At 5:30 a.m. on September 23, 2024, residents of a South Philadelphia neighborhood were awakened by the piercing, bloodcurdling screams of a woman in distress. Many rushed outside to help. What they found instead was some lawyers playing a 122-decibel recording of the piercing, bloodcurdling screams of a woman in distress. This continued for the next 60 minutes.
Somehow, the lawyers survived this incident.
Why all the screaming? That’s what U.S. District Judge John F. Murphy wanted to know.
Murphy is presiding over a civil-rights lawsuit filed by Termaine Hicks, who accuses the city and several officers of framing him for a 2002 rape. According to Hicks, he had been waiting at a bus stop at 5:30 that morning when he heard a woman screaming from a couple of blocks away and ran over to help. Three things then happened in quick succession: the assailant fled, Hicks arrived at the scene, and two police officers showed up. (You now probably have a sense of where this is going.) According to Hicks, he reached for his phone to call 911. According to police, he reached for a gun and “lunged toward” them. They shot him three times, but he survived. He was convicted of rape and got a 25-year sentence.
But in 2020, 18 years into that sentence, prosecutors announced that an analysis of “new forensic evidence” suggested it was possible—and I know this will shock many of you—that the officers had not exactly been, well, let’s say entirely truthful when recounting this incident.
The victim hadn’t been able to identify her attacker, so the conviction was based mainly on the officers’ testimony. According to them, (1) they saw Hicks assaulting her (they were very specific on this), (2) they shot him after he “lunged toward” them, and (3) they found a gun with the victim’s blood on it in his coat pocket. Pretty solid.
Or not? According to the new analysis, (1) DNA showed it wasn’t Hicks; (2) medical evidence showed Hicks was shot in the back—not an easy shot to pull off when someone’s lunging toward you; (3) there was no blood inside Hicks’s coat pocket, where the blood-covered gun had allegedly been; and also (4) that gun happened to be “registered to an active Philadelphia police officer” who had never reported it missing.
Faced with all this, the DA’s office agreed the conviction should be vacated. Lawsuit followed.
Though Hicks is now free and off the hook for the crime, the defendants are still arguing he committed it. That’s not impossible; just because the government couldn’t prove guilt doesn’t mean the defendant proved innocence, and in the civil case Hicks has the burden of proof. In any event, the defense is disputing Hicks’s “Good Samaritan” story, in part by arguing that he could not have heard the victim screaming from two blocks away as he claimed. The defense expert did a test using a “siren chirp” to support this argument. Hicks’s lawyers say that test wasn’t realistic.
And now you know why they decided to play a recording of a woman’s piercing, bloodcurdling screams at 5:30 a.m. in the neighborhood where the assault happened.
To be clear, I’m not saying there was anything wrong with the test itself. Tests should be done under the most realistic conditions possible. The question regarding a test like this one is just whether one should warn the court and especially the local community first. The answer to that question is yes.
As mentioned above, the test did not go unnoticed by said local community. To their credit, a number of residents rushed out to help (yes, I’m assuming this means they were trying to help the victim, have a little respect for South Philly, please). According to this source, 122 decibels is louder than the inside of a steel mill, a jet plane taking off 200 feet away, or a rock concert, a level that exceeds the “average human pain threshold” (depending on the band). Not something most people would be pleased to hear at 5:30 a.m. And they might be especially displeased to find, not a woman in terrible distress, but some lawyers with a loudspeaker. The article says one man showed up with a baseball bat, and it seems a little surprising that he didn’t end up using it, one way or another.
Having heard about this incident from many sources, Judge Murphy wanted an explanation. Having heard it, the judge denied a motion by defense counsel to exclude the results of the test. He wasn’t pleased with how Hicks’s lawyers had handled it, but found no evidence they acted “maliciously or in bad faith in executing the scream test,” or that they “intended to harm the community or deceive defendants.” Nor had the defendants been prejudiced—which seems right, given that I think we can assume anyone from that neighborhood would be excused from the jury pool. The judge did hold that counsel should apologize to residents for the wake-up call, and ordered that they do so, door-to-door.
On Oct. 29, counsel certified that they had complied.
Since then, the defendants have moved for summary judgment and each side has moved to exclude the other’s experts, including the competing scream experts. The court heard argument in March but has not yet ruled. Claims that survive and aren’t settled will go to trial in August.
Especially depending on what the DNA evidence shows, and that whole thing with the gun, settlement might be a good idea here. But I don’t claim to know all the facts.