Sidebilder
PDF
ePub

-78

public or if it is likely that the public may use such recorded telephone, then posted notifications are also appropriate.

4. Areas of a police station which have audio/video surveillance should have a posted notification.

The Committee believes that the following additional action

is appropriate:

1. The Commissioner of Public Safety should conduct a review of the internal (e.g., the recording of trooper calls to monitor State Police telephone use regulations), investigatory and emergency tape recording needs of the Division of State Police. A technical review should be conducted to determine how those needs may be met with a level of tape recording of State Police telephones and telephone lines that takes into account legitimate privacy concerns.

2. The Connecticut General Assembly should provide the Offices of the Chief State's Attorney and of the Attorney General with the authority to conduct jointly an annual legal audit of all State Police policies and practices. Such audits should be the legal equivalent to $5 2-90 and 2-92 of the Connecticut General Statutes, which deal with the audits of state accounts, and they should be submitted to the same state officials who receive the audits of state accounts. The purpose of such audits would be to determine that State Police policies and practices conform to applicable state and federal law. Such

-79

current trends and developments in the law and how such trends and developments relate to changing investigatory technology. Through the audit process, future legal problems that the state police may face can be prevented or minimized. See: Appendix F. 3. The management of State Police and of municipal police departments should receive semi-annual updates of new developments in criminal and constitutional law and their effects on police policy. Appropriate statutes should be amended to provide for such seminars and to provide credit to attending officers for this continuing law enforcement education. The State Police Training Academy, in conjunction with the Office of the Chief State's Attorney, should provide such semi-annual updates to the management of the State Police Department. The Municipal Police Training Council, in conjunction with the Connecticut Police Chiefs Association and with the Office of the Chief State's Attorney, should provide such semi-annual updates to the management of municipal police departments.

4. In light of the lack of written policies in certain municipal police departments evident from the results of the survey discussed in Section VI, the Committee also recommends that the Municipal Police Training Council, in conjunction with the Connecticut Police Chiefs Association, consider a process for developing written guidelines for municipal police practices and

Mr. MORRISON. The and you have essentially said that that report indicated what to you appeared to be violations-violations of a large number of statutes. The way in which that report has been characterized publicly is that there really aren't any serious consequences, because they didn't mean it. They didn't have any evil intent. They were not trying to find damaging information about any individual, and therefore to the public of Connecticut not to worry, this is just a technical dispute among lawyers, and maybe we have to clean up our act a little bit, but basically don't worry.

Do you think that the Connecticut public should be lulled into feeling that there are no consequences, that they are not going to have to pay out a lot of money out of tax dollars and they won't have to worry with the court being flooded with habeas petitions? Mr. PODESTA. Well, no. I think that the question really is one of whether they violated the act. We are cautious people at the ABA, so I must say that I am taking no position on whether they did or they didn't, but the committee report relies almost exclusively on the question of whether they had bad motive.

I would say that there is some case law which might support that prior to the 1986 amendments to the act. But the 1986 amendments contained in the Electronic Communications Privacy Act changed the state of mind requirement to intentional. I brought this with me. Let me just read you three sentences from the Senate report, which is where that change was made, to what the term intentional violation meant. I don't think that anyone disputes that they intercepted the communications.

"The term intentional is not meant to connote the existence of a motive. The word describes the mental attitude associated with an act that is being done on purpose. It does not suggest that the act was committed for a particular evil purpose.'

[ocr errors]

And I think that the reliance-they may prove to be right when it comes to court, but I think a fair reading of congressional intent was that the act of intercepting the communications, which the committee report finds to be illegal, had to be done intentionally as opposed to for any particular purpose.

Mr. MORRISON. So, obviously, it is not a negligence standard. We had the tape machines and the rule said we were supposed to turn them off, and there was a mechanism to turn them off, and we had a procedure to turn them off, and somebody forgot to turn it off, that would be a negligence kind of a standard perhaps, and that might not met the intentional standard.

But the intentional standard is we had a tape and ran it all the time, and we didn't tell people they were being taped, and we allowed them to be taped, and we didn't have to mean anything by it.

We didn't have to want to get them or get conversations that would be intentional, right?

Mr. PODESTA. That is my reading of the statute, yes.

Mr. MORRISON. So, the report of this hearing, as opposed to the report of the Governor's task force, ought to tell the people of Connecticut to hold their wallets, that this is not something that

We got the defense and, you know, you just go back and relax, all the money that you paid to the State for law enforcement will go to law enforcement, not to paying damages to people who were treated improperly.

Mr. PODESTA. Well, I don't advise the people of Connecticut, but I guess I would advise the staff counsel who wrote the legal memorandum that they should go back and look at the reports of the 1986 amendments as to what the requisite standard is in this statute.

Mr. MORRISON. So, the commander of the State police should have paid some attention to the amendment of this law. This is something that was very relevant to his work, and he certainly wasn't doing his job if he didn't understand that there was a tougher standard coming down, and in fact coincidentally just about the same time as he was buying some fancy new recording equipment and installing it without beep tones in the various barracks in the State?

Mr. PODESTA. I would say that he certainly should have been aware of the 1986 act, it was certainly relevant to what he was doing up there.

Mr. MORRISON. I want to just explore one other area, and that is videotaping and bugging of conversations within police headquarters. This is something that Mr. Koskoff made some reference to in his testimony, but hasn't really been explores very much in the course of this hearing.

We just did see as part of Mr. Koskoff's testimony a videotape which was running while the suspect was talking to his lawyer. What do your standards have to say about the practice of videotaping individuals in custody and individuals otherwise present in public premises like police stations?

What kind of standards do we currently have? What do you think the law says about that, and what should the people of Connecticut expect about the consequences of that activity?

Mr. PODESTA. Let me start off, as a general matter I believe the ABA has no policy on videotaping as a generic matter. The policies I have provided for the record, are relevant to the videotaping of attorney-client conversations.

[merged small][merged small][merged small][graphic][subsumed]
« ForrigeFortsett »