The interrogation itself can be suspect

The high court is scheduled to hear oral arguments Wednesday. That evening, Court TV will present “The Interrogation of Michael Crowe,” its movie reprising an actual murder case that found Escondido police obtaining a videotaped confession from a vulnerable 14-year-old suspect that appeared to have been coerced. Charges against him were later dropped -- after he had spent seven months in jail.

As the movie shows, officers did inform Michael of his Miranda rights before he withered under psychological pressure and told them he murdered his younger sister, Stephanie, in 1998. So the debate over Miranda -- whose redefining some legal experts believe would send a message to police that they could trample over rights -- does not directly apply here.

Where the movie does intersect with Miranda is on the broader issue of police behavior, and whether authorities can be trusted to do what’s proper and in the public’s interest when questioning suspects.

In Michael’s case, apparently not after they become convinced that he and two of his friends had collaborated in the knifing of 12-year-old Stephanie in her bedroom. And with young Canadian actor Mark Rendall as Michael in this movie -- a forlorn, pathetic, manipulated figure in jailhouse white while being pressed by police to confess -- this meltdown of a youth is as painful as TV drama gets.

The Miranda case before the Supreme Court stems from an Oxnard farm worker’s suit against police for questioning him relentlessly as he lay gravely wounded from their gunfire. With the Bush administration on board as well, Oxnard police are expected to argue to the high court that Miranda includes no “constitutional right to be free of coercive interrogation,” only the right not to have incriminating statements used against suspects in court. For Michael, coercion is the issue.

The San Diego County sheriff declared him innocent after he recanted his confession, and his family is suing police and prosecutors for allegedly violating his civil rights while questioning him.

Here’s the crux of this interesting, well-acted film written by Alan Hines and directed by Don McBrearty: If his confession hadn’t been videotaped, Michael might still be in the slammer.

Zigzagging emotions of interrogations have long fascinated scenarists. These encounters have proved perfect for small-screen intimacy, most notably in the 1990s in “Prime Suspect 2” on PBS, with British copper Jane Tennison (Helen Mirren) sweet-talking a confession from a dying murder suspect, and in NBC’s “Homicide: Life on the Street,” when Bayliss (Kyle Secor) and Pembleton (Andre Braugher) tried mightily to squeeze an admission from an old peddler they believed guilty of murder. After trying 12 hours, they failed.

When it comes to brilliant screen interrogations, though, “The Prisoner” also merits a pedestal. Not the Patrick McGoohan TV series, which was memorable for other reasons, but a 1955 movie of that title starring two British actors, Alec Guinness as an admired cardinal imprisoned in an unspecified country on a phony treason charge and Jack Hawkins as the Marxist inquisitor who methodically breaks him down.

Drawn from a play by Bridget Boland, this superbly staged psychological duel mimics novelist Arthur Koestler in showing that just about anyone, however strong-willed, can be tied into knots mentally by an interrogator skilled in the techniques of twisted logic and mind bending.

In “Darkness at Noon,” Koestler writes of an aging Bolshevik’s total loss of perspective when grilled for long hours by authorities in a new regime bent on erasing the old order much as the Kremlin leader Stalin did in the late 1930s.

At one point the exhausted Rubashov hears his interrogator’s voice above him and coming from every side of him as it hammers “mercilessly on his aching skull.”

He ultimately capitulates, somehow persuaded that public confession to imaginary crimes is the best last service he can do for the communism he still cherishes.

Flash forward. The chasm is not that wide between Koestler, writing in 1940, and the aching skull of Michael Crowe in an earlier Court TV documentary (featuring the actual videotape) and this movie when, after being worn down by hours of questioning without a parent or lawyer present, and being lied to and intimidated, he is convinced by investigators that his interests are served by confession. Even after he tells them his confession will be a lie.

The movie also features good work by Ally Sheedy and Michael Riley as Michael’s parents and John Bourgeois as a lead detective.

But there are nits to pick. It was Michael’s grandmother (a missing person here), not his father who discovered Stephanie’s bloody body. And the story loses steam as the closing credits draw near.

Burned into memory, though, is that image of a juvenile alone in an alien environment while alternately being cajoled and bullied by investigators claiming to be his pal. Although lying and manipulation are accepted techniques in police interrogations, a line surely was crossed here.

The sheriff’s department later replaced Escondido police on the case, and scheduled for a January court date is a drifter who was charged with Stephanie’s murder after DNA connected blood on his clothing with her blood.

Whether even that erases the stain on Michael remains to be seen.

Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at howard.rosenberg@latimes.

Com

*

To see it

“The Interrogation of Michael Crowe” will be shown at 8 p.m. on Wednesday on Court TV.