Steve Loomis—the guy who dressed convincingly in a Santa hat at the department's Christmas party, and as the dirty biker hillbilly dude when he worked undercover—will say whatever the hell he wants.

Sarah Koenig

Steve Dettelbach was U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Ohio. His signature is at the bottom of the DOJ report, a report which devoted several pages to the substandard way in which the Cleveland Police Department dealt with citizen complaints.

Sarah Koenig

My laughter here is born of shock, not mirth. I'm not going to say I like Steve Loomis. I can't get there. Some of the positions he inhabits are too awful. President Obama has blood on his hands for the police officers killed in Dallas, or racist and anti-Muslim tweets by a CDP sergeant are the First Amendment right of every American, et cetera.

But I appreciate Steve Loomis. I appreciate that he's got a sense of humor about himself. I appreciate that he appears to be a true believer. That he is sincere when he says even the lowliest rookie patrolman does more to help this community than any other person in government.

I appreciate that Steve Loomis gave us six hours of his time in one day. Six hours, sat there in his union office, packed with Trump paraphernalia—also one or two cartoons that I'd call racist, he'd call political, explaining his world to us, arguing with us. Congenially.

An aside to Clevelanders who will complain that the media only quotes Steve because he's colorful and available, who'll say Steve doesn't represent us. Well, it's true, no other Cleveland officers were permitted to talk to us on the record. And I know from off the record conversations that not all of them think like Steve. But that aside, Steve is the man whom the rank and file elected as their leader and spokesman. He does, or did, officially represent the police. So here we are.

I know where activists stand on the question of reform. I know where a lot of nonactivists stand on the question of police reform. But I wanted to know, is reform even possible? Are the police willing?

As union president, Steve Loomis sat on the Cleveland Community Police Commission, the CPC, a group mandated into existence as part of the consent decree. It's supposed to make recommendations on new policies for community policing, bias-free policing, use of force.

Sarah Koenig

In fact, there's been a steady drip of articles in the local press about Steve's spotty attendance at meetings and the many calls for his resignation. In one article, he explained that he'd appointed himself as a commissioner because he didn't want to subject any of his patrolmen to quote, "that farce of a commission."

Still, he insisted, he is not anti-reform. We can always improve on what we do, he told me. And I'm happy to take that challenge on. But when I asked him about possible reforms in Cleveland, reforms that are being discussed and implemented all over the country, he vigorously whacked each one aside. Slowing down police interactions with suspects in hopes of avoiding the need for force.

Sarah Koenig

Bias. Steve would like to see one study linking implicit bias to police actions and reactions.

Sarah Koenig

More restrictions on how and when police can use a gun is going to endanger his officers, he said, because they'll think twice. They'll be afraid of getting in trouble for doing it wrong. And then it'll be too late. It's a common complaint among police.

Sarah Koenig

To Steve, the Tamir Rice case is the perfect example of how people misunderstand and willfully distort what the police do. How their fixes make no sense. To me, the way Steve talked about the Tamir Rice case was the perfect example of why so many people in Cleveland believe the police have zero capacity for self-reflection, much less self-correction.

The officer who shot Tamir was new, young, still on probation. I pointed out that Steve himself, as an experienced officer, had avoided shootings by lowering his weapon. He'd just given me a couple examples. So why is he saying, in the Tamir Rice situation, any officer would have done the same thing?

Sarah Koenig

So it began. Steve reiterated, as he has many times, that number one, Tamir was a big kid. As if that made him blameworthy.

Sarah Koenig

I did hang on, and it got worse. His savaging of Samaria Rice, which I'm not going to dignify by repeating here. Steve has said unkind things about the Rice family in the past. He also helpfully suggested they should use the money they got from a lawsuit to educate kids about the dangers of guns.

He wasn't worried about his tone or its implications then. He's not worried now. He believes the facts are with him. We disagreed about whether the police drove up too close to Tamir, whether they drove up too fast, whether Tamir pulled the gun from his waistband, whether the shooting of Tamir Rice was a mistake at all.

Sarah Koenig

Actions by suspects cause reactions by police officers, justified reactions. Did police take away any lessons, then, from the Tamir Rice case, I asked him. Sure, he said, we always learn a lesson.

So what is it? I don't know, he said. It was, in fact, the only time I stumped him in our six hours together. I asked him several times, and he could not come up with one thing that wasn't Tamir's fault.

I think Steve might actually believe what he's saying here, that police are never to blame for harming someone in the line of duty. If you end up dead or hurt, it's always because of something you did or didn't do. It follows, then, that the only ones who need to reform are the citizens.

In the name of Cleveland's 1,500 patrolmen, Steve Loomis is folding his arms. Inside his petulance is also a threat, you don't like how we do business? Fine, we'll stop arresting people. See how you like your city then. It's the same stance some police officers have taken in Chicago, in Minneapolis, in New York, in Baltimore—a cop out.

Steve Loomis says Cleveland's problem isn't rotten police, or poorly trained police, or faulty policies. The problem, he says, is understaffing. And he's not wrong. Even people who can't abide Steve Loomis, agree that Cleveland's Police Department is overburdened, and undersupplied, and poorly paid. This, of course, is the lament of law enforcement everywhere. Civilians, we need your tax dollars. What we don't need is your oversight.

A coda here, a few weeks after we spoke, Steve Loomis was replaced as union president. He had been voted out of office. And I'm not saying these things are necessarily connected. But eight months later, the team in charge of overseeing police reforms in Cleveland released some stats showing that during the first five months of 2018, police use of force in Cleveland had decreased by nearly 40 percent compared to the year before. It was too soon to claim victory, the report said, but it was encouraging.

Sarah Koenig

Five months after he'd been arrested, Erimius went to court for a hearing. By now, the city of Euclid knew a civil lawsuit was probably coming, which is why, after all this time, the four criminal charges were still hunkered in his case file. As Paul predicted, the city was unrelenting.

The prosecutor was not going to drop them, definitely not the resisting arrest. That's the linchpin charge, the resisting, the one that could really mess up Erimius's civil case. Because if Erimius gets convicted of resisting, that could justify the officer's use of force, not necessarily the excessiveness of the beating. It doesn't give them carte blanche. But it does allow the officers to do what they have to do to subdue a suspect.

So if Erimius has to eat that resisting charge, it could shrivel his civil claim. That's why the city won't budge on the resisting, and why Erimius won't budge either. Instead, today, Erimius is here on a motion to suppress.

He's trying to get all the charges dropped by claiming that the police had no reasonable suspicion to stop him in that hallway. And then after they made the faulty stop, they had no probable cause to search him, which would make the actual blunt they found on him, the fruit of a poisonous tree. That's the legal metaphor. So no legal stop, no legal arrest, no case.

When I walked into the courtroom, Mary Casa, the city prosecutor, said to me, you do know this is just a hearing, right? I do, I said. Then she and the other lawyers left the room for a while. I sat waiting in the empty jury box. Erimius, the two cops, Erimius's mother all sat on the benches. No one said anything.

I wrote in my notes, it's like a tomb in here. Then I heard a ruckus through the wall behind me where the prosecutor's office is. People were shouting. After a while, the lawyers filed back into the courtroom looking peeved.

Mary Casa and a couple other lawyers sat on one side. On the other, Erimius and his defense attorney, the local guy Paul had enlisted, Spiros Gonakis. Judge Deborah LeBarron announced me.

Sarah Koenig

It seemed I had been the cause of the ruckus.

Sarah Koenig

Any flicker of a notion I had that the city's intentions were forthright withered now. Before I'd figured, well, sure, they're triangulating, just like Paul. But I'd also assumed that they were at least prosecuting Erimius in good faith because they believed the cops, believed he'd committed these crimes and deserved punishment.

But you don't try to kick the reporter out of a public proceeding unless there's something unsavory about what's about to happen. Judge LeBarron denied the prosecutor's request for a continuance. They began. The hearing would not touch on anything that came after the search, so nothing about the resisting or the beating. This was only about the validity of the stop and the search.

Mary Casa and Spiros Gonakis took both cops through it moment by moment. That's where the law tends to snap into place, in an instant. First up, was Officer Shane Rivera. He explained that he and his partner, Officer Michael Amiott, had been working an off-duty detail that day at the Richmond Hills apartment complex where Erimius lived.

He said they'd been working this particular detail for two years. There had been problems in the building—drug trafficking, break-ins. They began their usual sweep of the building starting at the fifth floor, the top floor, and working their way down. They saw Erimius, he said, as they came down the stairs to the fourth floor. He was knocking on a door.

Sarah Koenig

He's saying Erimius looked suspicious right then—reasonably so. Why would you keep knocking on a door if no one's answering? This is what burglars do in the building. They knock, and then when no one answers, they kick in the door.

Sarah Koenig

Erimius was squirming at the defense table, shaking his head, stifled. He told me he was knocking at his friend's apartment door because he wanted a cigarette. His friend wasn't home, but his friend's wife was there, asleep.

Erimius says she eventually woke up and did open the door. He says she saw him being beat up, and that the police told her to go back inside, and she did. But Erimius can't say anything about that now. He's not taking the stand.

His lawyer didn't want the prosecutor to get a crack at cross-examining Erimius prior to trial, so he's got to suck it up. Every defendant I spoke to while I was in Cleveland eventually asked, when do I get to say my thing? When do I get to explain to the judge what happened? The answer, often, is never.

Sarah Koenig

Soon, it was Spiros's turn.

Sarah Koenig

Spiros is a spirited attorney, an energetic performer. Spiros tried to show that Erimius wasn't a menacing figure in that hallway. He was just a guy knocking on a door.

Sarah Koenig

Next up, Officer Michael Amiott. He seemed more comfortable on the stand than Officer Rivera. He didn't sound nervous. He wasn't defensive.

Sarah Koenig

This is key to making the stop kosher, the smell of raw marijuana emanating from Erimius's person. It's what allows them to detain Erimius. The prosecutor cements it in the record.

Sarah Koenig

Know what I smell right now? Reasonable suspicion that Officer Amiott did not smell an unlit blunt wrapped in a baggie in Erimius's jean's pocket. It's not impossible he smelled it but the level of confidence he's exhibiting here—that he can smell any amount of marijuana in a person's pocket, in the hallway of a building where I am certain marijuana is not scarce. No one in the courtroom seems to register any skepticism about that, apart from Spiros.

Sarah Koenig

Officer Amiott says after he smelled the marijuana, he asked Erimius if he had any drugs on him.

Sarah Koenig

Each efficient beat of this hearing, the cops are chipping away at Erimius's chances for success—criminal and civil. Erimius is a scary door knocker. He smells like marijuana. He seems nervous.

He keeps putting his hands in his pockets. He lets me search him for drugs. It's all very neat, and all very different from what Erimius says actually happened. Then comes one more, a doozy, right at the end. Mary Casa squeezes it in during her closing.

Sarah Koenig

Spiros is like, whoa, whoa, whoa, a bulge? Where'd this bulge come from? A bulge could suggest a weapon, which could give Officer Amiott reason to go into Erimius's pocket, which can make the search legal, which can make the charges stick, which could hurt the civil lawsuit. Spiros says, wait up. Amiott himself never said anything about a bulge.

Sarah Koenig

The judge says, I heard it. I wrote it down right here.

Sarah Koenig

It was over. Mary Casa looked very pleased at the end, chatting animatedly with the other lawyers at her table. She knows, everyone in the courtroom knows, in the who are you going to believe contest, the judge tends to presume the cops are telling the truth. So her side virtually always wins.

Spiros knows it, too. He expected the police to say most of what they said today. But the bulge thing—that was a new one. Out in the hallway, Spiros is still arguing. You can't just invent testimony.

Sarah Koenig

Spiros is right. I have the tape. Despite what the judge thought she heard, Officer Amiott did not mention a bulge. Bulge or no bulge, Spiros tries to boost Erimius's spirits. It went well, right?

Sarah Koenig

Erimius's mom, Callie, is the only one who laughed at my joke. Erimius, himself, is brimming with frustration. It's been five months. He's having to fight criminal charges he considers illegitimate.

Because of what happened in the hallway, the building management stuck a three-day notice on his apartment door, telling him he had to move out or else face eviction. He said, they told him the incident was a violation of the building's rules. He got an extension, but still.

He says, his girlfriend was harassed in front of the building. He thinks it was the same officers who stopped her. He says, she told them she stayed with Erimius upstairs. They arrested her on a warrant.

And today, he's just listened to police officers tell a version of the original incident, which bears little resemblance to his own. He said, they asked him to stop from down the hall before they even got near him. They said, stop, don't move. He says, he never told them he didn't know whose door he was knocking on. Anyway, why would he be knocking on a door of a person he doesn't know?

Sarah Koenig

Paul Cristallo hadn't gone to the suppression hearing. He was still trying to remain invisible in Euclid. But Spiros had filled him in, and he'd read the judge's opinion which amounted to, the stop, the search, all legal. She'll didn't even get to the bulge. She wrote that based on the suspicious door knocking and the smell of marijuana, we're good.

Sarah Koenig

Another phrase you hear a lot in these cases—reaching toward his waistband. That's where guns live. Waistbands. In their written report, the Euclid officers wrote that Erimius was, quote, "fighting with officers and pulling both arms together toward his waistband area." And a little lower down, "more strikes were delivered until Spencer stopped fighting, and stopped reaching toward his waistband."

Erimius had no weapons, had no nothing tucked in his waistband. Why, then, in the midst of a fight, would he be reaching toward his waistband? Because waistband is a magic word, like furtive, like odor of raw marijuana. It plants a strong seed of reasonable suspicion that blossoms into a tree of probable cause, which can produce untainted fruit, justified use of force in response to resisting a legitimate arrest.

I asked Paul, back when he was working for insurance companies defending cops, whether he'd done the same thing Euclid was doing now. When they could see a civil lawsuit in the distance, would he meet with city officials or cops about doubling down on the criminal charges to try to stop the civil case from gaining traction.

[PAUL LAUGHS]

Sarah Koenig

Of course it's upsetted-ness if a police officer lies. What's more upsetting is when a system of laws and procedures kicks in to support and sanitize those lies, so that it looks and sounds as if justice is happening. I'd even wager that the officers, and the prosecutor, and the judge, they'd all swear, with consciences clear, that Erimius' hearing was fair. By the book.

If Erimius wants these police officers to be held accountable for beating him, he's now gotten the message. The criminal court is probably the last place he should look for help. A few months later, I got a call from Paul on my cell phone.

Sarah Koenig

I was driving in a car, heading to the airport in South Carolina. The connection was terrible.

Sarah Koenig

A video had appeared on the internet.

[SCREAMING]

Sarah Koenig

A white police officer pummeling a black guy in the street after a traffic stop.

Sarah Koenig

A woman watching from inside a building across the street had recorded it on her phone. Her child was next to her.

Sarah Koenig

The officer beating the motorist? Michael Amiott, the Euclid weed smeller. The video bounced all over the internet—made its way into national news. What happens to a case then, when everyone's paying attention? That's next time on Serial.

Serial is produced by Julie Snyder, Emmanuel Dzotsi, Ben Calhoun, and me, with additional reporting by Ida Lieszkovszky. Editing on this episode from Ira Glass and Nancy Updike. Whitney Dangerfield is our digital editor. Research and fact checking by Ben Phelan.

Sound design and mix by Stowe Nelson. Music clearance by Anthony Roman. Seth Lind is our director of operations. ZipRecruiter ads are voiced by Stephanie Foo.

The Serial staff includes Emily Condon, Julie Whitaker, Cassie Howley, Frances Swanson, and Matt Tierney. Our music is by Adam Dorn and Hal Willner with additional music from Matt McGinley and Dan Reitz. Our theme song is by Nick Thorburn, and remixed by Adam Dorn.

Special thanks to Amanda King, Subodh Chandra, Lisa Noller, Melissa Georges, Jonathan Witmer-Rich, Kyle Swenson, Matthew Barge, Mike Tobin, Steve Dettelbach, David Doughten, Daniel Hart, Captain Scott Roller and Tina Roeder of the Euclid Police Department, and Lynn Hampton, president of the Black Shield, Cleveland's African American police union.

Thanks also to Pandora, where you can listen to Serial for free. The art on our website was made by Darius Stewart, a Cleveland artist—he created the mural for this episode—and by Moth Studio. They did the animation. Please check it out on our website, serialpodcast.org. That's serialpodcast.org.

We're also, of course, on Facebook and Twitter. Support for Serial comes from ZipRecruiter. Their powerful matching technology scans thousands of resumes, identifies people with the right skills, education, and experience for your job, and actively invites them to apply. Try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/serial. That's ziprecruiter.com/serial. Serial is a production of This American Life and WBEZ Chicago.