Disgusted by city's top prosecutor, a police officer refuses to testify
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
We're going to start this hour with news of murder trials that have been taking place without an important witness. This is happening in St. Louis, and it tells us something about the nationwide debate over how to deal with crime and the resistance to progressive prosecutors. NPR investigative correspondent Sacha Pfeiffer is here to bring us the story. Hey, Sacha.
SACHA PFEIFFER, BYLINE: Hi, Ari.
SHAPIRO: You've been working on this story with ProPublica. What have you found?
PFEIFFER: So, right off the bat, Ari, I want to play you two pieces of tape. These are a pair of voicemails, pleading voicemails. And this is the first one.
UNIDENTIFIED ATTORNEY: Hey, Detective Murphey. I wanted to reach out to you one more time. I do think we need you on this case. There is no problem with calling you as a witness, so please give me a call.
SHAPIRO: What's happening here, Sacha? What are we hearing?
PFEIFFER: That is a prosecutor begging a police officer to testify at a homicide trial. But the officer did not respond, so the prosecutor called again.
UNIDENTIFIED ATTORNEY: Hey, Detective Murphey. I understand you have issues, but this is a murder case, and we kind of need you. If it makes any difference, this guy's a really bad guy. So can you put your differences aside and focus on getting this guy? That would be helpful. Thank you.
SHAPIRO: And did Detective Murphey respond to that second voicemail?
PFEIFFER: No, he did not. This is a detective named Roger Murphey. He never did testify. That's even though he was the lead detective and even though he believes the man on trial did beat a person to death and even though he believes his absence hurt the case.
SHAPIRO: So this detective investigated a murder. He thinks the defendant was guilty, and he thinks if he had testified, that could have helped secure a conviction. Why wouldn't he take the stand?
PFEIFFER: So I want to note, by the way, that that jury in that case came back with a not guilty verdict. I also want to note that Detective Murphey is not the only St. Louis police officer who has refused to cooperate, but he is one of the most extreme. So far, he has refused to testify in at least nine murder cases in which he was the lead detective and in another one coming up soon.
SHAPIRO: For what reason?
PFEIFFER: So some context - as we've said, this is taking place in St. Louis. That city, of course, became an epicenter of the Black Lives Matter movement and of calls for police accountability after the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown.
SHAPIRO: For anyone who doesn't remember, Michael Brown was killed by police in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson. His death and the protests that followed created a huge push for criminal justice reform.
PFEIFFER: Yes. And as part of that push for reform, St. Louis elected a new top prosecutor in 2016, and she created what's called an exclusion list of problematic cops.
SHAPIRO: What is an exclusion list?
PFEIFFER: It's a list where - police officers who are believed to have credibility problems get put on it, and it excludes them from getting search warrants or bringing cases forward. And Detective Murphey feels so wronged about being put on that list that he's basically willing to sabotage his own cases. So I went to St. Louis to talk with him.
SHAPIRO: Well, take us there. What did you find?
PFEIFFER: Well, I met Murphey at his home on the city's south side. He lives in a small house with his wife and his pickup truck and two pit bulls.
ROGER MURPHEY: That's Lucy, the brown one. And that's Ethel. I got her from a crime scene, a murder-suicide. We got her back to health, and now she's...
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: She's 50 pounds of craziness.
PFEIFFER: It's not that Murphey doesn't have time to testify. He's now retired, so he has nothing but time.
MURPHEY: I get up. I go and hit the coffee pot, put the dogs out. I go out in the garage. I smoke a cigarette. I go fishing, eat dinner, get with our neighbors.
PFEIFFER: Murphey appears to have a clean record, but he landed on a list of problematic St. Louis cops because of some Facebook posts. In one, he called a Black man who'd been killed by a white police officer a violent thug. He also referred to the top prosecutor in St. Louis at the time, a Black woman named Kim Gardner, as Kimmy G. A judge later said Murphy's Facebook posts were unprofessional but not racist, and Murphey says he was just exercising his right to free expression.
MURPHEY: There's nothing biased. It shows that I'm a conservative, and it shows I'm, you know, pro-police. I mean, I could see if I committed a crime, but this was because I was speaking out against the political system here in the city of St. Louis.
PFEIFFER: Murphey strongly opposes Kim Gardner's policies. She's a progressive Democrat. She wants to reduce mass incarceration, eliminate cash bail, promote rehabilitation over punishment and not prosecute some nonviolent crimes like shoplifting. Murphey calls that a soft-on-crime approach that's making cities less safe. And although Gardner's office put him on its exclusion list, it still asked him to testify at some trials. Murphey says it's hypocrisy to question his integrity yet want him to testify. And he says even if he did testify, defense attorneys might grill him about why he's on the list.
MURPHEY: I'm going to get on the stand, and they're going to crucify me. It would have been all about me and not about the case.
PFEIFFER: Being on Gardner's list meant Murphey wasn't allowed to do much work on cases, so he ended up doing a whole lot of nothing.
MURPHEY: I come in at 6 o'clock in the evening, and I'd watch Amazon Prime, or I'd watch Netflix, or I'd watch Hulu or whatever. You're paying me, at that time, $61,000 a year plus benefits to sit there and watch TV.
PFEIFFER: So Murphey retired about two years ago out of boredom and frustration, but some of his cases are still ongoing. The police department didn't order Murphey to testify and didn't discipline him for not testifying. There's now a new top prosecutor in St. Louis who says he doesn't have an exclusion list, and his office has also asked Murphey to testify. But Murphey still won't do it. And he said his lawyer advised him not to testify, either.
MURPHEY: Was it the right thing to do? In my mind, yes. In other people's minds, probably in your mind, it wasn't the right thing to do.
PFEIFFER: Prosecutors were able to get some convictions without Murphey on the stand, but in other cases, they offered plea deals or dropped charges entirely. Had Murphey testified, the outcomes may have been different.
MURPHEY: But that one defiant guy in Tiananmen Square standing in front of a Chinese tank - and I'm not saying I'm that guy, you know, but somebody has to stand up and go, this system needs an overhaul.
ADOLPHUS PRUITT: He is a menace to society.
PFEIFFER: Adolphus Pruitt is president of the St. Louis NAACP.
PRUITT: He has a sworn duty to protect and serve. And if he doesn't do such 'cause he was on his list or some other bullcrap, he is the biggest problem with policing and the biggest problem with society.
PFEIFFER: Murphey says he's fed up with what he calls hatred towards police and disgusted by liberal prosecutors. He also says he's taking a principled stance and speaking for other disillusioned police officers who are afraid to speak up. But Pruitt buys none of that.
PRUITT: It is retribution. If they had to drive cases or they had to plea for weaker sentences, it worked. He extracted the retribution he wanted to extract on the office, and that's all that was.
PFEIFFER: That office is the St. Louis Circuit Attorney's Office. It was led by Kim Gardner for nearly seven years. She was elected and reelected by a wide margin both times.
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PFEIFFER: Her progressive message resonated after the trauma St. Louis went through following Michael Brown's death. Here's Gardner after winning her primary three years ago.
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KIM GARDNER: The people spoke. And they said, it's enough is enough. People saw the murder of Mr. George Floyd. People see the murders of many others at the hands of law enforcement that should be there to...
PFEIFFER: But Gardner clashed with police. They say she failed to prosecute legitimate cases, and her office struggled with massive dysfunction. About a third of her attorneys quit. The ones left behind had crushing caseloads. Some didn't show up in court for trials. Eventually, Missouri's attorney general sued to try to remove her from office, and a judge said this.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED JUDGE: The circuit attorney's office appears to be a rudderless ship of chaos.
PFEIFFER: Back in 2020, Gardner had filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city and police union, alleging a racist conspiracy to push her out of office. She did not respond to multiple requests for comment. But here she is at a Baptist church in St. Louis in May.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
GARDNER: You can't run an office that you have people inside and out purposely tearing this office down. And I'm going to tell you I'm not leaving. I'm not resigning. I'm not doing nothing. You're going to have to remove me.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: That's right.
PFEIFFER: About two weeks later, Gardner did resign, but the legacy of her exclusion list still lingers.
MICHAEL CASSIDY: I don't think exclusion lists are a good idea to begin with.
PFEIFFER: That's Boston College law professor Michael Cassidy. He says these lists alienate police officers, so prosecutors shouldn't be surprised when cops on them refuse to cooperate.
CASSIDY: Saying that I'm going to put you on an exclusion list is basically the death penalty to your career.
PFEIFFER: But Cassidy also says Murphey has an obligation to testify. Murphey could be subpoenaed, but he says if that happens, he'd refused to answer questions on the stand. And Cassidy says that means murders may go unsolved.
CASSIDY: So he doesn't get a lot of sympathy for me. But neither does the extreme position of creating exclusion lists without giving the people on that list any opportunity to talk to you before the list is created. So neither party here gets a lot of sympathy from me.
PFEIFFER: Murphey is still railing against Kim Gardner months after she resigned from office, and he does not intend to testify in another St. Louis murder trial scheduled to start soon.
CASSIDY: Did it hurt cases? It definitely hurt cases. And I apologize to the family and all the other families out there that didn't get to see justice. But I don't believe in the progressive system at all. The public has seen me as the enemy and has seen our profession as the enemy. But we didn't break the system. We kept arresting people, and she kept letting them out, refusing cases, refusing good cases.
PFEIFFER: Murphey did agree to testify in one case. That's because Gardner's office wasn't involved and one of the victims was related to a police officer.
MURPHEY: And, yeah, the bias in that point is it's a policeman's family. And we're all, you know, supportive for each other.
PFEIFFER: Murphey says it does bother him that one homicide case he refused to testify in resulted in an acquittal. Murphey thinks if he had testified, the man accused would be behind bars.
MURPHEY: I still feel bad that he's walking the streets because he's going to do it to somebody else. Murderers don't just murder one time.
PFEIFFER: Progressive prosecutors say that attitude shows how much external and internal opposition they're up against. Sacha Pfeiffer, NPR News.
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SHAPIRO: We'll hear more about that on Morning Edition tomorrow. And go to npr.org for a link to the digital version of this story by ProPublica, which NPR collaborated with for this project.
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