Sarah Boone Is Being Forced to Represent Herself in Her Murder Trial

I don’t know if any of my readers are interested in true crime at all, but for the past four years I’ve taken an interest in watching police interrogations, a plethora of which can be found on YouTube nowadays. I’ve never listened to Serial or any other true-crime-related podcast, but I do like watching the dramatic reversals of fortune that can happen in these detective interviews; it’s almost like we don’t need playwrights or screenwriters, because we can see how a real person really reacts to being confronted with the evidence that they’ve committed murder, or to the knowledge that they’ll never be free again, and it’s hard to imagine what greater anguish or despair a person could experience, unless it’s learning that a loved one has died, and you sometimes get to see innocent suspects experience that particular kind of sorrow in these police interrogations too. Adding to the drama is the ironically cordial way these interviews usually begin; the suspect might not even realize they’re a suspect at the beginning, creating a certain degree of suspense and making the eventual outright confrontation all the more striking in its contrast with what came before. Some detectives I’ve seen have taken the cordial approach to extremes, as the Vancouver detective did in her interview of Rocky Rambo Wei Nam Kam, who murdered two neighbors of his with an axe: seeing he was a socially awkward young man interested in video games, she put on this soft-spoken maternal persona and repeatedly tried to get him to open up about his feelings and slowly, over a nine-hour interrogation, steer the conversation toward the murders. She didn’t actually succeed in getting much out of him, but the interview is certainly a fascinating failure.

The substantive facts of the cases being investigated are usually pretty banal and my main interest is in the drama inside the interview room, but sometimes the underlying facts are interesting in their own right: there’s Jennifer Pan, a Toronto-area¹ woman who had her boyfriend hire three men to murder her parents, with whom she was living at the time, and make it look like a robbery. In the first of the three interview she’s treated as a victim who was tied up by the robbers, but as time goes on the detectives sound more and more suspicious of her, until she’s accused outright of arranging the fake robbery.

But one substantively interesting case I’ve been following for the past two years, and which may finally be going to trial in October, is that of Sarah Boone of Winter Park, Florida, who filmed videos on her cellphone of her boyfriend zipped up in a suitcase begging to be let out while she can be heard taunting him. The boyfriend, one Jorge Torres, was found in the suitcase, suffocated to death, by Boone the following day. Boone sounds intoxicated in the videos she shot, so it could be that she didn’t remember having shot them, or maybe she deleted the videos and tried to conceal their presence from detectives, but I can only imagine the horror she feels in the interrogation when the detectives open the laptop sitting on the table and pull up one of the clips of her dead boyfriend begging for the suitcase to be unzipped so he can get out.

But as shocking as the facts in this case are, I’m not sure it’s quite a slam dunk for the State of Florida, who has charged her with second-degree murder. It’s clear enough that it can’t be proven Boone intended to trick or force Torres into getting into the suitcase so she could watch him suffocate while refusing to let him out, which is why she wasn’t charged with first-degree murder. (Boone’s story is they were playing hide-and-seek and he got into the suitcase voluntarily). And the trouble with prosecuting Boone for merely taunting Torres while he’s in the suitcase is that, in Florida, as in most states, there’s no general legal duty for a private citizen to render aid to someone in distress. I read about a case in Florida where some teens filmed a man drowning and taunted him as he died, without ever bothering to help him, and, while initially the state tried to nail them for failing to report a dead body, eventually even that charge wasn’t filed, and they got away with their callous actions. I’m fairly confident that if Boone had been walking down the street and found her boyfriend zipped up in a suitcase, having had no prior knowledge where he was, and had shot some videos where she taunted him instead of coming to his aid, she wouldn’t have been charged with murder. As best as I can tell, the state’s theory is that, by helping Torres get into the suitcase, and she probably would have had to zip it up for him, Boone took a dangerous action that, combined with the indisputable disregard for human life heard in her videos, rises to the level of second-degree murder. Boone insists in the interrogation that Torres could have gotten out on his own, and, if she can somehow demonstrate that at trial, that would be very interesting. The other big point in favor of the prosecution, and I think this is a true smoking gun, is the fact that the suitcase was apparently flipped over between the times Boone shot the two videos on her phone; what’s more, Boone admitted to detectives that she flipped the suitcase with Torres inside it. Flipping the suitcase probably had the effect of disorienting and hurting Torres, and may have made it more difficult for him to escape if it was flipped upside-down, and that intervention in an already dangerous situation probably is sufficient to convict her of second-degree murder, even if you think Boone had no duty to let him out of the suitcase after he voluntarily got in.

This is one of those cases when the facts look so bad that you’re in suspense to see what the defense can possibly make of them. The moment the jury sees the videos Boone shot, it will probably be over for her, unless one juror is unusually openminded. As I’ve been following the case the past couple of years, it appears most of Boone’s attorneys (she has had eight, all of whom have withdrawn one after the other) were contemplating a battered-woman defense, and indeed both Torres and Boone, both of whom were alcoholics, have been convicted of domestic violence against the other. The idea behind that defense would presumably be not to fully excuse Boone’s actions, but to suggest that she was so deranged by Torres’s abuse that she felt taunting him as he suffocated to death was the best way to protect herself, and thereby mitigate the verdict or the sentence. And depending on what facts surface it might work.

But who knows what will happen now? For the judge in Boone’s case, who has recently let her eighth lawyer withdraw, has said that he will appoint no more attorneys for the defendant, and that even if she manages to hire a private attorney he won’t continue the case merely to allow the new lawyer to get up to speed. In the United States a defendant has a right to assistance of counsel, and refusing to appoint an indigent defendant a public defender is an extraordinary step that is bound to be an issue if Boone is convicted and she appeals, but Boone has had trouble playing nice with her attorneys, arguing with them in conferences over trial strategy, demanding a bond she is unlikely to get, calling them names and accusing them of being incompetent, writing letters to the court where she accuses them of ignoring her phone calls and not meeting with her or sharing evidence with her, and, in the case of the last attorney, a female, demanding she pretend an invisible judge was in the room watching her speak with her client, possibly to manipulate her into being nicer or acceding to her suggestions about trial strategy. In the order finding that Boone has forfeited her right to assistance of counsel, the court opines that she is purposely being a difficult client in order to delay her trial (Boone was charged on February 25, 2020), and it’s true that, if that is her plan, she could delay her trial for the rest of her life, or until she gets out on bail, which is probably still her hope, though maybe she just would rather stay in jail forever than go to prison.

The trial is currently set for October 7, though I think Sara Boone, as a pro se defendant, will easily get the start date postponed if she needs more time to review the evidence or prepare her defense, because it’s already bad enough the judge is forcing her to defend herself against her will: to avoid any other appellate issues, it will behoove the court to be as lenient as it can with her without making a mockery of the criminal-justice system.

Boone will probably lose if she does represent herself at trial. As I saw when I watched the Darrell Brooks trial, concerning the Wisconsin man who ran over performers in a Christmas parade with his car, even if you have a strong command of the evidence and have some good arguments to put before the jury, if you don’t know all the procedural niceties in your jurisdiction you won’t be able to do much. At one point in that trial, Darrell Brooks was getting frustrated because he felt the state’s witnesses had been coached by prosecutors before the trial, but he couldn’t figure out how to properly cross-examine the witnesses on that point, and the judge refused to help him. Another funny moment came when the prosecution rested and the judge asked the defendant if he had any motions he wanted to make, I assume inviting him to argue that the state’s evidence was not sufficient for a reasonable jury to convict him of any of the charges, and to move for a directed verdict (a normal thing for the defense to do in any trial, for it can’t hurt to try, and making the motion gives you the chance to argue the issue again on appeal), but when it became clear Brooks had no idea what the judge was hinting at, the court moved on and told him to proceed with his case.

Darrell Brooks was an unusually combative and unruly pro se litigant, but Sarah Boone has herself proven to be a disagreeable client, and I expect many similar problems will arise at her trial when she’s forced to defend herself. It would have been fascinating to see what a qualified attorney would have done to mount a defense of this defendant who, as she has justly complained in her letters, has already been vilified worldwide thanks to the coverage of true-crime personalities on YouTube and other sites (and I myself am not helping things in that regard). But it should also be interesting to see how Sarah Boone sees herself and how she can justify her conduct in those infamous and fateful cellphone videos.

1. Many of the most entertaining police interrogations do come from Canada, in part, I think, because in Canada you can’t end an interview simply by invoking your right to have counsel present during questioning. What they do in Canada is, before the interrogation starts, take put you on the phone with a free legal-advice hotline (this conversation is made in private without any police officers present) where you can talk to a lawyer about your case for as long as you want, but as soon as that conversation ends you get taken back into the interrogation room and the detective starts asking you questions. You don’t have to answer the detective’s questions or say anything at all, but in Canada you do have to sit in the room with the detective until he decides he’s finished peppering you with questions. So whereas most of the intelligent suspects in the US will ask for a lawyer immediately and leave us with no interrogation video to watch on YouTube, in Canada a suspect has no choice but to listen to the detective talk to them for hours, and it must be difficult to keep your mouth shut all that time. Separately, I also find the Canadian detectives are more professional than the American ones: less stupid, more affable, and better at asking probing questions, which usually makes for a better viewing experience.