A federal judge has ordered attorneys to apologize for blaring screaming noises through South Philly

Chris Palmer, The Philadelphia Inquirer on Oct 14, 2024

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PHILADELPHIA — The screams started before dawn.

Desperate, bloodcurdling shrieks from a woman in distress — with yells so loud they woke the neighbors around 15th and Mifflin Streets in South Philadelphia.

Rachel Robbins was so disturbed that she went outside to see what was going on shortly after the wails began at 5:30 a.m.

But she didn’t encounter a crime scene.

Instead, she found a large speaker blaring out the disembodied howls as police and attorneys looked on — all part of an unusual “test” that was conducted for a civil lawsuit against the city.

“It was so jarring,” Robbins said, noting that the screams continued playing for an hour, even after children started getting dropped off at a day care on the block. “It was just really awful.”

A federal judge recently agreed.

In a unique order filed last week, U.S. District Judge John F. Murphy said the attorneys who led the stunt — dubbed a “scream test” — must apologize to residents and businesses in the area where the recorded cries were played on Sept. 23.

The exercise was designed to bolster the account of Termaine Hicks, who is suing the city over a wrongful conviction for rape. Hicks’ conviction was overturned in 2020, and he subsequently sued the city, saying officers who responded to the scene shot him then framed him for a crime he didn’t commit.

Part of the dispute in the case is whether Hicks — who has insisted he was a Good Samaritan trying to help the victim, and was not her attacker — could have heard a woman screaming for help from two blocks away.

“So Mr. Hicks’s lawyers devised a test," Murphy wrote. “And with no warning to the people who live and work near Broad and Passyunk in South Philadelphia, the lawyers played a looped recording of a woman screaming. At 122 decibels. For an hour. At 5:30 a.m.”

The confusion — and uproar — from neighbors was almost immediate.

Robbins said she and other residents quickly rushed outside to survey the scene. When she saw police officers and asked what was happening, she said, she was told the recording was being played “for a court case.”

She later wrote to the city solicitor’s office. News stations covered the saga. Another resident heard the case involved Murphy’s courtroom, then emailed the judge, saying it was fortunate the situation did not end in violence.

“[T]here are firearm owners in this area and we all thought a woman was being raped,” the man wrote.

Murphy quickly took action.

On Sept. 24 — the day after the test — he filed an unusually blunt order in the case, attaching the concerned resident’s email and instructing attorneys to “file a complete explanation of what is going on, whether they informed anyone that I had specifically authorized the purported tests, and why.”

A flurry of legal filings followed, revealing that the scream test was actually the second audio experiment conducted in the neighborhood for Hicks’ suit.

In April, the city’s attorneys had conducted their own test by playing a recording of a police siren instead of a woman’s screams to assess the plausibility of Hicks' story.

Hicks’ attorneys took issue with the city’s findings and decided to conduct a test of their own. One of Hicks’ lawyers, Emma Freudenberger, wrote in court documents that her team coordinated the exercise with the city and police before taking their equipment out to the neighborhood.

Still, she acknowledged that her team “did not appreciate the impact of the study on the community or the impact that it could have on trauma victims — although in hindsight we should have. And we undoubtedly should have taken additional measures to ensure that our coordination with the Philadelphia Police Department (PPD) to authorize the study would include advanced notification to residents.”

Murphy, in his opinion last week, said the lawyers' “disregard for community members fell short of the ethical standards by which all attorneys practicing in this district must abide.”

And he ordered that Hicks’ lawyers write apology letters to a host of local residents and businesses. Most of those letters can be mailed, he said, but the attorneys must hand-deliver them to a string of homes and businesses closest to the speaker’s blare.

The judge acknowledged that the exercise was conducted as part of zealous advocacy for Hicks.

Still, he wrote: “At best, this lack of forethought and sensitive judgment resulted in a deeply disturbing and potentially dangerous situation. At worst, it undermined the local community’s confidence in the exact justice system that Mr. Hicks relies on for recourse.”