One night in May, 2015, an accountant named Renata Singleton arrived home from work and changed into lounge pants. Singleton, a polite, bespectacled woman in her mid-thirties, who kept the books for a local New Orleans charter school, intended to have a quiet evening with her three children. She was surprised when two uniformed police officers knocked on the door. “Can we speak to you away from your kids?” one of the cops asked. Singleton stepped outside to join the officers and recalls one of them explaining, “The district attorney’s office called us to come and pick you up tonight.” The officers had a warrant to arrest Singleton and take her to the Orleans Parish Prison. Singleton had not committed—nor even been accused of—a crime. But, six months earlier, she’d called the cops after her then boyfriend, in a jealous fit, grabbed her cell phone and smashed it; she’d feared for her safety. The cops had arrived and arrested the boyfriend. Later, Singleton told the district attorney’s office that she wasn’t interested in pursuing charges. (She’d left the relationship in the meantime.) Still, the D.A.’s office pressed ahead. Her ex faced charges of “simple battery and criminal damage to property less than 500 dollars,” and prosecutors wanted Singleton to testify against him in court.
Now, the cops had a warrant to arrest Singleton because, according to the D.A.’s office, she had dodged the office’s attempts to serve her a subpoena or contact her by phone; according to Singleton, a prosecutor wanted to interview her about the alleged crime in private and had deemed her an uncoöperative victim. (Singleton told me that she had planned to appear in court; she’d ignored two previous subpoenas left in her door, which were improperly served.) The D.A.’s office was using an arcane tool of the law—a little-known but highly consequential instrument called a “material witness” statute—to jail Singleton until she testified in court about the cell-phone incident.
While the officers were at Singleton’s home, a friend who worked in law enforcement arrived and told the officers, “Don’t do this! The kids are in the house—you’re going too far!” She promised to escort Singleton to the D.A.’s office in the morning, after arrangements could be made for the children.
[For more on this story by Sarah Stillman, go to https://www.newyorker.com/news...nt-witnesses-in-jail]
Illustration: The right to jail these so-called material witnesses has deep roots in America. By Justin Renteria
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