How ‘give me a lawyer dog’ could mean canine or counsel
When a friend says, “I’ll hit you up later dog,” he is stating that he will call again sometime. He is not calling the person a “later dog.”
But that’s not how the courts in Louisiana see it. And when a suspect in an interrogation told detectives to “just give me a lawyer dog,” the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled that the suspect was, in fact, asking for a “lawyer dog,” and not invoking his constitutional right to counsel.
The ruling by Louisiana’s high court could have serious implications for a suspect charged with raping a juvenile, because it will allow his subsequent incriminating statements into evidence at his trial, which is pending.
Warren Demesme was being interrogated by New Orleans police in October 2015 after two young girls claimed he had sexually assaulted them. He had repeatedly denied the crime. Finally, Demesme told the detectives:
“This is how I feel, if y’all think I did it, I know that I didn’t do it so why don’t you just give me a lawyer dog ‘cause this is not what’s up.” The punctuation, arguably critical to Demesme’s use of the sobriquet “dog,” was provided by the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s office in a brief, and then adopted by Louisiana Associate Supreme Court Justice Scott J. Crichton. Demesme subsequently made admissions to the crime, prosecutors said, and was charged with aggravated rape and indecent behaviour with a juvenile.
A public defender, Derwyn D. Bunton, took on Demesme’s case and filed a motion to suppress his statement. In a court brief, Bunton noted that police are legally bound to stop questioning anyone who asks for a lawyer.
Orleans Parish Assistant District Attorney Kyle Daly responded in his brief that Demesme’s “reference to a lawyer did not constitute an unambiguous invocation of his right to counsel, because the defendant communicated that whether he actually wanted a lawyer was dependent on the subjective beliefs of the officers.” Daly added, “A reasonable officer under the circumstances would have understood, as (the detectives) did, that the defendant only might be invoking his right to counsel.”
Bunton’s motion to throw out Demesme’s statement was rejected by the trial court and the appeals court, so he took it to the state Supreme Court. Justice Crichton of the Supreme Court, in a recent ruling, wrote a brief concurrence “to spotlight the very important constitutional issue regarding the invocation of counsel during a law enforcement interview.”
Crichton noted that Louisiana case law has ruled that “if a suspect makes a reference to an attorney that is ambiguous or equivocal . . . the cessation of questioning is not required.” Crichton concluded: “In my view, the defendant’s ambiguous and equivocal reference to a ‘lawyer dog’ does not constitute an invocation of counsel that warrants termination of the interview.”