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.

I was talking to this guy, Kevin, forty years old. He'd been busted for giving someone at his college a marijuana cookie. He'd offered it as a nice gesture. Really, just hey, have one. He thought the guy understood what it was, wink, wink. But he didn't, and it all went wrong. Kevin ended up with a felony conviction. Well, another felony conviction. The case sounded absurd. There had been a trial over this cookie. That's funny, right?

I went to talk to Kevin, the cookie baker, in the hallway outside the courtroom in the Justice Center right after the verdict. Not funny. He was in what my mother would call a swivet, cracking angry jokes but also desperately upset, half-crying. Kevin said he'd been a drug dealer when he was young, but he'd changed. He was in school, volunteering in his community, trying to start his own business.

Doing well, and now this—what Kevin called felonious childish stupidness. It got him kicked out of his college, and it also triggered probation violation on a case from a few years earlier. Kevin had been just two months shy of completing that probation. He was almost done. And now this.

I'm sorry, I said. This is a rough day. He said, it's all right. It's all right. It's all right. I'm starting to get used to it, actually.

Sarah Koenig

You've got roots here in this building.

Sarah Koenig

So far in this series, we've talked a lot about the system aspect of the justice system, how the machinery of it works or doesn't. Now for the rest of the series, we want to look at the criminal justice system a whole other way. We want to follow people who are like Kevin, people who feel like they have roots in the system, who've been in it for years and who've been shaped by its machinery.

Probably nothing we've reported so far would be news to them. They know it. I know it's pretentious to say this, but I keep thinking of this Russian word, чувствовать. It means to feel something, almost sensually, to the point where you can taste it. You know it in your bones.

So now, we're going to follow people out of the Justice Center, out into the world, into their normal lives. The guy we're going to start with, his name is Jesse Nickerson.

Back in the summer of 2016, before we got to Cleveland, there had been a police scandal with a satisfying twist, if I'm allowed to call it that. Two officers had arrested this guy, Jesse Nickerson. And instead of taking him back to the station, they drove to a city park, took off Jesse's handcuffs, and one of the officers, a guy named Denayne Dixon, six foot four, former linebacker in the Arena Football League, challenged Jesse to a fight. Jesse squared off with Denayne Dixon for a second, but then he took off. He ran into the woods. The officers eventually found him, cuffed him. Jesse said they beat him. The officers said he hurt himself. The story made the news.

Sarah Koenig

That was the mayor talking to a TV reporter. This all happened in East Cleveland, not to be confused with the east side of Cleveland. East Cleveland is its own small city bordering Cleveland. Seventeen thousand people, it's got its own city government, and its own police department.

And it seemed, refreshingly, as if those entities were taking responsibility for what happened, and swiftly, no excuses. Both officers were fired within days. The police chief referred the case to state investigators. The county prosecutor's office sought criminal indictments. One officer pleaded guilty to a couple of misdemeanors, the other, Denayne Dixon, pleaded to a couple of felonies. We went to Denayne Dixon's sentencing at the Justice Center.

Sarah Koenig

That's the prosecutor, Ashley Kilbane.

Sarah Koenig

A police officer convicted for bad behavior on the job, already unusual in this courthouse. And here, Ashley Kilbane was arguing forcefully for the harshest possible punishment. She was pitching consecutive sentences, meaning the sentence for each crime would run back to back. The judge, Nancy Fuerst, invited Officer Dixon to speak.

Sarah Koenig

And he did. He apologized. He said, I understand I was put in a position of authority, and I was entrusted with the public's trust to make a difference, to be part of the solution and not part of the problem. And then he said, I had no intention of assaulting anyone.

Sarah Koenig

It's difficult to hear, but he says it was a tactic I had seen done before. You know, take a guy out of cuffs and get him to stop running his mouth or whatever. Officer Dixon's lawyer told the court that Dixon had told him the same thing, quote, "which is kind of disturbing." Other than that, no one remarks on this kind of disturbing information, just lets it go. The judge sentenced Denayne Dixon to two years in prison, and it was over.

The victim, Jesse Nickerson, was not in the courtroom the day of the sentencing. But he'd been in touch with the county prosecutors throughout the case. He had told Emmanuel that at one point, they'd given him some advice that he found kind of disturbing.

Sarah Koenig

Jesse said they told him, remember, Denayne Dixon's got friends.

Sarah Koenig

Usually, these cases of police brutality, the ones we hear about, the government response is constipated. Months, sometimes years of stop, start, internal investigations, equivocating public officials, officers placed on desk duty. And then, it just peters out.

In Jesse's case, there was none of that. The officers who'd abused him had been fired, convicted, and sentenced. Jesse had gotten all the things, the rare things people say they want in cases like this. Jesse had won. And yet here he was, on high alert. This whole situation with the police, it was not over.

Emmanuel, he lived in Cleveland for most of the year we were reporting there. And this is one of the cases he began to look into. Emmanuel interviewed police and prosecutors, and he interviewed Jesse Nickerson. And that interview turned into a nearly yearlong—adventure is too happy a word—misadventure, I guess. A year watching Jessie negotiate the afterwards of his case, the push and pull of one man's relationship with the police in his town. Here's Emmanuel.

Sarah Koenig

Before we get back to Jesse, I'm going to tell you about the case of Arnold Black, because it'll help you understand some of what's going to happen to Jesse, and also because the case of Arnold Black is crazy. I don't want to reach for another descriptor. It starts out crazy and then it gets more crazy.

First, a caveat. Arnold Black sued East Cleveland. I read the court transcript, I interviewed his attorney. There was a trial, but East Cleveland, the defendant, did not defend itself. They did not offer evidence or witnesses. They did not cross-examine anyone. So what I'm going to tell you is one-sided, which doesn't make it untrue. Everything I'm telling you now was testified to under oath in the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas, and again, was not challenged by the city. Here's the story.

This guy, Arnold Black, he's forty-four at the time. He's driving down Euclid Avenue in the middle of East Cleveland. It's nighttime. He'd done a landscaping job near where his mother lived, and he'd gone over to her house afterwards for dinner. And now, he was heading home. He was driving his truck, a green Chevy Silverado. He's got equipment in the back, weed whacker, leaf blower, a lawnmower. And the cops pull him over.

One uniformed officer in a cruiser, the other officer is a detective in normal clothes driving his normal car. The uniformed officer, Jonathan O'Leary, tells Arnold to get out of the truck, pats him down, cuffs him. They take Arnold Black to the rear of his truck, sit him down on the bumper. The cop in street clothes, Detective Randy Hicks, aggressively searches the truck, rips out the inside door panels.

In court, Arnold Black testified to the following. He said Detective Hicks started asking him about drugs in East Cleveland, and he told him he didn't know because I don't sell drugs, I don't do drugs, and I don't live in East Cleveland. He said he was looking for a kilo of cocaine, and he said to me that I wasn't in the right truck. Evidently, Detective Hicks was looking for a drug dealer in a green truck, but Arnold wasn't him, and that annoyed Hicks. He said, you messed my night up.

Arnold thought Detective Hicks seemed off, drunk probably. He keeps asking Arnold about drugs. Arnold is saying, why you keep asking me that? Then, wham. Detective Hicks punches Arnold in the face. Arnold testifies that he then starts to kind of slide off the bumper. Officer O'Leary props him up. Detective Hicks hits him again in the head. These were hard hits, hard enough that three years later, Arnold Black would need brain surgery to drain the fluid and blood from his skull. Even now, he can't remember things properly, his speech is slowed, he has trouble controlling his anger. His mother and fiance say his personality is changed.

The officers put him in the cruiser, take him back to the East Cleveland Police Department where the jail is, and they put him in a room that Arnold's attorney calls a storage locker. East Cleveland police called it a holding cell. Tomato, tomahto, no one can decide what this room is called. But whatever it is, it is not a proper jail cell. No bed, no toilet, no window, no water. It's got a bench, a few old lockers, the tall kind, and some cleaning supplies—brooms, mops, buckets, like that. They lock Arnold in there. That's according to his testimony.

And now, the timeline of all this is a little unclear. The police and county records say one thing, the trial transcript says another. But if we go by the records, at least, this began on a Friday night.

Arnold says he could hear people talking and hollering and walking around. He could hear keys. I knocked on the door and was screaming. Like, I told him I had to use the bathroom. And I said, anybody? Anybody? No one comes. Arnold pees in a locker.

Meanwhile, his girlfriend, Eryka, is getting worried. Where is he? She was supposed to hear from him. She was calling around to friends. She calls the hospital.

Sunday comes. Arnold says an officer opens a door to the room and asks him, does anyone know you're in here? Arnold says, no. The guy says, shhh and points to the ceiling. There's a microphone up there. He says, step back. They won't pick up whispers.

Then, he takes his own cell phone from his back pocket. Arnold gives the guard Eryka's number. The guard dials the phone, hands it to Arnold, and tells him to make it quick. Arnold tells Eryka, the cops beat me up. I'm in East Cleveland Jail. Come get me.

Arnold says a bit later, that same guy comes back and tosses him one of those little milk cartons, like from a school cafeteria. Eryka arrives, asks to see Arnold. Now, this is according to her testimony. The cops at the reception window kind of look at each other for a while. Finally, someone says, he's under investigation. You can't see him. He's under investigation. She feels like something's wrong, like they're lying to her. She calls Arnold's family.

Arnold's brother, he took the stand at trial, too. Arnold's brother says, he goes to East Cleveland, and they tell him Arnold's in Cleveland Jail. So he drives over to Cleveland, where they tell him there's no Arnold Black here. And he's like, I was just—they just told me to come here. They check, check again. Nope. He goes back to East Cleveland again, where they again say, we don't know what to tell you. He ain't here.

It's now Monday, day three of the storage room. Arnold is in terrible pain from his head injuries. He can't sleep, really. He's hungry. In court, Arnold said that aside from that one little milk carton, they gave him nothing to eat or drink. The pee in the locker is stinking.

He's intensely anxious. He's worried the cops are going to do something to Eryka because he called her. He feels like the room is closing in on him. Finally, again, if I'm reading the records right, on day five, he's put in a van and taken to the county jail at the Justice Center.

He's held there a couple days until Eryka comes to get him, pays his bond, $250 bucks. When she sees him walking out of the county jail, she says his head is so swollen, he looks like he's wearing a helmet. She takes him home. Sometime later, Arnold gets a letter in the mail telling him he's been indicted by a grand jury for possessing crack cocaine. I was like, charged with cocaine, Arnold said. I never had no cocaine. How can I get charged with that?

In the police report, Officer O'Leary claims he found a baggie of crack under Arnold's tongue, and also that he had a baggie of marijuana. I'll point out that the East Cleveland detective who testified about the crack before the grand jury, Eric Jones, was at that time part of a cabal of East Cleveland cops who were shaking down drug dealers, stealing their money, and falsifying evidence. He's now in federal prison. But I digress.

In any case, the prosecutor could see the circumstances of Arnold's arrest were shady. She'd been told about the beating. This file was going to be trouble. They dropped the charges.

Arnold hires a civil rights lawyer, Bobby DiCello. He sues. He sues the City of East Cleveland, he sues the police chief, Ralph Spotts, he sues Officer O'Leary, he sues Detective Hicks. He's asking for $35 million dollars.

Bobby DiCello seeks a settlement from the city on behalf of Arnold Black. DiCello gets much the same pitch Scott Ramsey got when he sought a settlement for Jesse. There's only so much we can afford. DiCello's response, though, very different. Here's Bobby DiCello.

Sarah Koenig

I'm going to ask you to bear with me a little longer here, because this story gets better/worse. As they prepare for trial, DiCello finds out there was dash cam footage of the arrest that shows detective Hicks beating Arnold. And they also discover that that same raw video was later edited by the police, altered so as not to show the beating, and—listen up here—that the police chief and the mayor knew about it.

They discovered that the East Cleveland police did this all the time. In fact, they discovered that nothing that happened to Arnold Black during the time he was secretly in East Cleveland's custody was unusual. Police in East Cleveland routinely pulled people over and roughed them up. That'd been the practice for decades, routinely held them in jail for no reason, routinely altered evidence. The police chief routinely told officers to keep quiet about abuse to avoid lawsuits.

DiCello had found out about almost all this stuff from a most unlikely source, Detective Randy Hicks, the guy who beat Arnold Black. Hicks had walked off the job within days of Arnold's arrest, he said, as soon as he realized his bosses were going to blame everything on him. He'd been at the department for about fifteen years, head of the narcotics unit for six, had earned commendations. He wasn't a rogue cop, he said. He was doing what they'd all been taught to do in East Cleveland.

We asked the city's law director to respond to this story. She didn't. Neither did Officer O'Leary or Detective Hicks. The then mayor, Gary Norton, did respond. He said the characterizations from the civil trial are one thousand percent false. He said all he knew about the dash cam video was that, quote, "there was a gap in the tape," unquote. A gap. And he said he didn't know about the holding cell/storage locker at the jail, which was downstairs from his office. I just didn't know. I really didn't.

The then police chief, Ralph Spotts, also called us back. He said, ditto. There was no such culture of aggression within the police department, he said—no pattern of altering evidence or of hiding abuse. Mr. Spotts said Detective Hicks was just shifting blame for his own personal wrongdoing.

The civil lawsuit drags on. Years go by. But at no point does East Cleveland ever hand over discovery, not one piece of paper. Never mind the dash cam video or personnel records or logs from the jail, DiCello never even gets a police report. The city law director claims she doesn't know where anything is. They simply have nothing to hand over.

It's egregious enough, this refusal to engage, that the judge finally issues a ruling saying, OK, East Cleveland. You are now barred from introducing any evidence in trial. So we're going to have a trial, but you cannot defend yourself. You've forfeited that right. The city appeals this ruling. They appeal once, twice, they get denied.

In 2016, four years after Arnold's beating and arrest, they finally go to trial. And the only person who shows up for the other side, the only person, is former East Cleveland Detective Randy Hicks. No city law director, no police chief, no mayor, just Randy Hicks, all by himself. And he admits everything.

There's this extraordinary part of the trial transcript in which DiCello reads a long list of all the things officers in East Cleveland did, and Hicks confirms it. All of it. DiCello—number four, Officer Hicks was and his fellow officers were required by Chief Spotts to follow a custom of using violence in the city of East Cleveland which had officers using force on civilians to compel statements from them, to establish control, to instill fear and submission, and to show dominance during arrests and traffic stops. The judge—is that true? Hicks—yes, Your Honor.

A jury awarded Arnold Black $22 million in compensatory and punitive damages. A $22 million judgment. Victory, right? Not exactly, because—get this—the morning of trial, about an hour and a half before it started, the city's lawyer filed a notice of appeal with the Ohio Supreme Court. It's a notice saying, hey, we're planning on filing something with you guys. The city had assumed that the notice would stop the clock on the trial. And retroactively, it did. An appeals court later ruled that the trial should not have gone forward with that notice pending.

So now, as I write this in 2018, the verdict in Arnold Black's case has been overturned. Now, DiCello is the one appealing. He's not sure if he'll prevail. He might have to retry this case.

Civil lawsuits are supposed to lead to reform. That's the hope—that a city will fix the problems that are costing it a lot of money.

We talked to eleven attorneys who do civil rights cases in Cuyahoga County. One attorney said, yeah, bring it. I have no problem pulling the trigger against East Cleveland. The other ten attorneys, no way, they said. It's not worth it, said one. I have a business to run, said another. We heard, there's no reward. We heard, it's a bitch. We heard, I turn down any case that comes from East Cleveland, and it's heartbreaking.

In other words, Arnold Black is a cautionary tale, which makes DiCello nuts. He doesn't see it that way. And he says Arnold Black doesn't either. The city hasn't paid Arnold Black a dime, but he has gotten quite a bit of money as a result of the lawsuit, from a funding company that loans plaintiffs money based on likely verdicts. That's a whole financial industry, apparently. But more to the point, DiCello says, there's now a public record of how East Cleveland was running its police department. This case, this verdict was national news. Because it went to trial, I'm talking about it right now.

I asked DiCello, can you understand, though, how someone like Jesse Nickerson might not want to spend six plus years fighting the city, especially if they live there? DiCello said, yeah. But if a client did tell him that, he'd push back with a speech that goes something like this.

Sarah Koenig

If you settle for peanuts like Jesse did, DiCello says, you're not going to get real change. You're going to get peanuts. And now, you're living in your same town along with the same people you're scared of. Right. And that's where Jesse is. Emmanuel is going to take it from here.

Sarah Koenig

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. Whitney Dangerfield is our digital editor, research and fact checking by Ben Phelan, sound design and mix by Stowe Nelson. Additional production from Kate Bilinski. Music clearance by Anthony Roman. Seth Lind is our director of operations. 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, Fritz Meyers, Nick Thorburn, and Wes Schwartz. Our theme song is by Nick Thorburn and remixed by Adam Dorn. Special thanks this episode to Melissa Georges, Ed Little, Eric Brewer, William Vodrey, Nancy Jamieson, Mollie Murphy, Chris Link at the ACLU, and Colleen Cotter at Legal Aid Society of Cleveland.

The art on our website was made by Martinez E-B. He created the mural for this episode and Moth Studio did the animation. Please check it out on our website, serialpodcast.org. That's serialpodcast.org. Or you can also sign up for our email newsletter and be notified when new episodes are released. Serial is a production of This American Life and WBEZ Chicago.