Smart — unaware that Armbrister had been interviewed, and emboldened by his mother's advice — called the cops. He said he wanted to talk. Officers agreed to meet him at a Kwik Stop at NE 135th Street. Smart wore a black shirt and shorts. He paced outside the gas station, waiting. This is the right decision, he told himself. This is the right decision. But when he saw detectives arrive with a camera-wielding "chubby white guy in a yellow polo," he knew he'd made a mistake.
A second person then appeared before the window. He held a black 9mm Luger.
With cameras rolling, the cops snapped a pair of cuffs around Smart's wrists, and it would be two years until he'd be free again.
Few jobs elicit greater esteem than a detective's. There's a cultural fascination with solving murders, manifested in the sheer number of TV shows that deconstruct homicide investigations. Crime television — from the endless stream of CSI spinoffs to Cold Case to Law & Order — account for nearly one-fourth of all prime-time television programming. This demand means production companies are constantly under pressure to expand upon the standard crime television formula, according to a 2007 study called "The CSI Effect." No channel is more bound to that effect than A&E. Over the past decade, the station has birthed a dizzying assortment of crime programs: Cold Case Files, American Justice, City Confidential, Investigative Reports, Crime 360, and The First 48, which first aired in 2004.
Photo still from A&E's "The First 48"
Detectives interrogated Smart for hours in a room they call "the box."
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The narrative structure of The First 48 is both conventional and chronological, and nearly every episode begins with a murder. But the show's true genius lies in how it ratchets up the drama with an artificially imposed deadline.
"For homicide detectives," the narrator pronounces in a gravelly timbre at the program's start, "the clock starts ticking the moment they are called. Their chance of solving a murder is cut in half if they don't get a lead within the first 48 hours." Throughout the program, producers splice into the frame a ticking clock, and detectives may fret over their deadline. Dramatic tension mounts as investigators collect evidence, interview witnesses, and identify suspects, until it hits a crescendo with a climactic confrontation between suspect and detective during the episode's final interrogation.
On November 17, 2009, Taiwan Smart found himself inside "the box." The 21-year-old slid into a chair across from Detective T.C. Cepero, a veteran, hard-bitten cop who looks like a miniature Mr. Clean and has a Facebook fan page dedicated to his First 48 exploits. Beside him was Detective Fabio Sanchez, who opened a blue folder. (Both officers and their superiors declined repeated requests for comment.)
Smart was nervous, fidgeting back and forth, grabbing at his dreadlocks. He refused to eat a Subway sandwich they'd brought for him. For hours, the detectives listened to Smart unspool the same story he'd told everyone: An unknown person had arrived at his apartment's open window and shot inside. "I was nervous for my life," Smart said. "I heard the shooting, and I took off running out the back. I didn't see nobody get shot, I didn't see any blood, I didn't see anything. I just got out of there."
The first hint that the cops weren't on Smart's side arrived three hours into the interrogation. "You're not telling us something, or else you're bending the truth," Cepero suddenly said, eyebrows plunging into a scowl. "We have all gathered a lot of evidence, and it talks."
"What are you talking about?" Smart gasped.
"The evidence talks," Cepero replied, telling Smart the shooter had been inside the apartment, where cops had collected four bullet casings. Plus, both men had been shot point-blank, in the back of the head. "Don't get into [a lie] you can't get out of."
"You think I'm lying?" Smart asked. He pleaded multiple times for a polygraph test. He sank his head in his hands. "You're trying to get me to say something I don't know."
"You're telling me a story you concocted, and it's bullshit," Cepero told him, asserting that if Smart's story had been accurate, the window would have been shattered. (Police evidence logs show the window had been open six inches.) "I believe the evidence ten times more. I'm calling you a liar because you're blowing smoke up my ass."
Sanchez leaned in so close to Smart, he could smell him. "You know what the evidence is telling me right now?" Sanchez seethed. "That you're a fucking liar."
Eleven hours into the interrogation, when Smart realized he was going to jail for two murders, he wept uncontrollably. "I don't want to go to jail for something I didn't do!" Smart, now cuffed to the chair, begged Sanchez, who wrote in an arrest report that the youth's statements weren't "consistent" with evidence.
"I'm asking you," Smart wept. "Out of the decency of your heart, please help me! Please!"
But days later at Smart's probable-cause hearing, when Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Jorge Cueto asked for harder proof linking Smart to the murders, Sanchez perpetuated the injustice.
The detective, wearing a dark-red button-down and a darker expression, first misrepresented witness Armbrister's interview. "She could hear [Smart and the victims] arguing over drugs and money," he told the judge.
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