On May 19, a Fort Wayne woman died after an altercation with store employees at a Tim Horton’s shop. The now-viral video of the fight has raised questions about why no one was arrested at the scene. WBOI’s Rebecca Green sat down with Whitley County Prosecutor D. J. Sigler to talk about what can cause a criminal investigation to unfold slowly.
Below is a transcript of their conversation.
Rebecca Green: I am joined in studio today by Whitley County Prosecutor DJ Sigler to talk a little bit about the nature of death investigations, what can complicate them, and why they can take longer than people are often used to in this age of episodic television and podcasts, and social media can often skew the perception of what people are seeing, and so I wanted to talk to you today.
Obviously, we're not going to ask you to comment specifically on this case, because it's not your case, and if it was your case, you couldn't talk about it anyway.
But I did want to talk to you a little bit about some terms, and make sure that our listeners understand one of the things that I think there's been some questions about is why people aren't arrested immediately, and what it takes for police officers to arrest someone on scene, and then what the difference is between an on-scene arrest and criminal charges.
DJ Sigler: Yeah, anytime you have a death investigation, it behooves you as a prosecutor to be to be both thorough and then thorough again.
I can tell you that as a young prosecutor, I had some very good teachers, one of whom happened to be my father, and he always taught me when we were working cases together that you could be fast or you could be right, and for a prosecutor it behooves you to get it right. And when I say right, I mean the facts correct, and have the full command of the facts.
In order to do that, you have to spend an inordinate amount of time not only reviewing what you have in front of you, but going above and beyond to kind of discover what's going on around the case, and in my experience with prosecutors, and as a prosecutor, anytime you have somebody that's had a serious injury, anytime that you've had a death, any time that you've had a child, for example, that's been harmed grievously, then you're going to do everything that's necessary.
You want to gather as much information as you can before you make a decision, and in order to make a good decision, you're balancing several things.
You're balancing, on the one hand, perhaps somebody that's been injured or harmed. And on the other hand, you have an ethical obligation to consider, you know, taking someone's liberty from them. So the things that are set up for television and are designed for television for us to consume and enjoy aren't very reflective of the seriousness, I think, sometimes of what we're confronted with in a death investigation.
You have to be certain as you're proceeding forward.
Rebecca Green: When someone is arrested, does that necessarily mean that they're going to be charged, and if they are going to be charged, does that charge necessarily match the one that they might have been arrested on?
DJ Sigler: The short answer is no. Ultimately, prosecutors are the people who make decisions about charging what a police officer chooses to do or not do on scene is generally reflective of what they're confronted with.
And in my experience, police officers who are confronted with conflicting stories or confronted with cases that are complex or may require the involvement of a (medical examiner) or a forensic pathologist or a sexual assault nurse examiner, anytime that that officers are confronted with that level of complexity, they're typically going to do a full and thorough investigation, and they're going to pass that investigation to the prosecutor's office, who's responsible for the charging.
Rebecca Green: What you're describing is a process that takes time.
DJ Sigler: There is no substitution for having the time and the space to do your work to make sure that you're coming to a correct factual conclusion, and the things that appear so often on their face as written stone are often not.
And as I was explaining to police detective earlier today, don't forget that in your doing your work, you're making assumptions about things that you know, and we ultimately, the ultimate expression of what we do as investigators and as prosecutors, is we then have to explain these decisions, and then prove these decisions beyond a reasonable now to folks who aren't experts.
And it's a good system. It's the way it should be. So as you're assimilating these facts, and there's, there's things that you see in the media, or you read in the newspaper, or you read online. And that seems "well, that's cut and dried, that's, that's straightforward."
In my experience, in this line of work, very, very rarely is it as cut and dried as it seems. And then you add to that the collective attention span we all have, and I lump myself in here too, the collective attention span that we have, that we want these cases wrapped up and we want them solved and we want them put behind us and we want it done yesterday, and to expound on.
One of the things that I tell people, it has been a continual source of kind of astonishment to me through the years, is where our focus as a culture starts and stops.
It starts and stops on the charging of a crime, you know, we want somebody arrested and we want them charged, and, and that sounds wonderful, but that is such a small part of the overall process.
I mean, the overall process, don't forget, after a person is arrested, you then continue forward, where I have an ethical obligation as a prosecutor—if I have charged someone with a crime, and I have probable cause to believe they've committed a crime, and I believe they've committed that crime—then I have to put forward evidence that proves beyond a reasonable doubt that that person committed that crime.
And so the spectrum of proof necessary to arrest versus convict is so vast I cannot begin to describe in the amount of time that we have how difficult that is.
So, it feels good out front to say they should be charged, they should be arrested. That would make me feel good as an aggrieved person, as a member of the community.
But, as I have explained to my victims throughout the years, what would feel much worse than that is to charge quickly to go all the way through the process, and then you're forced to walk out as the victim of a crime.
You're forced to walk out of the courthouse with your assailant, because they've been acquitted. And and then the focus is on why the prosecutor, why the police didn't do their their job on the front end. And many times that arrest and charge feels good in year one when you're still litigating or you're still fighting in year two and you're trying it in year three, people have forgotten about how good they felt when the arrest and the charge came down.
Rebecca Green: DJ, thank you so much for coming by the station today.
DJ Sigler: Well, thank you for having me.
Rebecca Green: That was DJ Sigler, Whitley County Prosecutor.
