All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
Okay, guys, introducing Steven Silverman.
He is a lawyer out of Baltimore, Maryland.
Welcome to the show.
How are you?
I'm great, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
I appreciate you joining me on the show today.
I don't want to take up too much of your time, but I've got some questions for you.
My old friend, the late, great Will Grigg, who was the co-founder of the Libertarian Institute with me and Sheldon Richman, we've posted his full article archive going back for years there at our little institute website, and that includes an article called Police State Keynesianism, Stimulating Tyranny.
It's about a few different cases of local police abuse of victims, and it includes a reference to a previous client of yours.
This article was from 2009.
It was based on, in part, he quotes a story from the Baltimore Sun.
It's called $210 million suit filed over police team's strip search.
The reason it was brought to my attention was because the cop who was sued by your client with your help here over this, his lawyer contacted me and wanted me to take the article down.
For what reason?
On the claim that, it was categorically untrue, and the fact that this cop is now an FBI agent proves that he must not have done it.
So I contacted a free speech lawyer who told me, don't you worry one bit about that.
And I told her, I politely declined, and that's where it sits now.
So now my curiosity is piqued, and I want to know everything you can tell me about this lawsuit and your client, Daryl A. Martin, and what happened to him, allegedly, and the results of the lawsuit, and all of these things.
And is it true that this cop was investigated and cleared repeatedly, including by the FBI and the rest of this stuff?
So what can you tell me?
Well, if memory serves me correct, it was a number of police officers.
Did the lawyer that reached out to you identify who he was representing?
Yes, it was, she is the lawyer, and she's representing Shaquille Moss, who was the man alleged to have been, I believe, the ringleader.
Go ahead.
Right, right.
Well, it's been a few years, but the long and short of it is, Daryl Martin was literally walking down the street in Baltimore City, and he's a hell of a nice guy, love him, actually.
And he was up to nothing nefarious.
He, you know, just was minding his own business, and what was called a special tactic operation team, which was a group of plainclothes officers that would roam around Baltimore City under the auspices of having free reign to grab guns.
They jacked him up on the side of the street for no reason, no probable cause, no reasonable articulable suspicion, and they started to conduct a strip search in broad daylight.
And what was interesting about the case is, you know, you hear this stuff all the time, and it's five officers word against one, but what ended up happening, and I didn't brush up on the facts, and again, it's been about a decade, but it was either Officer Moss or another one of the officers.
For some reason, I do think it was Moss, but I'm not 100% sure.
The allegation was that Officer Moss put on a plastic glove and actually did an anal cavity search of my client in the middle of the day, in the middle of the city, in front of people for no reason, an anal cavity search.
Now, when he contacted me, I found it, you know, hard to believe, if not impossible to believe that any officer would do that, let alone for no reason.
It wasn't like he was suspected of trying to conceal drugs into a prison setting or something like that.
And so what ended up happening was, we filed an IAD complaint, Internal Affairs Division complaint, Internal Affairs, which is sometimes independent of the police department, even though they're always supposed to be, and sometimes they're not.
They actually went out and got the glove and conducted a DNA test, and there was a match for both the officer and my client, which corroborated the fact that they gave him an anal cavity search in broad daylight.
So in other words, that wasn't, you didn't have that test done at a private lab that you paid.
That was the Internal Affairs that did the test on the glove.
Yeah, made or broke the case, because like I said, you know, it's a handful of officers against my client.
And by the way, just to clarify, in the Baltimore Sun piece from back then, it is clear that it's Moss specifically who's accused of that part of the act.
Yeah.
So we filed a federal lawsuit.
It was a huge complaint.
If I remember, we went back and not only attacked this incident, but attacked this group of officers and found identical situations where identical statement of charges that they wrote on different defendants, the same sort of course of action over systemic violations of civil rights, and the lawsuit ended up resolving.
You know, Baltimore has had a terrible run of this kind of thing.
I'm currently representing two gentlemen, Umar Burley and a guy named Brent Matthews, that were minding their own business on the side of the street.
They actually pulled over so the driver could make a cell phone call, and a similar rogue group of plainclothes officers decided to, quote unquote, jack them up, blocked the front, blocked the back.
My client, one guy came out in a black mask and a gun.
My client, Umar Burley, thought he was getting robbed, takes off from the scene, goes about two blocks and flips his car and kills this poor guy who's literally sitting on his porch.
Turns out the man on his porch was the father of another Baltimore City police officer, so these cops are now livid.
You know, they know they made a, quote unquote, stop without probable cause or reasonable or articulable suspicion, and now they've got an innocent bystander that's killed.
So what do they do?
They call another officer who was not there, who comes in and plants drugs in the back of their car to give them the probable cause for the chase that ended up in a fatality.
So they end up prosecuting these guys, but it's not bad enough that they had, you know, local level street amount of drugs that they planted.
They actually pushed this case federal, and my guys had no choice because, again, it's the officer's word against theirs.
I didn't represent them at the time, but they had no choice other than to end up copping to, I think it was 11 years, because if they went to trial and lawsuit, they would've got like life in prison in the federal system.
And so what ended up happening was this group, like the similar group that you're talking about back in 2009, they got exposed and the feds did an extraordinary thing, which is bring them back and vacate the convictions of these guys.
So you know, these abuse of civil rights have been going on in this town for a long, long time.
You know, I was searching, I had found a reprint of an article and I was searching for the original at the Baltimore Sun, and instead I came up with nurse says traffic stop led to strip search.
So this is the kind of thing, I don't think she's necessarily a client of yours, but this is going on.
But I wanted to bring this up too, and this is the article I was searching for.
I could only find it on the reprint, but it's also, it's the same reporter, Tricia Bishop at the Baltimore Sun.
It's called Man Recounts Strip Search After Filing Suit Against Baltimore Police.
Father of two, quote, felt like I was raped that day by a city officer.
And this just seems, you know, exceptionally credible to me that this guy, as they describe here, a football coach and father of two, the victim here alleged says, I felt like I was raped that day.
Like my manhood was gone, Martin says quietly pausing to collect himself.
I didn't deserve this at all.
I don't think anyone deserves what I went through.
I thought they were going to kill me.
Now that doesn't sound like a liar trumping up some charge.
Who would falsely accuse someone of doing that to them?
Falsely accuse someone of putting them in that position to be victimized in that way?
He could have just accused them of beating him up or something, you know?
Oh, right, right, right.
And Daryl, Daryl's a proud guy and he's a sweetheart of a man and he's huge.
He's a big guy and he felt violated.
It really, really hurt him deeply.
And it was sort of a big case around here at the time because everybody knew that this group of cops was running around in the city and stopping people, arresting people, searching people without any probable cause whatsoever.
And this was an instant where there was actually scientific DNA to back up the guy's story.
I mean, you hear ...
I was a public defender in the early 90s and everybody's innocent and everybody's claiming this and this and that and I didn't do it and the cops are lying and all that.
Sometimes it's true and sometimes it's not true and it's really hard to distinguish which one it is.
But the short of it is with Daryl, you had irrefutable evidence with the DNA that completely backed up what he was saying.
I mean, literally one in a million where internal affairs would actually get the glove tested, find the DNA and match it up.
And when you say that the lawsuit was resolved, that means it was settled or it was won?
It was settled.
It was a federal lawsuit.
It was settled.
The city solicitor's office in Baltimore defended it.
There was a board with the mayor and the city solicitor and the controller that had a board of estimates that have to approve the settlement and it was settled.
And so it was resolved.
So, you know, I don't know what Officer Moss's lawyer is complaining about.
I mean, you know, you reprinted an article that's already online and searchable on the Baltimore Sun website and probably a bunch of other websites.
Well, you know, here's what the letter says.
The letter says, respectfully, Mr. Moss did not strip search anyone in public, nor did he insert his fingers into anyone.
The search he actually did conduct was legal and well within the departmental standards and his training.
It was a constitutional search, which was fully investigated by the Internal Affairs Division and the FBI.
If there had been an ounce of truth to what was alleged, Mr. Moss would have been prosecuted by the FBI or the Baltimore City State's Attorney's Office.
What do you say about that?
Well, I think the allegations in our lawsuit were vetted and certainly we wouldn't have filed it if we didn't think it was credible and that lawsuit is available to you or anybody else on PACER.
I'm curious, did the IA guys clear him after they were the ones who found the irrefutable evidence?
I don't know what they ultimately did from a disciplinary standpoint.
And I think that there's...whether they did or not, to me, doesn't add credibility one way or the other as to that officer or any officer's involvement in this because there's so many instances, especially during that time period where officers would do bad things, but they would still be back on the force.
The other case I was telling you about that's going on now, three or four of the cops in that similar group are in federal prison and another one is still with the police department for some reason.
So there's politics, there's all kinds of good old boy type things going on and so that means nothing to me other than perhaps dysfunction within the Baltimore City Police Department, which everybody knows exists.
Yeah, I kind of read it that way too, like, oh, the cops cleared him, so I guess that's all we need to know, huh?
From somebody's point of view, that's meaningful, I guess, but not to me.
I don't know if I'm being a little paranoid here, but the reiteration of what an FBI agent this guy is now, I took to be as a little bit of attempted intimidation between the lines there, although I don't intimidate so easy.
Yeah, I mean, we all have a job to do and I'm not trying to hurt Officer Moss or his family, you know, and he may be a great FBI agent for all we know.
And after all, he didn't have to pay a dime of this, right?
It was the taxpayers that picked up his bill for this.
Yeah, the taxpayers paid it for whatever the resolution was.
And so I don't, you know, he may be, like I said, he may be a great agent now and I'm glad that that happened, but what I do know is I stand behind the lawsuit that we filed, my client stands behind it, and there's been nothing that has occurred between the day of that incident and today, which makes me believe anything other than what we alleged.
All right.
Well, listen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate your time on the show today, Stephen.
Yeah.
Thanks so much.
Have a good day.
Bye-bye.
Thank you.
All right, you guys, that is Stephen Silverman.
He's a lawyer out of Baltimore, Maryland, and represented Daryl A. Martin, and you can read about this story in the Baltimore Sun, $210 million suit filed over police team's strip search, and then you'll have to find the reprint out there on the internet.
This one is called Man Recounts Strip Search After Filing Suit Against Baltimore Police, and it's about Daryl A. Martin's suit against Shaquille Moss, who the IA division proved committed this act.
So isn't that interesting?
Oh, and then they settled it.
So yeah, that sounds like a thing right there, isn't that something?
And also, of course, check out Will Griggs' great article, the great Will Griggs' great article, Police State Keynesianism, Stimulating Tyranny, from July 3rd, 2019, at LibertarianInstitute.org.
The Scott Horton Show and Antiwar Radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
