By KEVIN KOENINGER
CINCINNATI (CN) - A diabetic suffering "a medical emergency caused by dangerously low sugar levels" was pulled over by Hamilton County Sheriff's officers, Tasered repeatedly, "violently dragged from the vehicle, thrown on the ground, kicked in the head by a boot, and stomped mercilessly while lying on his back," the man claims in Federal Court. Plaintiff John Harmon, who is black, says he was driving through a white area at the time.
Harmon and his wife sued the county, the sheriff and his department, four patrol officers and a sergeant for the beating he got in October 2009.
Sheriff's officers pulled him over after seeing his vehicle weaving, according to the complaint. Defendant Patrol Officer Ryan Wolf then "approached Harmon's vehicle with his gun drawn along with a second patrol officer, Matthew Wissel," the complaint states. "Without giving Harmon an opportunity to comply with any order, if, in fact, any order was given, Wolf shattered the driver's side window of Harmon's vehicle, spraying Harmon's face and body with broken glass. As this was occurring, a third patrol officer, defendant [John] Haynes, arrived at the scene.
"Almost immediately, Harmon was Tased by defendant Wissel. The officers attempted to remove Harmon from his vehicle by violently pulling on his neck. Harmon was then Tased again. They were unable to remove Harmon because Harmon was caught in his seatbelt. Defendant Wissel cut Harmon's seatbelt in order to remove him from the vehicle.
"Harmon was then violently dragged from the vehicle, thrown on the ground, kicked in the head by a boot, and stomped mercilessly while lying on his back. In the process, Harmon suffered numerous injuries, including a severely dislocated elbow and trauma to his shoulder and thumb. During the course of these events, which lasted approximately two minutes and twenty seconds, he was Tased seven times."
Three more officers arrived during the beating, and one of them "located a diabetic kit on the floorboard of Harmon's vehicle. At one point, Harmon was asked by the officers if he is diabetic, to which Harmon responded, 'Yes.' Paramedics were called to the scene, and it was confirmed that Harmon's blood sugar level was extremely low."
Harmon was taken to a hospital, where Patrol Officer Shawn Cox refused to let him use the bathroom. This "eventually resulted in Harmon being deeply humiliated and embarrassed when he urinated on himself," according to the complaint.
Harmon was charged with "(1) failure to comply with an order or signal of a police officer; (2) resisting arrest; (3) operating his vehicle with only one headlight; and (4) failure to drive in a marked lane." All charges were dropped 2 weeks later.
The complaint states: "The actions taken by the defendants against Harmon ... were due to the fact that Harmon was a large African-American male driving a sport utility vehicle at a late hour through a primarily white area of Hamilton County," Anderson Township.
Officers Wolf, Wissel, Cox and Haynes are named as defendants, along with Hamilton County, the Hamilton County Board of Commissioners, Hamilton County Sheriff Simon Leis Jr., and Sgt. Barbara Stuckey.
Harmon and his wife seek punitive damages for excessive force and other civil rights violations, malicious prosecution, false arrest, constitutional violations, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. They are represented by Timothy Burke with Manley Burke.
Thursday, December 23, 2010
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Ending era of racism
By Adrian Walker
Frank G. Cousins Jr. freely admits that he has a hard time talking about the entrenched problems involving race and gender in his department.
That isn’t an easy admission for any sheriff. But then again, Cousins might be the only law enforcement boss to file a complaint with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination against a group of his own subordinates. For creating a workplace that was hostile — toward him.
The Essex County sheriff won an important measure of vindication a few days ago, when a Superior Court judge ruled in his favor against two employees Cousins had fired for their role in running an often racist and sexist union website. The ruling, by Judge David A. Lowy, overturned an arbitrators’ ruling that would have reinstated them.
Cousins, a former state representative from Newburyport, was appointed sheriff by Governor William F. Weld in 1996. Some employees quickly showed their displeasure with having a black boss. Problems escalated in 1998, when the Essex County Corrections Officers Association was formed.
A union website became home to often anonymous attacks and slurs against minorities and women in the department, including, frequently, Cousins.
“You hear a lot about the culture of law enforcement,’’ Cousins said yesterday. “The culture here has been very difficult.’’
Black male employees were called pimps; females were accused of winning promotions by sleeping with superiors. One person posted a list of ways to commit suicide, and suggested it would be a good idea for “sell-outs — and Frank.’’
The poster was later identified as Lieutenant Scott Thompson, who was successfully prosecuted for making threats against the sheriff. Thompson left the department. The operative posting: In a passage critical of Cousins’s management, one employee asked if there was anyone who could help the situation. “Yeah, there was someone who can help, but James Earl Ray is dead!’’ Thompson responded, alluding to the man convicted of killing the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
That was when Cousins finally became concerned for his own safety. He filed a complaint against the union with the MCAD, which has issued a preliminary finding in his favor. He got a driver. He began watching his back.
“I’ve been around a long time and I have a tough skin, but that was a bad chapter,’’ Cousins said. “What was hard was that you had people who knew who was doing these things and they never came forward.’’
The latest ruling involves Lieutenant Jerry Enos and Sergeant K. Ricky Thompson, who were fired in 2007 over their roles as webmasters for the site. But an arbitrator bought their arguments they were not fired in a timely fashion and were not aware that their actions could cost them their jobs. But the judge roundly rejected that thinking.
“Enos and Thompson’s conduct disrupted the operation of the department, violated multiple rules and regulations of the department, and endangered the safety of their co-workers and those in the custody of the department,’’ Lowy wrote. “Although arbitrator’s decisions are given great deference, they are not sacrosanct.’’
Cousins believes that this ruling, though likely to be appealed, will be a turning point for the department. He said a new union president has brought a more mature and inclusive attitude. He thinks that finally, after 14 years on the job, employees have finally gotten accustomed to the presence of a black boss.
“I’m not naïve,’’ Cousins said. “Change is very difficult. I felt when I went there that we would have to work through some of these issues, but I didn’t expect it to rise to the level that it did.’’
Cousins has just easily won another six-year term, and said he is excited about the prospect of working on issues like recidivism and prisoner reentry without the distraction of racial and gender strife.
“There are a lot of good people here,’’ he said. “At this point, everyone just wants to move forward.’’
Frank G. Cousins Jr. freely admits that he has a hard time talking about the entrenched problems involving race and gender in his department.
That isn’t an easy admission for any sheriff. But then again, Cousins might be the only law enforcement boss to file a complaint with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination against a group of his own subordinates. For creating a workplace that was hostile — toward him.
The Essex County sheriff won an important measure of vindication a few days ago, when a Superior Court judge ruled in his favor against two employees Cousins had fired for their role in running an often racist and sexist union website. The ruling, by Judge David A. Lowy, overturned an arbitrators’ ruling that would have reinstated them.
Cousins, a former state representative from Newburyport, was appointed sheriff by Governor William F. Weld in 1996. Some employees quickly showed their displeasure with having a black boss. Problems escalated in 1998, when the Essex County Corrections Officers Association was formed.
A union website became home to often anonymous attacks and slurs against minorities and women in the department, including, frequently, Cousins.
“You hear a lot about the culture of law enforcement,’’ Cousins said yesterday. “The culture here has been very difficult.’’
Black male employees were called pimps; females were accused of winning promotions by sleeping with superiors. One person posted a list of ways to commit suicide, and suggested it would be a good idea for “sell-outs — and Frank.’’
The poster was later identified as Lieutenant Scott Thompson, who was successfully prosecuted for making threats against the sheriff. Thompson left the department. The operative posting: In a passage critical of Cousins’s management, one employee asked if there was anyone who could help the situation. “Yeah, there was someone who can help, but James Earl Ray is dead!’’ Thompson responded, alluding to the man convicted of killing the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
That was when Cousins finally became concerned for his own safety. He filed a complaint against the union with the MCAD, which has issued a preliminary finding in his favor. He got a driver. He began watching his back.
“I’ve been around a long time and I have a tough skin, but that was a bad chapter,’’ Cousins said. “What was hard was that you had people who knew who was doing these things and they never came forward.’’
The latest ruling involves Lieutenant Jerry Enos and Sergeant K. Ricky Thompson, who were fired in 2007 over their roles as webmasters for the site. But an arbitrator bought their arguments they were not fired in a timely fashion and were not aware that their actions could cost them their jobs. But the judge roundly rejected that thinking.
“Enos and Thompson’s conduct disrupted the operation of the department, violated multiple rules and regulations of the department, and endangered the safety of their co-workers and those in the custody of the department,’’ Lowy wrote. “Although arbitrator’s decisions are given great deference, they are not sacrosanct.’’
Cousins believes that this ruling, though likely to be appealed, will be a turning point for the department. He said a new union president has brought a more mature and inclusive attitude. He thinks that finally, after 14 years on the job, employees have finally gotten accustomed to the presence of a black boss.
“I’m not naïve,’’ Cousins said. “Change is very difficult. I felt when I went there that we would have to work through some of these issues, but I didn’t expect it to rise to the level that it did.’’
Cousins has just easily won another six-year term, and said he is excited about the prospect of working on issues like recidivism and prisoner reentry without the distraction of racial and gender strife.
“There are a lot of good people here,’’ he said. “At this point, everyone just wants to move forward.’’
Monday, December 13, 2010
The 6 Most Shocking Cases of Police Stun-Gun Abuse
By Lauren Kelley
Take a police force that’s notorious for its use of excessive force, add a massive arsenal of tasers, put those weapons in the hands of low-level patrol officers, and what do you get?
If you guessed “an awful mess of civil rights abuses and safety concerns,” then, unfortunately, you’re correct. A new report from the City of Chicago Independent Police Review Authority, which investigates police misconduct cases in the city, has found that incidences of taser use by Chicago police officers increased by nearly 350% over the past year in the wake of the department’s decision to more than double its taser arsenal in the name of “increasing officer safety” and “defusing trouble.”
Here are the numbers: In March, the department decided to increase its supply of tasers from 280 to 660 and began putting them in every patrol officer’s squad car. (Previously, only sergeants and field training officers were allowed to carry tasers.) As a direct result, Chicago officers used tasers a whopping 683 times in the 12-month period ending September 30, compared to 197 times in 2009 and 163 in 2008.
The problem with the increase is that tasers are far too often used inappropriately – on innocent citizens and minors, for instance – and they’ve been proven to be unsafe, causing dozens of heart problems and even deaths. To make matters worse, Chicago’s Independent Police Review Authority has said it will no longer investigate every case of police taser use, arguing that the growing caseload is overwhelming the short-staffed office. Instead, it will only investigate taser use “if allegations of misconduct are made, serious injury or death resulted, or a minor or senior citizen was targeted.”
Chicago’s unchecked use of tasers is setting a dangerous example for the rest of the country to follow, as it opens the door to rampant abuses of power. There are myriad stories of taser-happy police officers wreaking havoc on people’s lives that should give us pause on that matter. Below are some of the most egregious examples of taser abuse by police in Chicago and elsewhere in the country, illustrating why the willy-nilly increase of taser use is terrible for citizens.
1. Man having diabetic seizure tasered 11 times: In April 2009, Prospero Lassi suffered a diabetes-induced seizure at his home in the Chicago suburb of LaGrange Park. Lassi’s roommate called 911, and both EMTs and police responded. When the EMTs asked police officers to help move Lassi, who had been unable to move his body, one of Lassi’s arms flailed uncontrollably, striking one of the officers. According to Lassi, he was then tasered an incredible 11 times, for nearly a minute, as he lay immobilized. The attack was so severe that Lassi was hospitalized for five days and out of work for three months due to the injuries he sustained that day.
2. Officers taser 14-year-old boy, sending him into cardiac arrest: In February 2005, Chicago police were called on a young teenager living in a state group home who was reportedly acting out. According to Cook County Public Guardian Robert Harris, the boy had calmed down and was sitting on a couch when the police arrived. Nevertheless, officers said the boy lunged at them, so they tasered him, sending him into cardiac arrest.
3. Officers repeatedly taser, threaten to sodomize foster children: Elsewhere in Illinois, at the Southern Thirty Adolescent Center in Mt. Vernon, two officers lashed out unprovoked at several foster youth in July 2008, repeatedly using a taser on them. One of the officers also threatened to sodomize a young man, causing the boy to soil himself. Both the county sheriff and the Illinois State Police determined that the officers had done nothing wrong. A lawsuit brought against the officers was settled for $750,000.
Take a police force that’s notorious for its use of excessive force, add a massive arsenal of tasers, put those weapons in the hands of low-level patrol officers, and what do you get?
If you guessed “an awful mess of civil rights abuses and safety concerns,” then, unfortunately, you’re correct. A new report from the City of Chicago Independent Police Review Authority, which investigates police misconduct cases in the city, has found that incidences of taser use by Chicago police officers increased by nearly 350% over the past year in the wake of the department’s decision to more than double its taser arsenal in the name of “increasing officer safety” and “defusing trouble.”
Here are the numbers: In March, the department decided to increase its supply of tasers from 280 to 660 and began putting them in every patrol officer’s squad car. (Previously, only sergeants and field training officers were allowed to carry tasers.) As a direct result, Chicago officers used tasers a whopping 683 times in the 12-month period ending September 30, compared to 197 times in 2009 and 163 in 2008.
The problem with the increase is that tasers are far too often used inappropriately – on innocent citizens and minors, for instance – and they’ve been proven to be unsafe, causing dozens of heart problems and even deaths. To make matters worse, Chicago’s Independent Police Review Authority has said it will no longer investigate every case of police taser use, arguing that the growing caseload is overwhelming the short-staffed office. Instead, it will only investigate taser use “if allegations of misconduct are made, serious injury or death resulted, or a minor or senior citizen was targeted.”
Chicago’s unchecked use of tasers is setting a dangerous example for the rest of the country to follow, as it opens the door to rampant abuses of power. There are myriad stories of taser-happy police officers wreaking havoc on people’s lives that should give us pause on that matter. Below are some of the most egregious examples of taser abuse by police in Chicago and elsewhere in the country, illustrating why the willy-nilly increase of taser use is terrible for citizens.
1. Man having diabetic seizure tasered 11 times: In April 2009, Prospero Lassi suffered a diabetes-induced seizure at his home in the Chicago suburb of LaGrange Park. Lassi’s roommate called 911, and both EMTs and police responded. When the EMTs asked police officers to help move Lassi, who had been unable to move his body, one of Lassi’s arms flailed uncontrollably, striking one of the officers. According to Lassi, he was then tasered an incredible 11 times, for nearly a minute, as he lay immobilized. The attack was so severe that Lassi was hospitalized for five days and out of work for three months due to the injuries he sustained that day.
2. Officers taser 14-year-old boy, sending him into cardiac arrest: In February 2005, Chicago police were called on a young teenager living in a state group home who was reportedly acting out. According to Cook County Public Guardian Robert Harris, the boy had calmed down and was sitting on a couch when the police arrived. Nevertheless, officers said the boy lunged at them, so they tasered him, sending him into cardiac arrest.
3. Officers repeatedly taser, threaten to sodomize foster children: Elsewhere in Illinois, at the Southern Thirty Adolescent Center in Mt. Vernon, two officers lashed out unprovoked at several foster youth in July 2008, repeatedly using a taser on them. One of the officers also threatened to sodomize a young man, causing the boy to soil himself. Both the county sheriff and the Illinois State Police determined that the officers had done nothing wrong. A lawsuit brought against the officers was settled for $750,000.
Black teen who filmed an LAUSD campus cop hitting a student faces bizarre charges and years in prison
By KATHARINE RUSS
On Dec. 2, Jeremy Marks, a Verdugo Hills High School special education student, was offered a new plea offer by the L.A. County District Attorney: If he pled guilty to charges of obstructing an officer, resisting arrest, criminal threats and "attempted lynching," he'd serve only 32 months in prison. That actually was an improvement from the previous offer made to the young, black high schooler - seven years in prison. The D.A. then handed Angela Berry-Jacoby, Mark's lawyer, a stack of 130 documents, and the message within those thick files was clear: She says District Attorney Steve Cooley's prosecution team plans to try to discredit Marks, and several other Verdugo Hills High School students on the witness stand, by dragging out misbehavior incidents from their school records over the years. Marks, 18, has been sitting in Peter Pitchess Detention Center, a tough adult jail, since May 10. Bail was set at $155,000, which his working-class parents can't pay to free their son for Christmas. His mother is a part-time clerk at a city swimming pool, his father is a lab tech. The first thing to understand is that Jeremy Marks touched no one during his "attempted lynching" of LAUSD campus police officer Erin Robles. The second is that Marks' weapon was the camera in his cell phone. The third is that Officer Robles' own actions helped turn an exceedingly minor wrongdoing - a student smoking at a bus stop - into a state prison case. The altercation that has ruined Marks' life occurred in early May at a Metro bus stop on a city street a few blocks from Verdugo Hills High School as about 30 kids were waiting to board a bus. Witness accounts say campus police officer Robles challenged an unnamed 15-year-old for allegedly smoking - it's unclear whether he was smoking or just holding what has been variously reported to be a cigar, cigarette or joint. When the 15-year-old resisted, Robles grabbed and shoved him, according to eyewitnesses. In Robles' sworn statement, she says she pulled the resisting boy to the ground as other students shouted "Fuck you!" and Marks called out the name of the gang Piru Bloods. Robles testified that the minor who allegedly was smoking "is screaming, 'Hit me, fucking bitch, hit me, you stupid bitch, hit me, you dyke!'" When that boy turned his body and possibly elbowed her, Robles says, "That is when I did strike him," with her expanded baton, "about three times in the left leg." She further stated that she sprayed him with pepper spray. The kid then hit her hand, she dropped her pepper spray can, and another student grabbed it off the ground. Students and Berry-Jacobs allege to L.A. Weekly that Robles then slammed the student's head against the bus window - a violation of numerous police policies. After that, several stunned students got out their cell phone cameras to record what was unfolding. Robles struck the 15-year-old's head on the window so hard, eyewitnesses tell the Weekly, that the window was forced out of its rubberized casement and broken. Robles has changed her story in documents obtained by the Weekly, as she describes which student allegedly called out, "Kick her ass!" - the phrase at the heart of Cooley's case against Marks, and the basis of the "attempted lynching" charge against him. But student videos of Marks doing his own cell phone taping tell a different story. Two YouTube videos show Marks in a grayish shirt, getting out his cell phone as he stands in the background of the scene near a student in a white shirt. [View the student videos here: Video 1 and Video 2] Marks tapes the final minutes of the MTA bus stop altercation as several students - not including Marks - loudly and repeatedly taunt Robles. The videos appear to show that Robles had little ability or training to handle razzing from angry high schoolers. She holds the 15-year-old against the MTA bus as he repeatedly tries to slap and push her hands off, and she never appears to have him fully under control. She turns several times to look behind her at rowdy students, several feet away on a low wall, who jump around and cheer for the student Robles is grasping. The videos show the loudest and angriest student in a black shirt and sweatpants rushing a few feet toward Robles more than once, and another student in a striped shirt moving toward her - but not Jeremy Marks. In the videos, Marks, in his grayish shirt, can be seen speaking once. He never joins the extended taunting or picks anything up off the ground. [View the student videos here: Video 1 and Video 2] Testifying at a preliminary hearing over the summer, Robles acknowledges she doesn't know who grabbed for her fallen pepper spray, or even why fellow Officer Gilbert Rea decided to pin it on Marks in the incident report submitted by campus police, which Robles did not write. Her preliminary hearing testimony also reveals the chaos during which Robles now claims she is certain it was Marks - who student videos show standing out of her line of sight most of the time - who yelled, "Kick her ass." "I was very scared," Robles testified. "I got my O.C. spray to control (the 15-year-old student) that was facing me, and went to spray him. Sprayed him for about one, maybe two seconds. He had hit the pepper spray out of my hands and it landed in between the bus and the sidewalk in the gutter. It was starting almost a riot. "It was getting very, very wild. There was screaming, people were walking behind me. There were individuals trying to reach for my O.C. spray that had fallen on the ground. I was screaming for help on my radio. I could not leave that weapon there for all the juveniles and a few adults, as well, in the area. So after the O.C. had fallen out of my hands, I used my right hand and got my baton out next. "There is a subject by the name of 'Victor' that went after my O.C. spray, a minor as well. And also - defendant (Jeremy Marks) wasn't necessarily going to grab it, but he was walking around me - made me believe that he was. I believe when I told (Officer Gilbert) Rea that (Jeremy Marks) was in the area - I don't know what conclusions (Officer Rea) formed when he was writing the [incident report], or this Arrest Report." One student waiting for the bus last May described the incident to the Weekly as being driven by Robles' repeated overreactions after coming down on a kid for smoking: "The officer (Erin Robles), initially, confronted the student over a cigar." After the student yelled at and grappled with Robles, "She slammed the student into a wall, threw him on the ground, took out her pepper spray, slammed him into the bus, broke the window out of the bus with his head, sprayed him in the face and slammed him into the bus some more." Marks' mother, Rochelle Pittman, has barely been able to sleep since the campus cops and Los Angeles County prosecutors began to single out her son as the bad actor that day. Yet he had no physical contact with anyone during the bus incident, was shown on video to be among the quieter students watching the altercation, and spent much of the time taking pictures of it with his cell phone. The family recently hired two new criminal defense attorneys, Mark Ravis and Karen Travis, to defend him. Pittman tells the Weekly that Los Angeles School Police Officer George Sandoval told her on the day her son was arrested that Marks was being charged with a serious crime for saying, "Kick her ass!" Several Verdugo Hills students and parents have questioned whether the alleged words spoken by Marks even rise to the severe criminal charges of "attempted lynching," which means trying to "incite a riot during an attempt to free a suspect from police custody." All the other students initially detained by police, including the student who shoved and fought with Robles, were released May 11. But more and more charges were piled onto Marks. Cooley's team claims Marks "resisted arrest" at the McDonalds where he was arrested after he watched the bus incident. Pittman says her son and two of his friends walked to McDonalds after the excitement was over. At McDonalds, "Police cars came flying from everywhere, jumped out on my son with their guns pointed right at him, yelling and screaming for him to get on the ground," she says. Pittman says Marks did not resist arrest, doing everything he was asked. His own mom might be expected to say that. But for many present at the bus incident, something doesn't add up. Student eyewitnesses told the Weekly that Marks is not the student who laughingly told the teenager being struck by Robles to "kick her ass!" But they are terrified of repercussions against them on campus if they speak out against LAUSD's school police. Pittman expects the grandmother of the student struck by Robles to sue the L.A. School Police Department. Attorney Berry-Jacoby says she has a copy of an invoice that shows an order to replace the MTA bus window. The campus police, now blaming Marks for grabbing the pepper spray can after Robles dropped it, have dropped all interest in the "Victor" identified by Robles in her sworn testimony. Says Berry-Jacoby: "In Officer Rea's report of what Officer Robles allegedly told him, Jeremy tried to take her pepper spray after it was knocked out of her hand. In her testimony in court she stated that 'Victor' tried to take her pepper spray but that Jeremy was walking around behind her." The Weekly has contacted Cooley's office four times for an explanation of the changing stories by school police officers. Its calls have not been returned. Lydia Grant, an LAUSD student safety activist and community liaison, says she's disgusted by the piling-on of accusations against a student observer with a cell phone camera, and the severe charges that could send him to a California prison. "In my opinion, the district is responsible for the beating of a youth and the entire bus-stop incident, including the false imprisonment of a special education student for seven months," Grant says. "The officer involved failed to write a police report, and the LASPD has failed on two occasions to appear in court, under subpoena, to turn over any evidence." Coincidentally, six days before the bus incident, Grant says she reported two officers to school authorities, Erin Robles and Angelica Kegayan, "and asked for their removal," after Grant got complaints from students and parents that the two were harassing them. L.A. School District Police Department deputy chief Tim Anderson stands by the case against Marks, saying, "When someone is arrested, we obviously have to know everything from reasonable suspicion, probable cause, the elements of the crime, etc." Berry-Jacoby says Robles met with deputy District Attorney Ed Green for nearly three hours and told Green she saw a video taken by a "kid" inside the bus that would substantiate her claim that Marks urged the 15-year-old to attack her. Berry-Jacoby says she has asked the D.A. for a copy of the video, as is her right as a member of the defense team. But, she tells the Weekly, she was appalled to learn from Deputy D.A. Chuck Stodel that Officer Robles never viewed the video purportedly taken from inside the bus - and the student on the bus no longer has the phone that purportedly contained the footage. Cooley's office has not responded to the Weekly's request for an explanation, nor has the "kid" from inside the bus been identified by prosecutors as a witness. School police chief Anderson says, in defense of the stiff bail hike that is keeping Marks in the rough adult Peter Pitchess jail for months, "I don't know him personally or have any other information about him. However, one of the unique things about our department is that we are on or around these two campuses every day, and we get to know the students, the staff, the community, etc., very well." But in fact, L.A. Weekly investigated the tiny, and controversial, school police agency in 2009 in its cover story "LAUSD's Finest: How an Oblivious School Board Lets a Tiny, Scandal-Ridden Campus Police Force Endanger L.A. Kids"
On Dec. 2, Jeremy Marks, a Verdugo Hills High School special education student, was offered a new plea offer by the L.A. County District Attorney: If he pled guilty to charges of obstructing an officer, resisting arrest, criminal threats and "attempted lynching," he'd serve only 32 months in prison. That actually was an improvement from the previous offer made to the young, black high schooler - seven years in prison. The D.A. then handed Angela Berry-Jacoby, Mark's lawyer, a stack of 130 documents, and the message within those thick files was clear: She says District Attorney Steve Cooley's prosecution team plans to try to discredit Marks, and several other Verdugo Hills High School students on the witness stand, by dragging out misbehavior incidents from their school records over the years. Marks, 18, has been sitting in Peter Pitchess Detention Center, a tough adult jail, since May 10. Bail was set at $155,000, which his working-class parents can't pay to free their son for Christmas. His mother is a part-time clerk at a city swimming pool, his father is a lab tech. The first thing to understand is that Jeremy Marks touched no one during his "attempted lynching" of LAUSD campus police officer Erin Robles. The second is that Marks' weapon was the camera in his cell phone. The third is that Officer Robles' own actions helped turn an exceedingly minor wrongdoing - a student smoking at a bus stop - into a state prison case. The altercation that has ruined Marks' life occurred in early May at a Metro bus stop on a city street a few blocks from Verdugo Hills High School as about 30 kids were waiting to board a bus. Witness accounts say campus police officer Robles challenged an unnamed 15-year-old for allegedly smoking - it's unclear whether he was smoking or just holding what has been variously reported to be a cigar, cigarette or joint. When the 15-year-old resisted, Robles grabbed and shoved him, according to eyewitnesses. In Robles' sworn statement, she says she pulled the resisting boy to the ground as other students shouted "Fuck you!" and Marks called out the name of the gang Piru Bloods. Robles testified that the minor who allegedly was smoking "is screaming, 'Hit me, fucking bitch, hit me, you stupid bitch, hit me, you dyke!'" When that boy turned his body and possibly elbowed her, Robles says, "That is when I did strike him," with her expanded baton, "about three times in the left leg." She further stated that she sprayed him with pepper spray. The kid then hit her hand, she dropped her pepper spray can, and another student grabbed it off the ground. Students and Berry-Jacobs allege to L.A. Weekly that Robles then slammed the student's head against the bus window - a violation of numerous police policies. After that, several stunned students got out their cell phone cameras to record what was unfolding. Robles struck the 15-year-old's head on the window so hard, eyewitnesses tell the Weekly, that the window was forced out of its rubberized casement and broken. Robles has changed her story in documents obtained by the Weekly, as she describes which student allegedly called out, "Kick her ass!" - the phrase at the heart of Cooley's case against Marks, and the basis of the "attempted lynching" charge against him. But student videos of Marks doing his own cell phone taping tell a different story. Two YouTube videos show Marks in a grayish shirt, getting out his cell phone as he stands in the background of the scene near a student in a white shirt. [View the student videos here: Video 1
Friday, December 10, 2010
Jury Convicts 3 Officers in Post-Katrina Death
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
NEW ORLEANS — More than five years after a man named Henry Glover was shot and his body burned here by police officers in the days after Hurricane Katrina, a jury has weighed in on the circumstances of his death. Three police officers were found guilty Thursday night on nine federal counts in an emotionally charged case that painted a grim portrait of the city’s troubled Police Department.
David Warren, a former police officer, was found guilty of manslaughter in the shooting of Mr. Glover; Officer Gregory McRae was convicted of obstructing justice and other charges for burning Mr. Glover’s body; and Lt. Travis McCabe was convicted of perjury and obstructing justice for drawing up a false police report.
Two other police officers were found not guilty on various counts. The mixed verdict, returned by the jury after nearly three days of deliberation, left relatives and friends of Mr. Glover with an incomplete sense of vindication.
“All of them should have been found guilty,” said Rebecca Glover, Mr. Glover’s aunt, as she left the courtroom. “They all participated in this. How are you going to let them go free?”
This was the first trial of an untold number of New Orleans officers being investigated by the federal authorities. There are at least eight other such investigations into actions by the city Police Department, including one into shootings on the Danziger Bridge on Sept 4, 2005, that left two civilians dead and six wounded.
Six police officers who were indicted in that case face trial, four of them charged in connection with the deaths. Five other officers have pleaded guilty. One of them, Michael Hunter, was sentenced to eight years in prison last week.
The horrific nature of some of the actions being investigated, as well as the city’s stubborn crime rate, led the Justice Department to begin conducting a full scale review of the department in May.
Few of the criminal cases contain such grisly details as the one involving Mr. Glover, which remained uninvestigated for years despite repeated inquiries by his family. In late 2008, an article about the killing was published by The Nation, in a joint investigative project with ProPublica. Federal investigators began looking into the case shortly afterward.
Preparing to leave the city, Mr. Glover, 31, and a friend drove in a stolen truck to a strip mall in the Algiers neighborhood, across the Mississippi River from downtown New Orleans. They had come to pick up suitcases that had been looted from the mall but left behind earlier, prosecutors said.
Mr. Warren, who was patrolling the strip mall — which was being used as a detective bureau — shot Mr. Glover, who was unarmed. Mr. Warren claimed at trial that he had fired in self-defense, and that he had perceived something in Mr. Glover’s hand. His partner testified that he shot him in the back. Mr. Glover, his shirt covered in blood, was picked up by a stranger, William Tanner, who drove him, his brother and a friend to an elementary school that was being used as headquarters for a police special operations division.
There, Mr. Tanner says, he was beaten by Lt. Dwayne Scheuermann and Officer McRae, though they were both found not guilty on this count. Officer McRae did not deny taking Mr. Tanner’s car, with Mr. Glover’s body inside, and driving it to a levee behind a police substation. There, Mr. McRae used flares to set afire the car and the body.
The other two defendants, Robert Italiano, a retired lieutenant, and Lieutenant McCabe, were charged with creating a false report to cover up the killing. Lieutenant Italiano was found not guilty.
All of the testimony was haunted by the specter of Hurricane Katrina, and a debate about the nature of law and order within catastrophe.
“When you take into account reasonable versus unreasonable,” Rick Simmons, who represents Mr. Warren, said in his closing arguments, “you have to take into consideration the conditions under which he was living.”
But prosecutors, who described Mr. Warren as zealously looking for an opportunity to use his expensive personal assault rifle, said that even under the harrowing conditions after the hurricane, the rule of law was never abandoned.
“Hurricane Katrina didn’t turn petty theft into a capital offense,” said Jared Fishman, a federal prosecutor in his closing arguments.
NEW ORLEANS — More than five years after a man named Henry Glover was shot and his body burned here by police officers in the days after Hurricane Katrina, a jury has weighed in on the circumstances of his death. Three police officers were found guilty Thursday night on nine federal counts in an emotionally charged case that painted a grim portrait of the city’s troubled Police Department.
David Warren, a former police officer, was found guilty of manslaughter in the shooting of Mr. Glover; Officer Gregory McRae was convicted of obstructing justice and other charges for burning Mr. Glover’s body; and Lt. Travis McCabe was convicted of perjury and obstructing justice for drawing up a false police report.
Two other police officers were found not guilty on various counts. The mixed verdict, returned by the jury after nearly three days of deliberation, left relatives and friends of Mr. Glover with an incomplete sense of vindication.
“All of them should have been found guilty,” said Rebecca Glover, Mr. Glover’s aunt, as she left the courtroom. “They all participated in this. How are you going to let them go free?”
This was the first trial of an untold number of New Orleans officers being investigated by the federal authorities. There are at least eight other such investigations into actions by the city Police Department, including one into shootings on the Danziger Bridge on Sept 4, 2005, that left two civilians dead and six wounded.
Six police officers who were indicted in that case face trial, four of them charged in connection with the deaths. Five other officers have pleaded guilty. One of them, Michael Hunter, was sentenced to eight years in prison last week.
The horrific nature of some of the actions being investigated, as well as the city’s stubborn crime rate, led the Justice Department to begin conducting a full scale review of the department in May.
Few of the criminal cases contain such grisly details as the one involving Mr. Glover, which remained uninvestigated for years despite repeated inquiries by his family. In late 2008, an article about the killing was published by The Nation, in a joint investigative project with ProPublica. Federal investigators began looking into the case shortly afterward.
Preparing to leave the city, Mr. Glover, 31, and a friend drove in a stolen truck to a strip mall in the Algiers neighborhood, across the Mississippi River from downtown New Orleans. They had come to pick up suitcases that had been looted from the mall but left behind earlier, prosecutors said.
Mr. Warren, who was patrolling the strip mall — which was being used as a detective bureau — shot Mr. Glover, who was unarmed. Mr. Warren claimed at trial that he had fired in self-defense, and that he had perceived something in Mr. Glover’s hand. His partner testified that he shot him in the back. Mr. Glover, his shirt covered in blood, was picked up by a stranger, William Tanner, who drove him, his brother and a friend to an elementary school that was being used as headquarters for a police special operations division.
There, Mr. Tanner says, he was beaten by Lt. Dwayne Scheuermann and Officer McRae, though they were both found not guilty on this count. Officer McRae did not deny taking Mr. Tanner’s car, with Mr. Glover’s body inside, and driving it to a levee behind a police substation. There, Mr. McRae used flares to set afire the car and the body.
The other two defendants, Robert Italiano, a retired lieutenant, and Lieutenant McCabe, were charged with creating a false report to cover up the killing. Lieutenant Italiano was found not guilty.
All of the testimony was haunted by the specter of Hurricane Katrina, and a debate about the nature of law and order within catastrophe.
“When you take into account reasonable versus unreasonable,” Rick Simmons, who represents Mr. Warren, said in his closing arguments, “you have to take into consideration the conditions under which he was living.”
But prosecutors, who described Mr. Warren as zealously looking for an opportunity to use his expensive personal assault rifle, said that even under the harrowing conditions after the hurricane, the rule of law was never abandoned.
“Hurricane Katrina didn’t turn petty theft into a capital offense,” said Jared Fishman, a federal prosecutor in his closing arguments.
Thursday, December 9, 2010
OC Deputy Charged In On-Duty Sexual Assault Of Teen
SANTA ANA (CBS) — An Orange County sheriff’s deputy was charged Thursday with sexually assaulting a 17-year-old girl while on duty.
Scott Cole, 41, of Hesperia, could face up to three years in prison if convicted of a felony count of sexual penetration by a foreign object of a minor, said Deputy District Attorney Robert Mestman.
Cole made his initial appearance this afternoon before an Orange County judge, who postponed the defendant’s arraignment until tomorrow morning and released him on his own recognizance.
The teen’s mother called sheriff’s deputies on June 23 to report that some of her jewelry was stolen from her residence in unincorporated Orange County near Tustin, Mestman said.
Cole, who responded to the call, first spoke to the girl’s mother and sister in the living room and later allegedly told the 17-year-old, who was in her bedroom, to take off her clothes, Mestman said.
He left the bedroom to speak again to the mother and her other daughter for a few minutes before he returned to the girl’s bedroom and closed the door, the prosecutor alleged.
While in the bedroom, Cole is accused of digitally penetrating the girl, Mestman said.
“She was in shock when it happened,” he said.
The mother and sister “thought it was suspicious he was in there alone with the door closed,” the prosecutor said.
Once Cole left, the girl told her mother what allegedly happened.
Cole, who has been on paid administrative leave since June, has been with the department for 14 years, according to John McDonald, a spokesman for the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.
Scott Cole, 41, of Hesperia, could face up to three years in prison if convicted of a felony count of sexual penetration by a foreign object of a minor, said Deputy District Attorney Robert Mestman.
Cole made his initial appearance this afternoon before an Orange County judge, who postponed the defendant’s arraignment until tomorrow morning and released him on his own recognizance.
The teen’s mother called sheriff’s deputies on June 23 to report that some of her jewelry was stolen from her residence in unincorporated Orange County near Tustin, Mestman said.
Cole, who responded to the call, first spoke to the girl’s mother and sister in the living room and later allegedly told the 17-year-old, who was in her bedroom, to take off her clothes, Mestman said.
He left the bedroom to speak again to the mother and her other daughter for a few minutes before he returned to the girl’s bedroom and closed the door, the prosecutor alleged.
While in the bedroom, Cole is accused of digitally penetrating the girl, Mestman said.
“She was in shock when it happened,” he said.
The mother and sister “thought it was suspicious he was in there alone with the door closed,” the prosecutor said.
Once Cole left, the girl told her mother what allegedly happened.
Cole, who has been on paid administrative leave since June, has been with the department for 14 years, according to John McDonald, a spokesman for the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Atlanta Pays $1M to Gay Bar to Settle Suit Against Police
By Ernie Suggs
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Atlanta's long battle with the Atlanta Eagle club is finally over, and the city is $1 million poorer for it.
On Monday, the Atlanta City Council passed a resolution to settle a lawsuit in its dispute with the Atlanta Eagle, a gay bar in Midtown that was the location of a botched police raid in September 2009.
The council voted 14-0 to make the payment of $1,002,500 in the case of Calhoun v. Pennington, but it reserved deep discussion on the matter to executive session. Geoff Calhoun was a patron of the bar, and Richard Pennington was the city's police chief at the time of the raid.
After going into executive session to address Councilman Howard Shook's question on how the final figure was determined, the council returned and voted. As part of the settlement, the city will also oversee reforms within the Atlanta Police Department.
The settlement must now go back to a federal judge for final approval. At this point, the money will go into an escrow account controlled by the nonprofit legal group Lambda Legal.
On behalf of 19 patrons of the nightclub, attorney Dan Grossman filed the lawsuit in November 2009 alleging that the APD violated the federal and state constitutional rights of the people at the bar by illegally detaining them. It also said officers did not present a search warrant and used anti-gay slurs during the raid on Sept. 10, 2009.
Following a court-mandated gag order by federal Magistrate Judge Alan J. Baverman, neither Calhoun nor Grossman would comment on the ruling. But immediately after the council's vote, Calhoun walked out of the chambers wiping tears from his eyes. Grossman followed and hugged him.
In the widely reported raid, dozens of police officers swarmed into the Ponce de Leon nightclub after undercover vice officers reported that they had witnessed men having sex while other patrons watched. The department also received complaints alleging drug sales on the premises. During the raid, 62 patrons were forced to lie down on the bar's floor. No search warrant was served, and no charges were ever filed against any of them. Police did arrest eight Eagle employees on permit violations.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Atlanta's long battle with the Atlanta Eagle club is finally over, and the city is $1 million poorer for it.
On Monday, the Atlanta City Council passed a resolution to settle a lawsuit in its dispute with the Atlanta Eagle, a gay bar in Midtown that was the location of a botched police raid in September 2009.
The council voted 14-0 to make the payment of $1,002,500 in the case of Calhoun v. Pennington, but it reserved deep discussion on the matter to executive session. Geoff Calhoun was a patron of the bar, and Richard Pennington was the city's police chief at the time of the raid.
After going into executive session to address Councilman Howard Shook's question on how the final figure was determined, the council returned and voted. As part of the settlement, the city will also oversee reforms within the Atlanta Police Department.
The settlement must now go back to a federal judge for final approval. At this point, the money will go into an escrow account controlled by the nonprofit legal group Lambda Legal.
On behalf of 19 patrons of the nightclub, attorney Dan Grossman filed the lawsuit in November 2009 alleging that the APD violated the federal and state constitutional rights of the people at the bar by illegally detaining them. It also said officers did not present a search warrant and used anti-gay slurs during the raid on Sept. 10, 2009.
Following a court-mandated gag order by federal Magistrate Judge Alan J. Baverman, neither Calhoun nor Grossman would comment on the ruling. But immediately after the council's vote, Calhoun walked out of the chambers wiping tears from his eyes. Grossman followed and hugged him.
In the widely reported raid, dozens of police officers swarmed into the Ponce de Leon nightclub after undercover vice officers reported that they had witnessed men having sex while other patrons watched. The department also received complaints alleging drug sales on the premises. During the raid, 62 patrons were forced to lie down on the bar's floor. No search warrant was served, and no charges were ever filed against any of them. Police did arrest eight Eagle employees on permit violations.
Man Alleges Sodomy by NYPD Police Officers
By TOM HAYS and LARRY NEUMEISTER
Associated Press
A Wall Street financial worker says New York City police officers responding to a noisy domestic dispute in 2004 sodomized him with a baton, allegations that recall the more notorious cases of a Brooklyn tattoo parlor employee in 2008 and Haitian immigrant Abner Louima a decade earlier.
Those past accusations grabbed headlines and raise concerns about excessive force, but Ralph Johnson's civil case has unfolded largely unnoticed in federal court in Manhattan.
Johnson is seeking unspecified damages from the city and the New York Police Department at his ongoing trial. In recent testimony, he told a jury that the officers violated him with a metal baton and sought to cover up the assault.
"When I was face down ... my legs were held and I felt a sharp jabbing pain into my rectum," Johnson testified.
A doctor who examined Johnson testified that he saw abrasions and oozing blood that were "consistent with what he said happened to him."
Johnson's ex-girlfriend also has taken the witness stand. She said that after officers hauled him off in handcuffs, one made a curious query about their Bronx apartment: "He asked me if there was any reason a video camera would be set up (there)."
There was no video. But Johnson's lawyers have introduced as evidence a pair of Johnson's jeans with a hole torn through the seat and lab results confirming his DNA was on a skinny, retractable police baton - the same type of instrument central to the 2008 Brooklyn case involving Michael Mineo.
Mineo said he was assaulted during his arrest on a subway platform. The allegations resulted in news conferences arranged by his lawyers, criminal charges against three patrolmen and comparisons to Louima, whose attack by a broomstick-wielding officer in a police station bathroom in 1997 ranks among the worst scandals in NYPD history.
The officers in the Mineo case were acquitted, but he has pursued a lawsuit against one in a civil case now on trial in Brooklyn.
The largest settlement ever in a police brutality case in New York resulted in 2001 when the city and police union agreed to pay $8.7 million to resolve a lawsuit Louima brought for the severe internal injuries he suffered. One officer is serving 30 years for the attack, while another served a five-year term for perjury.
By contrast, Johnson's case was obscured partly because of his reluctance to go public with his allegations. He also had to beat what he says were trumped-up criminal charges stemming from the encounter.
The city and the NYPD have defended the officers, claiming the girlfriend was in distress and Johnson was uncooperative. They also cite a taped interview with NYPD internal affairs in which Johnson says he wasn't sure how he was injured.
Johnson has conceded he can't identify the officer who allegedly used the baton on him. In his opening statement, city attorney Sumit Sud accused the plaintiff of trying "to cast an illusion on the facts of this case."
The lawyer argued that Johnson's internal injuries were so minor that they could have been caused by constipation. The tear in the jeans also was misleading, he said.
"He was wearing underwear and, low and behold, the underwear has no hole in it," he said.
An NYPD sergeant who took the stand briefly last week resumed testimony Monday, saying he punched Johnson in the face twice at one point when he thought he was going to reach for a glass object he could use as a weapon.
U.S. District Judge Kevin P. Castel seemed to be urging a settlement Monday when, with the jury out of the room, he predicted that the panel's verdict might lead the losing side to conclude it made a "serious miscalculation." He also said the case had legal issues that were complex enough to ensure appeals and continued litigation.
Johnson, 40, told jurors that he's employed at a financial consulting firm and is a partner in a precious metals venture. He was working at an investment banking firm in the summer of 2004 when a night out drinking with his live-in girlfriend spiraled out of control.
The girlfriend, teacher Alison Bongo, blew up because he spoke to another woman at a Manhattan nightspot. Once back at their apartment, the argument escalated. She confronted with a bank statement with an unexplained charge for a hotel room.
"I tried to talk to him about it and he wouldn't listen," she said.
Even when she began throwing things around and breaking windows, she said, he sat silent.
"It made me even angrier," she said.
She said he finally responded by carrying her to the doorstep and locking her out. She banged on the door and yelled at the top of her lungs.
That's when the 911 calls from neighbors began - six in all. "A woman is screaming like crazy," one caller said.
Bongo testified that about a half dozen officers showed up shortly after midnight on Aug. 27. She told the officers she wanted to get some clothes and leave, and offered her keys for them to let themselves in.
She testified that the officers had trouble unlocking the door, and decided to break it down. Johnson said he was sitting on a couch, clueless about the commotion outside, when they burst in.
"I didn't know what to do," he said. "I just froze."
He continued: "They were kicking and punching me. They threw me on the ground, face first." After feeling the pain in his rectum, he said he "screamed out" for his girlfriend before being dragged out of the home.
The officers tell a different story: They say Johnson knew they were outside but refused to let them in. He also ignored repeated orders to show his hands and stand, and resisted when they tried to pull him up, they say. The retractable baton was used only to pry his arms into position to be handcuffed, the officers say.
At the police station, Johnson told an officer that he had been assaulted and asked for medical attention. He claimed he recanted on the internal affairs tape because of investigators' intimidation.
He said one warned him "that the last time this was true was Abner Louima and you're not Louima." Also, "We're going to prosecute you for a felony if you're lying."
Johnson said he feared police "would put me on the news. They would contact my employer and all my clients. They would interview family and friends."
Bongo refused to press domestic violence charges against Johnson, but prosecutors still pursued a misdemeanor count of resisting arrest. He said he rejected a plea deal that would have required him sign a statement saying "there was no brutality or sodomy." He was acquitted at trial.
Paul Browne, the police department's top spokesman, said the Internal Affairs Bureau found Johnson's allegation to be unfounded after he recanted and after no physical evidence of a sexual assault was found. He noted that the Bronx district attorney had declined to prosecute the officers.
At the current trial, Bongo coolly recounted how the arrest was the beginning of the end for the couple.
"Do you have any interest in testifying on behalf of Mr. Johnson or helping Mr. Johnson?" his lawyer asked.
"No," she replied, without hesitation.
The ex-girlfriend testified she didn't see the arrest because police had her sequestered in a bedroom. But she claimed she was coerced into falsely signing a statement saying, "I was scared and that I was going to get hurt" that night.
In truth, she said her ex was never violent toward her. If he had been, "I would have left."
Associated Press
A Wall Street financial worker says New York City police officers responding to a noisy domestic dispute in 2004 sodomized him with a baton, allegations that recall the more notorious cases of a Brooklyn tattoo parlor employee in 2008 and Haitian immigrant Abner Louima a decade earlier.
Those past accusations grabbed headlines and raise concerns about excessive force, but Ralph Johnson's civil case has unfolded largely unnoticed in federal court in Manhattan.
Johnson is seeking unspecified damages from the city and the New York Police Department at his ongoing trial. In recent testimony, he told a jury that the officers violated him with a metal baton and sought to cover up the assault.
"When I was face down ... my legs were held and I felt a sharp jabbing pain into my rectum," Johnson testified.
A doctor who examined Johnson testified that he saw abrasions and oozing blood that were "consistent with what he said happened to him."
Johnson's ex-girlfriend also has taken the witness stand. She said that after officers hauled him off in handcuffs, one made a curious query about their Bronx apartment: "He asked me if there was any reason a video camera would be set up (there)."
There was no video. But Johnson's lawyers have introduced as evidence a pair of Johnson's jeans with a hole torn through the seat and lab results confirming his DNA was on a skinny, retractable police baton - the same type of instrument central to the 2008 Brooklyn case involving Michael Mineo.
Mineo said he was assaulted during his arrest on a subway platform. The allegations resulted in news conferences arranged by his lawyers, criminal charges against three patrolmen and comparisons to Louima, whose attack by a broomstick-wielding officer in a police station bathroom in 1997 ranks among the worst scandals in NYPD history.
The officers in the Mineo case were acquitted, but he has pursued a lawsuit against one in a civil case now on trial in Brooklyn.
The largest settlement ever in a police brutality case in New York resulted in 2001 when the city and police union agreed to pay $8.7 million to resolve a lawsuit Louima brought for the severe internal injuries he suffered. One officer is serving 30 years for the attack, while another served a five-year term for perjury.
By contrast, Johnson's case was obscured partly because of his reluctance to go public with his allegations. He also had to beat what he says were trumped-up criminal charges stemming from the encounter.
The city and the NYPD have defended the officers, claiming the girlfriend was in distress and Johnson was uncooperative. They also cite a taped interview with NYPD internal affairs in which Johnson says he wasn't sure how he was injured.
Johnson has conceded he can't identify the officer who allegedly used the baton on him. In his opening statement, city attorney Sumit Sud accused the plaintiff of trying "to cast an illusion on the facts of this case."
The lawyer argued that Johnson's internal injuries were so minor that they could have been caused by constipation. The tear in the jeans also was misleading, he said.
"He was wearing underwear and, low and behold, the underwear has no hole in it," he said.
An NYPD sergeant who took the stand briefly last week resumed testimony Monday, saying he punched Johnson in the face twice at one point when he thought he was going to reach for a glass object he could use as a weapon.
U.S. District Judge Kevin P. Castel seemed to be urging a settlement Monday when, with the jury out of the room, he predicted that the panel's verdict might lead the losing side to conclude it made a "serious miscalculation." He also said the case had legal issues that were complex enough to ensure appeals and continued litigation.
Johnson, 40, told jurors that he's employed at a financial consulting firm and is a partner in a precious metals venture. He was working at an investment banking firm in the summer of 2004 when a night out drinking with his live-in girlfriend spiraled out of control.
The girlfriend, teacher Alison Bongo, blew up because he spoke to another woman at a Manhattan nightspot. Once back at their apartment, the argument escalated. She confronted with a bank statement with an unexplained charge for a hotel room.
"I tried to talk to him about it and he wouldn't listen," she said.
Even when she began throwing things around and breaking windows, she said, he sat silent.
"It made me even angrier," she said.
She said he finally responded by carrying her to the doorstep and locking her out. She banged on the door and yelled at the top of her lungs.
That's when the 911 calls from neighbors began - six in all. "A woman is screaming like crazy," one caller said.
Bongo testified that about a half dozen officers showed up shortly after midnight on Aug. 27. She told the officers she wanted to get some clothes and leave, and offered her keys for them to let themselves in.
She testified that the officers had trouble unlocking the door, and decided to break it down. Johnson said he was sitting on a couch, clueless about the commotion outside, when they burst in.
"I didn't know what to do," he said. "I just froze."
He continued: "They were kicking and punching me. They threw me on the ground, face first." After feeling the pain in his rectum, he said he "screamed out" for his girlfriend before being dragged out of the home.
The officers tell a different story: They say Johnson knew they were outside but refused to let them in. He also ignored repeated orders to show his hands and stand, and resisted when they tried to pull him up, they say. The retractable baton was used only to pry his arms into position to be handcuffed, the officers say.
At the police station, Johnson told an officer that he had been assaulted and asked for medical attention. He claimed he recanted on the internal affairs tape because of investigators' intimidation.
He said one warned him "that the last time this was true was Abner Louima and you're not Louima." Also, "We're going to prosecute you for a felony if you're lying."
Johnson said he feared police "would put me on the news. They would contact my employer and all my clients. They would interview family and friends."
Bongo refused to press domestic violence charges against Johnson, but prosecutors still pursued a misdemeanor count of resisting arrest. He said he rejected a plea deal that would have required him sign a statement saying "there was no brutality or sodomy." He was acquitted at trial.
Paul Browne, the police department's top spokesman, said the Internal Affairs Bureau found Johnson's allegation to be unfounded after he recanted and after no physical evidence of a sexual assault was found. He noted that the Bronx district attorney had declined to prosecute the officers.
At the current trial, Bongo coolly recounted how the arrest was the beginning of the end for the couple.
"Do you have any interest in testifying on behalf of Mr. Johnson or helping Mr. Johnson?" his lawyer asked.
"No," she replied, without hesitation.
The ex-girlfriend testified she didn't see the arrest because police had her sequestered in a bedroom. But she claimed she was coerced into falsely signing a statement saying, "I was scared and that I was going to get hurt" that night.
In truth, she said her ex was never violent toward her. If he had been, "I would have left."
Monday, December 6, 2010
The Crime of Punishment
In 2005, when a federal court took a snapshot of California’s prisons, one inmate was dying each week because the state failed to provide adequate health care. Adequate does not mean state-of-the-art, or even tolerable. It means care meeting “the minimal civilized measure of life’s necessities,” in the Supreme Court’s words, so inmates do not die from rampant staph infections or commit suicide at nearly twice the national average.
These and other horrors have been documented in California’s prisons for two decades, and last week they were before the Supreme Court in Schwarzenegger v. Plata. It is the most important case in years about prison conditions. The justices should uphold the lower court’s remedy for addressing the horrors.
Four years ago, when the number of inmates in California reached more than 160,000, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a “state of emergency.” The state’s prisons, he said, are places “of extreme peril.”
Last year, under a federal law focusing on prison conditions, the lower court found that overcrowding was the “primary cause” of gruesome inadequacies in medical and mental health care. The court concluded that the only relief under the law “capable of remedying these constitutional deficiencies” is a “prison release order.”
Today, there are almost twice as many inmates in California’s 33 prisons as they were designed for. The court ordered the state to reduce that population by around 30 percent. While still leaving it overcrowded, that would free up space, staff and other vital resources for long overdue medical and mental health clinics.
The case will most likely be resolved by a vote of 5 to 4, with Justice Anthony Kennedy’s vote decisive. At the oral argument, he said that “at some point,” the court must say “overcrowding is the principal cause, as experts have testified, and it’s now time for a remedy.” After 20 years of litigation and 70 court orders, that point has come.
At the intense, sometimes testy argument, Justice Samuel Alito revealed the law-and-order thinking behind the California system. “If 40,000 prisoners are going to be released,” he said overstating the likely number, “you really believe that if you were to come back here two years after that you would be able to say they haven’t contributed to an increase in crime?” To Justice Alito, apparently, it was out of the realm of possibility that, rather than increasing crime, the state could actually decrease it by reducing the number of prison inmates.
Among experts, as a forthcoming issue of the journal Criminology & Public Policy relates, there is a growing belief that less prison and more and better policing will reduce crime. There is almost unanimous condemnation of California-style mass incarceration, which has led to no reduction in serious crime and has turned many inmates into habitual criminals.
America’s prison system is now studied largely because of its failure — the result of an expensive approach to criminal justice shaped by fear-driven ideology. California’s prisons embody this overwhelming failure.
These and other horrors have been documented in California’s prisons for two decades, and last week they were before the Supreme Court in Schwarzenegger v. Plata. It is the most important case in years about prison conditions. The justices should uphold the lower court’s remedy for addressing the horrors.
Four years ago, when the number of inmates in California reached more than 160,000, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a “state of emergency.” The state’s prisons, he said, are places “of extreme peril.”
Last year, under a federal law focusing on prison conditions, the lower court found that overcrowding was the “primary cause” of gruesome inadequacies in medical and mental health care. The court concluded that the only relief under the law “capable of remedying these constitutional deficiencies” is a “prison release order.”
Today, there are almost twice as many inmates in California’s 33 prisons as they were designed for. The court ordered the state to reduce that population by around 30 percent. While still leaving it overcrowded, that would free up space, staff and other vital resources for long overdue medical and mental health clinics.
The case will most likely be resolved by a vote of 5 to 4, with Justice Anthony Kennedy’s vote decisive. At the oral argument, he said that “at some point,” the court must say “overcrowding is the principal cause, as experts have testified, and it’s now time for a remedy.” After 20 years of litigation and 70 court orders, that point has come.
At the intense, sometimes testy argument, Justice Samuel Alito revealed the law-and-order thinking behind the California system. “If 40,000 prisoners are going to be released,” he said overstating the likely number, “you really believe that if you were to come back here two years after that you would be able to say they haven’t contributed to an increase in crime?” To Justice Alito, apparently, it was out of the realm of possibility that, rather than increasing crime, the state could actually decrease it by reducing the number of prison inmates.
Among experts, as a forthcoming issue of the journal Criminology & Public Policy relates, there is a growing belief that less prison and more and better policing will reduce crime. There is almost unanimous condemnation of California-style mass incarceration, which has led to no reduction in serious crime and has turned many inmates into habitual criminals.
America’s prison system is now studied largely because of its failure — the result of an expensive approach to criminal justice shaped by fear-driven ideology. California’s prisons embody this overwhelming failure.
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
In Post-Katrina Killing, NOPD Cop Testifies Why He Shot Man, Another Explains Why He Burned the Body
by Sabrina Shankman, ProPublica
In the ongoing trial of five police officers charged with killing a New Orleans man in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, two of those charged have taken the stand in their own defense.
In testimony yesterday and this morning, New Orleans police officer Greg McRae explained his decision to burn the body of 31-year-old Henry Glover, who had been shot by police officer David Warren earlier that day.
"I had seen enough bodies," McRae said. "I had seen enough rot."
McRae testified that he did not know, at the time, that Glover had been shot by a police officer. He said he was motivated by exhaustion, the trauma of the storm, and the need to get the body away from the makeshift police station where he was based.
Glover's death was first detailed by ProPublica nearly two years ago, in an investigative partnership with the Nation Institute and the Nation magazine.
In June, the Justice Department indicted five officers in connection with the case. Warren has been charged with shooting Glover; McRae and Lt. Dwayne Scheuermann have been charged with beating three men who tried to help Glover, and then burning Glover's remains; and former Lt. Robert Italiano and Lt. Travis McCabe are charged with covering it up.
Last week, in the first day of testimony from the defense, Warren told the jury that he believed his life was in danger when he shot Glover on Sept. 2, 2005. Warren said that Glover was running toward him at the time, and that from the second floor balcony where Warren stood, it appeared that Glover was holding a weapon.
His partner that day, NOPD officer Linda Howard, testified earlier in the trial that Glover was actually running away from the strip mall where they stood -- not towards it -- when Glover was shot.
In testimony on Monday, Alan Baxter, an expert for the defense, testified that Warren's shooting was justified, and that Warren met the standard for firing his weapon, which requires the reasonable belief that his or someone else's life was in danger.
As our partners at the Times-Picayune explain, Baxter himself appeared to be on trial at times, as the prosecution picked apart his qualifications, noting that he has never published any articles about police procedure. Baxter says he is a former executive-level police commander with the United Nations, yet the U.N. has no record of his employment, the prosecution said.
A quick look at Baxter's background (PDF) shows that he's not an attorney, but was formerly a member of the Canadian Bar Association as well as two trial lawyers' groups in Washington State.
He's listed as a current member of the National Association of Police Chiefs, the American Correctional Association and the American College of Forensics. We called to confirm he's still a member, and learned that his membership in the first two expired earlier this year. The American College of Forensics doesn't give out information on its members, but says that anyone can join, as long as they pay the fees.
Baxter's testimony was based on a two-hour interview with Warren, he said. He did not speak with any other witnesses of the event.
In addition to saying that Warren's shooting of Glover was justified, Baxter also said that Warren was acting legally when he fired a warning shot at a man earlier in the day.
The NOPD's use of force guidelines, explicitly says, "Police Officers shall not fire warning shots." (We have posted the guidelines.)
Baxter testified that the guidelines were essentially suggestions rather than rules.
The trial is expected to continue at least through the end of the week. Check out nola.com for continued coverage.
In the ongoing trial of five police officers charged with killing a New Orleans man in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, two of those charged have taken the stand in their own defense.
In testimony yesterday and this morning, New Orleans police officer Greg McRae explained his decision to burn the body of 31-year-old Henry Glover, who had been shot by police officer David Warren earlier that day.
"I had seen enough bodies," McRae said. "I had seen enough rot."
McRae testified that he did not know, at the time, that Glover had been shot by a police officer. He said he was motivated by exhaustion, the trauma of the storm, and the need to get the body away from the makeshift police station where he was based.
Glover's death was first detailed by ProPublica nearly two years ago, in an investigative partnership with the Nation Institute and the Nation magazine.
In June, the Justice Department indicted five officers in connection with the case. Warren has been charged with shooting Glover; McRae and Lt. Dwayne Scheuermann have been charged with beating three men who tried to help Glover, and then burning Glover's remains; and former Lt. Robert Italiano and Lt. Travis McCabe are charged with covering it up.
Last week, in the first day of testimony from the defense, Warren told the jury that he believed his life was in danger when he shot Glover on Sept. 2, 2005. Warren said that Glover was running toward him at the time, and that from the second floor balcony where Warren stood, it appeared that Glover was holding a weapon.
His partner that day, NOPD officer Linda Howard, testified earlier in the trial that Glover was actually running away from the strip mall where they stood -- not towards it -- when Glover was shot.
In testimony on Monday, Alan Baxter, an expert for the defense, testified that Warren's shooting was justified, and that Warren met the standard for firing his weapon, which requires the reasonable belief that his or someone else's life was in danger.
As our partners at the Times-Picayune explain, Baxter himself appeared to be on trial at times, as the prosecution picked apart his qualifications, noting that he has never published any articles about police procedure. Baxter says he is a former executive-level police commander with the United Nations, yet the U.N. has no record of his employment, the prosecution said.
A quick look at Baxter's background (PDF) shows that he's not an attorney, but was formerly a member of the Canadian Bar Association as well as two trial lawyers' groups in Washington State.
He's listed as a current member of the National Association of Police Chiefs, the American Correctional Association and the American College of Forensics. We called to confirm he's still a member, and learned that his membership in the first two expired earlier this year. The American College of Forensics doesn't give out information on its members, but says that anyone can join, as long as they pay the fees.
Baxter's testimony was based on a two-hour interview with Warren, he said. He did not speak with any other witnesses of the event.
In addition to saying that Warren's shooting of Glover was justified, Baxter also said that Warren was acting legally when he fired a warning shot at a man earlier in the day.
The NOPD's use of force guidelines, explicitly says, "Police Officers shall not fire warning shots." (We have posted the guidelines.)
Baxter testified that the guidelines were essentially suggestions rather than rules.
The trial is expected to continue at least through the end of the week. Check out nola.com for continued coverage.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Broken Beyond Repair
By BOB HERBERT
Published: November 29, 2010
You can only hope that you will be as sharp and intellectually focused as former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens when you’re 90 years old.
In a provocative essay in The New York Review of Books, the former justice, who once supported the death penalty, offers some welcome insight into why he now opposes this ultimate criminal sanction and believes it to be unconstitutional.
As Adam Liptak noted in The Times on Sunday, Justice Stevens had once thought the death penalty could be administered rationally and fairly but has come to the conclusion “that personnel changes on the court, coupled with ‘regrettable judicial activism,’ had created a system of capital punishment that is shot through with racism, skewed toward conviction, infected with politics and tinged with hysteria.”
The egregious problems identified by Justice Stevens (and other prominent Americans who have changed their minds in recent years about capital punishment) have always been the case. The awful evidence has always been right there for all to see, but mostly it has been ignored. The death penalty in the United States has never been anything but an abomination — a grotesque, uncivilized, overwhelmingly racist affront to the very idea of justice.
Police and prosecutorial misconduct have been rampant, with evidence of innocence deliberately withheld from defendants being prominent among the abuses. Juries have systematically been shaped — rigged — to heighten the chances of conviction, and thus imposition of the ultimate punishment.
Prosecutors and judges in death penalty cases have been overwhelmingly white and male and their behavior has often — not always, but shockingly often — been unfair, bigoted and cruel. The Death Penalty Information Center has reams of meticulously documented horror stories.
Innocents have undoubtedly been executed. Executions have been upheld in cases in which defense lawyers slept through crucial proceedings. Alcoholic, drug-addicted and incompetent lawyers — as well as lawyers who had been suspended or otherwise disciplined for misconduct — have been assigned to indigent defendants. And it has always been the case that the death penalty machinery is fired up far more often when the victims are white.
I remember reporting on a study several years ago by the Texas Defender Service, which represented indigent death row inmates. It mentioned a Dallas defense lawyer, who, reminiscing in 2000, said: “At one point, with a black-on-black murder, you could get it dismissed if the defendant would pay funeral expenses.” A judge, looking back on his days as a prosecutor in the 1950s, recalled being told by an angry boss: “If you ever put another nigger on a jury, you’re fired.”
Prosecutors cleaned up their language somewhat over the years, but the discrimination has persisted, along with the pernicious idea that white lives are inherently more valuable than black ones. Patricia Lemay, a white juror in a Georgia death penalty case that resulted in an execution, told me in an interview in 2002 that she had been nauseated by the vile racial comments made by other jurors during the deliberations.
Justice Harry Blackmun was 85 years old and near the end of his tenure on the Supreme Court when he declared in 1994 that he could no longer support the imposition of the death penalty. “The problem,” he said, “is that the inevitability of factual, legal and moral error gives us a system that we know must wrongly kill some defendants, a system that fails to deliver the fair, consistent and reliable sentences of death required by the Constitution.”
Justice Blackmun vowed that he would no longer participate in a system “fraught with arbitrariness, discrimination, caprice and mistake.”
In 1990, Justice Thurgood Marshall asserted: “When in Gregg v. Georgia the Supreme Court gave its seal of approval to capital punishment, this endorsement was premised on the promise that capital punishment would be administered with fairness and justice. Instead, the promise has become a cruel and empty mockery.”
Justices Blackmun and Marshall are gone, but the death penalty is still with us. It is still an abomination. Illinois has tried mightily to deal with a system of capital punishment that had, as The Chicago Tribune described it, “one of the worst records of wrongful capital convictions in the country.”
The sentences of 167 condemned inmates were commuted in 2003. Four others were pardoned and a moratorium on the death penalty has been in effect since 2000. But prosecutors continue mindlessly to seek the death penalty. And the system for trying murder cases remains a mess. As The Tribune wrote in an editorial just last week:
“Lawmakers still haven’t taken adequate steps to ensure that the death penalty is applied evenly across the state, or to guard against wrongful convictions based on errant identifications of witnesses or mistakes at forensic labs. False confessions and prosecutorial missteps are still alarmingly common.”
In the paper’s view, “Illinois must abolish the death penalty.”
And so must the United States.
Published: November 29, 2010
You can only hope that you will be as sharp and intellectually focused as former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens when you’re 90 years old.
In a provocative essay in The New York Review of Books, the former justice, who once supported the death penalty, offers some welcome insight into why he now opposes this ultimate criminal sanction and believes it to be unconstitutional.
As Adam Liptak noted in The Times on Sunday, Justice Stevens had once thought the death penalty could be administered rationally and fairly but has come to the conclusion “that personnel changes on the court, coupled with ‘regrettable judicial activism,’ had created a system of capital punishment that is shot through with racism, skewed toward conviction, infected with politics and tinged with hysteria.”
The egregious problems identified by Justice Stevens (and other prominent Americans who have changed their minds in recent years about capital punishment) have always been the case. The awful evidence has always been right there for all to see, but mostly it has been ignored. The death penalty in the United States has never been anything but an abomination — a grotesque, uncivilized, overwhelmingly racist affront to the very idea of justice.
Police and prosecutorial misconduct have been rampant, with evidence of innocence deliberately withheld from defendants being prominent among the abuses. Juries have systematically been shaped — rigged — to heighten the chances of conviction, and thus imposition of the ultimate punishment.
Prosecutors and judges in death penalty cases have been overwhelmingly white and male and their behavior has often — not always, but shockingly often — been unfair, bigoted and cruel. The Death Penalty Information Center has reams of meticulously documented horror stories.
Innocents have undoubtedly been executed. Executions have been upheld in cases in which defense lawyers slept through crucial proceedings. Alcoholic, drug-addicted and incompetent lawyers — as well as lawyers who had been suspended or otherwise disciplined for misconduct — have been assigned to indigent defendants. And it has always been the case that the death penalty machinery is fired up far more often when the victims are white.
I remember reporting on a study several years ago by the Texas Defender Service, which represented indigent death row inmates. It mentioned a Dallas defense lawyer, who, reminiscing in 2000, said: “At one point, with a black-on-black murder, you could get it dismissed if the defendant would pay funeral expenses.” A judge, looking back on his days as a prosecutor in the 1950s, recalled being told by an angry boss: “If you ever put another nigger on a jury, you’re fired.”
Prosecutors cleaned up their language somewhat over the years, but the discrimination has persisted, along with the pernicious idea that white lives are inherently more valuable than black ones. Patricia Lemay, a white juror in a Georgia death penalty case that resulted in an execution, told me in an interview in 2002 that she had been nauseated by the vile racial comments made by other jurors during the deliberations.
Justice Harry Blackmun was 85 years old and near the end of his tenure on the Supreme Court when he declared in 1994 that he could no longer support the imposition of the death penalty. “The problem,” he said, “is that the inevitability of factual, legal and moral error gives us a system that we know must wrongly kill some defendants, a system that fails to deliver the fair, consistent and reliable sentences of death required by the Constitution.”
Justice Blackmun vowed that he would no longer participate in a system “fraught with arbitrariness, discrimination, caprice and mistake.”
In 1990, Justice Thurgood Marshall asserted: “When in Gregg v. Georgia the Supreme Court gave its seal of approval to capital punishment, this endorsement was premised on the promise that capital punishment would be administered with fairness and justice. Instead, the promise has become a cruel and empty mockery.”
Justices Blackmun and Marshall are gone, but the death penalty is still with us. It is still an abomination. Illinois has tried mightily to deal with a system of capital punishment that had, as The Chicago Tribune described it, “one of the worst records of wrongful capital convictions in the country.”
The sentences of 167 condemned inmates were commuted in 2003. Four others were pardoned and a moratorium on the death penalty has been in effect since 2000. But prosecutors continue mindlessly to seek the death penalty. And the system for trying murder cases remains a mess. As The Tribune wrote in an editorial just last week:
“Lawmakers still haven’t taken adequate steps to ensure that the death penalty is applied evenly across the state, or to guard against wrongful convictions based on errant identifications of witnesses or mistakes at forensic labs. False confessions and prosecutorial missteps are still alarmingly common.”
In the paper’s view, “Illinois must abolish the death penalty.”
And so must the United States.
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
New York City Police Photograph Irises of Suspects
By RAY RIVERA and AL BAKER
The New York Police Department has begun photographing the irises of people who are arrested in an effort to prevent escapes as suspects move through the court system, a police official said Monday.
The program was instituted after two embarrassing episodes early this year in which prisoners arrested on serious charges tricked the authorities into freeing them by posing at arraignment as suspects facing minor cases. The occurrences exposed weaknesses in the city’s handling of suspects as they move from police custody into the maze of court systems in the five boroughs.
With the new system, the authorities are using a hand-held scanning device that can check a prisoner’s identity in seconds when the suspect is presented in court, said Paul J. Browne, the department’s chief spokesman.
Officials began photographing the irises of suspects arrested for any reason on Monday at Manhattan Central Booking and expect to expand the program to all five boroughs by early December, Mr. Browne said.
The department has been working on the program for months, Mr. Browne said. But the effort caught many in the city’s legal circles by surprise as news of it began trickling out late last week. It is raising concerns among civil libertarians and privacy advocates, who say the authorities’ cataloging of the new data could put innocent people under permanent suspicion.
“It’s really distressing that the Police Department is once again undertaking a new regime of personal data collection without any public discourse,” said Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, “and we don’t know the reason for it, whether this is a necessary program, whether it’s effective to address the concerns that it’s designed to address, and whether in this day and age it’s even cost-effective, not to mention whether there are any protections in place against the misuse of the data that’s collected.”
Steven Banks, attorney in chief of the Legal Aid Society, said his office learned about the program on Friday in a phone call from the mayor’s criminal justice coordinator.
“This is an unnecessary process,” Mr. Banks said. “It’s unauthorized by the statutes and of questionable legality at best. The statutes specifically authorize collecting fingerprints. There has been great legislative debate about the extent to which DNA evidence can be collected, and it is limited to certain types of cases. So the idea that the Police Department can forge ahead and use a totally new technology without any statutory authorization is certainly suspect.”
Mr. Browne said a legal review by the department had concluded that legislative authorization was not necessary.
“Our legal review determined that these are photographs and should be treated the same as mug shots, which are destroyed when arrests are sealed,” he said.
The technology uses high-resolution images to identify unique patterns in the iris, the colored part of the eye. It is considered less intrusive than retinal scanning, which looks at patterns in the blood vessels in the back of the eye and can reveal information about a person’s health, raising privacy concerns.
The department’s collection and use of electronic data have long been controversial. A new state law forced the department to halt electronic storage of the names and addresses of people stopped under the stop-and-frisk program but not charged or arrested.
The iris database has other implications as well, potentially providing the department with a tool in the fight against terrorism. The military has been using similar biometric technology in Iraq and Afghanistan to develop a database of potential insurgents, though Mr. Browne said that the Police Department’s data was not intended for that use and that there had been no coordination with the Defense Department or the Federal Bureau of Investigation on the program.
Other police agencies and correctional facilities across the country also use iris recognition, though it was unclear on Monday how widespread the practice is.
Marc Rotenberg, the president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which focuses on emerging privacy and civil liberties issues, said that law and policy had developed over time on the collection of fingerprints, and more recently DNA, in the criminal justice system, and that iris scans fell somewhere in between.
“It’s a more accurate form of identification,” Mr. Rotenberg said of the scans, “but at the same time doesn’t raise the same privacy concerns that DNA data has.”
The program will cost the city $500,000 to implement and is being paid for through a grant from the Department of Homeland Security, Mr. Browne said.
In March, a suspect charged in a string of robberies, who had served time in prison for attempted murder, claimed to be another man, who was facing a charge of marijuana possession, as they were about to be arraigned on Staten Island. The ruse worked and the suspect, Freddie Thompson, was released and remained free for 56 hours before he was recaptured. Another suspect, Michael Bautista, who was facing charges of assault and criminal mischief in the Bronx, escaped in the same manner in February and remains at large.
Mr. Browne said he had no statistics on how often suspects had escaped in this manner, but he said the problem was not widespread.
William K. Rashbaum and Karen Zraick contributed reporting.
The New York Police Department has begun photographing the irises of people who are arrested in an effort to prevent escapes as suspects move through the court system, a police official said Monday.
The program was instituted after two embarrassing episodes early this year in which prisoners arrested on serious charges tricked the authorities into freeing them by posing at arraignment as suspects facing minor cases. The occurrences exposed weaknesses in the city’s handling of suspects as they move from police custody into the maze of court systems in the five boroughs.
With the new system, the authorities are using a hand-held scanning device that can check a prisoner’s identity in seconds when the suspect is presented in court, said Paul J. Browne, the department’s chief spokesman.
Officials began photographing the irises of suspects arrested for any reason on Monday at Manhattan Central Booking and expect to expand the program to all five boroughs by early December, Mr. Browne said.
The department has been working on the program for months, Mr. Browne said. But the effort caught many in the city’s legal circles by surprise as news of it began trickling out late last week. It is raising concerns among civil libertarians and privacy advocates, who say the authorities’ cataloging of the new data could put innocent people under permanent suspicion.
“It’s really distressing that the Police Department is once again undertaking a new regime of personal data collection without any public discourse,” said Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, “and we don’t know the reason for it, whether this is a necessary program, whether it’s effective to address the concerns that it’s designed to address, and whether in this day and age it’s even cost-effective, not to mention whether there are any protections in place against the misuse of the data that’s collected.”
Steven Banks, attorney in chief of the Legal Aid Society, said his office learned about the program on Friday in a phone call from the mayor’s criminal justice coordinator.
“This is an unnecessary process,” Mr. Banks said. “It’s unauthorized by the statutes and of questionable legality at best. The statutes specifically authorize collecting fingerprints. There has been great legislative debate about the extent to which DNA evidence can be collected, and it is limited to certain types of cases. So the idea that the Police Department can forge ahead and use a totally new technology without any statutory authorization is certainly suspect.”
Mr. Browne said a legal review by the department had concluded that legislative authorization was not necessary.
“Our legal review determined that these are photographs and should be treated the same as mug shots, which are destroyed when arrests are sealed,” he said.
The technology uses high-resolution images to identify unique patterns in the iris, the colored part of the eye. It is considered less intrusive than retinal scanning, which looks at patterns in the blood vessels in the back of the eye and can reveal information about a person’s health, raising privacy concerns.
The department’s collection and use of electronic data have long been controversial. A new state law forced the department to halt electronic storage of the names and addresses of people stopped under the stop-and-frisk program but not charged or arrested.
The iris database has other implications as well, potentially providing the department with a tool in the fight against terrorism. The military has been using similar biometric technology in Iraq and Afghanistan to develop a database of potential insurgents, though Mr. Browne said that the Police Department’s data was not intended for that use and that there had been no coordination with the Defense Department or the Federal Bureau of Investigation on the program.
Other police agencies and correctional facilities across the country also use iris recognition, though it was unclear on Monday how widespread the practice is.
Marc Rotenberg, the president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which focuses on emerging privacy and civil liberties issues, said that law and policy had developed over time on the collection of fingerprints, and more recently DNA, in the criminal justice system, and that iris scans fell somewhere in between.
“It’s a more accurate form of identification,” Mr. Rotenberg said of the scans, “but at the same time doesn’t raise the same privacy concerns that DNA data has.”
The program will cost the city $500,000 to implement and is being paid for through a grant from the Department of Homeland Security, Mr. Browne said.
In March, a suspect charged in a string of robberies, who had served time in prison for attempted murder, claimed to be another man, who was facing a charge of marijuana possession, as they were about to be arraigned on Staten Island. The ruse worked and the suspect, Freddie Thompson, was released and remained free for 56 hours before he was recaptured. Another suspect, Michael Bautista, who was facing charges of assault and criminal mischief in the Bronx, escaped in the same manner in February and remains at large.
Mr. Browne said he had no statistics on how often suspects had escaped in this manner, but he said the problem was not widespread.
William K. Rashbaum and Karen Zraick contributed reporting.
POLI-MIGRA (ICE) Practices In COOK COUNTY CONTINUE
Village of South Holland Police enforces Immigration Laws and leaves a 2 year old Orphan
COOK COUNTY, IL-Our Lady of Guadalupe Mission/Justice Mission received a phone call in regards to a woman, Susana Chichilla age 24, who was stopped by the South Holland Police on her way to the Walgreen’s pharmacy store to purchase medicine for her 2 year old U.S. Citizen son who is very ill and in need of daily medication.
“Officer P. Williams star#102, who works on the morning shift, is the arresting officer of Susana Chichilla and the cause of the break up of this innocent family. Because of his decision to call Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) against Susana Chichilla, a 2 year old Citizen child is about to become orphan” said Father Landaverde, “This U.S. Citizen child is suffering tremendously for this unjust and inhumane action that this local police officer took, we can not tolerate racial profiling and this kind of attacks to our immigrant families any longer, we denounce as unjust and inhumane the acts of South Holland Police and any law enforcement agency and individuals that collaborate with ICE and tries to enforce unjust and inhumane laws like the ones from our broken immigration system, we will bring our voices and community power to the door steps of the Village of South Holland if there's not an immediate release from custody of Susana Chichilla ” concluded Father Landaverde.
Jose Herrera, organizer for the Immigrant Youth Justice League and the Justice Mission, said “The welcoming message of South Holland made by Mayor, Don A. De Graff, states that the Village was founded by early Dutch settlers and that their history has included a heritage of faith in God with an important emphasis on unity in the family, if this last part is true then why do they take this kind of action against Susana Chichilla? We must lift our voices and denounce all of this. The Village of South Holland is located in the county of cook. County of Cook does not participate in any of the ICE programs, like the Secure Communities or 287(g) programs, which make legal the collaboration of ICE and local law enforcement agencies, WE DEMAND THE IMMEDIATE RELEASE OF SUSANA CHICHILLA” concluded Jose Herrera.
COOK COUNTY, IL-Our Lady of Guadalupe Mission/Justice Mission received a phone call in regards to a woman, Susana Chichilla age 24, who was stopped by the South Holland Police on her way to the Walgreen’s pharmacy store to purchase medicine for her 2 year old U.S. Citizen son who is very ill and in need of daily medication.
“Officer P. Williams star#102, who works on the morning shift, is the arresting officer of Susana Chichilla and the cause of the break up of this innocent family. Because of his decision to call Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) against Susana Chichilla, a 2 year old Citizen child is about to become orphan” said Father Landaverde, “This U.S. Citizen child is suffering tremendously for this unjust and inhumane action that this local police officer took, we can not tolerate racial profiling and this kind of attacks to our immigrant families any longer, we denounce as unjust and inhumane the acts of South Holland Police and any law enforcement agency and individuals that collaborate with ICE and tries to enforce unjust and inhumane laws like the ones from our broken immigration system, we will bring our voices and community power to the door steps of the Village of South Holland if there's not an immediate release from custody of Susana Chichilla ” concluded Father Landaverde.
Jose Herrera, organizer for the Immigrant Youth Justice League and the Justice Mission, said “The welcoming message of South Holland made by Mayor, Don A. De Graff, states that the Village was founded by early Dutch settlers and that their history has included a heritage of faith in God with an important emphasis on unity in the family, if this last part is true then why do they take this kind of action against Susana Chichilla? We must lift our voices and denounce all of this. The Village of South Holland is located in the county of cook. County of Cook does not participate in any of the ICE programs, like the Secure Communities or 287(g) programs, which make legal the collaboration of ICE and local law enforcement agencies, WE DEMAND THE IMMEDIATE RELEASE OF SUSANA CHICHILLA” concluded Jose Herrera.
Monday, November 22, 2010
Judge who did time peddling prison survival skills
BY DAVID OVALLE
Former Miami-Dade County Judge Harvey Shenberg returns to Miami this week to promote his new consulting business, Prison Planning, which helps inmates prepare and cope with their new lives in prison.
For newcomers to the federal pen, mistakes are easy to make: cutting in the chow line, arguing about what's on television, befriending the wrong inmates.
In his shell-shocked early days behind bars, former Miami-Dade County Judge Harvey Shenberg angered a fellow inmate when he casually looked into his cell while walking down the hall. He saw nothing -- but wasn't spared some angry words of advice.
``You might see somebody raping someone, you may see someone getting killed,'' Shenberg said. ``So now you're in the middle of it and witnessed something you didn't want to witness.''
After nearly 11 years in federal prison for his role in the notorious Miami-Dade judicial corruption scandal dubbed Operation Court Broom, Shenberg, 67, is hoping to parlay his mistakes and successes behind bars into a new career as an advice guru and social worker of sorts for inmates and their families.
Shenberg returned to Miami-Dade County last week to start promoting his new consulting business, Prison Planning, and meet with two clients soon headed to prison and a third awaiting trial.
It's the latest twist for someone who staked his career on law and order, first as a Dade prosecutor, then as a 19-year defense attorney, and finally as a county court judge.
But that life came crashed down in embarrassing fashion.
BUSTED
In 1991, federal agents videotaped Shenberg accepting cash for giving a defense attorney the name of a confidential informant who had been marked for murder. Shenberg -- who earned about $90,000 a year and later lost his state pension -- famously told a fellow judge he needed the money to put his son through college.
The investigation netted several other Miami-Dade judges and lawyers. After a 10 ½-month trial, Shenberg was convicted of racketeering conspiracy and extortion.
Today, Shenberg admits: ``I was a crummy criminal.''
But he doesn't shy away from his past. On his new website -- PrisonPlanning.com -- he even displays his prison ID card and a lengthy description of his time in the pen.
Released from a Miami halfway house in February 2008, and having just completed court supervision earlier this year, the idea for the consulting firm came from Shenberg's volunteer work helping inmates with the Aleph Institute, a nonprofit that supports Jewish prisoners.
``I wish I had had someone like me before I went in -- and that's with 20-something years in the criminal justice system. Prison is a whole other world,'' he said.
DIPLOMACY, SMARTS
Shenberg says he survived through a mix of diplomacy and savvy in a ``world inside a world'' segregated by race and internal prison class, where outcast groups like ``cooperators'' and child molesters stuck together.
Mostly, he says, he learned humility.
``All of a sudden you go from being in control of your life to someone controlling your life,'' he recalled. ``You go from telling people what to do to begging people on the outside to send you a magazine, or to help your family out.''
His company, run with his wife from their Arizona condo, is one of a handful of for-profit consulting companies nationwide aimed at walking prisoners and their families through the experience.
Herbert J. Hoelter, executive director and co-founder of the nonprofit National Center on Institutions and Alternatives, said Shenberg's effort will be positive for clients, though probably not too lucrative.
``I think it's helpful. To me, it's not a big for-profit money-maker thing,'' Hoelter said. ``But people need assistance, whether they can afford it or not. Prison is a searing experience.''
For business, Shenberg -- whose mother still lives in Miami -- is soliciting lawyers in Miami-Dade. He says he doesn't expect to rake in the money, but wants to help.
``There is use for his services. A lot of attorneys are ill-equipped to give out the type of information he is giving, or don't have the inclination or the time,'' said Miami defense attorney Jose Quiñon, who represented co-defendant Alfonso Sepe, a Circuit Court judge.
``Maybe [Shenberg] can help some people, and at the same time put some food on the table. He's paid his debt to society.''
POTENTIAL CLIENTS
Shenberg's target clientele: white-collar convicts who will likely be allowed to surrender, rather than being thrown in the slammer straight from the courtroom.
Shenberg offers advice on free videos, but he stresses the benefits of dialogue that books and Web pages can't provide. That may run a couple of hundred bucks for a telephone consultation, or up to $1,500 for a face-to-face meeting.
The advice starts with the practical: Before surrender, get your teeth deep-cleaned by a dentist, make copies of your medical records and, if needed, pack two pairs of glasses. Lockdowns are inevitable, so stock extra food and books in your cell.
There's also the philosophical: Prison isn't fair. Stay under the radar. Don't gripe. Accept that some guards live to make your life hell.
Shenberg thinks he's earned credibility. He spent time at nine facilities, including in Miami and Mississippi, and two short but hellacious stints at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, where he was locked up 23 out of 24 hours.
When Shenberg first arrived at Miami's federal prison, one inmate marked him for stabbing because he mistakingly thought he was the judge who had sentenced him. The plot fell apart when the inmate learned Shenberg was in fact not his judge.
``Three weeks later, we had a great relationship,'' Shenberg said.
In the Miami penitentiary, Shenberg refused extra protection or to be placed in special housing -- even when a newspaper article about Operation Court Broom circulated among prisoners.
Just as he didn't cooperate with federal agents in Court Broom, he chose not to complain to guards, lest he end up in special housing alienated from the prison populace.
And while some inmates hustled by gambling or washing laundry for food, he was lucky to have family replenishing his commissary account. So he worked resodding sports fields and handing out sports equipment and ceramics supplies. And, as he got closer to release, he began to work on a plan for his new business -- something he hopes his clients will be able to emulate.
``We want people to get something beneficial out of a terrible situation,'' he said.
Former Miami-Dade County Judge Harvey Shenberg returns to Miami this week to promote his new consulting business, Prison Planning, which helps inmates prepare and cope with their new lives in prison.
For newcomers to the federal pen, mistakes are easy to make: cutting in the chow line, arguing about what's on television, befriending the wrong inmates.
In his shell-shocked early days behind bars, former Miami-Dade County Judge Harvey Shenberg angered a fellow inmate when he casually looked into his cell while walking down the hall. He saw nothing -- but wasn't spared some angry words of advice.
``You might see somebody raping someone, you may see someone getting killed,'' Shenberg said. ``So now you're in the middle of it and witnessed something you didn't want to witness.''
After nearly 11 years in federal prison for his role in the notorious Miami-Dade judicial corruption scandal dubbed Operation Court Broom, Shenberg, 67, is hoping to parlay his mistakes and successes behind bars into a new career as an advice guru and social worker of sorts for inmates and their families.
Shenberg returned to Miami-Dade County last week to start promoting his new consulting business, Prison Planning, and meet with two clients soon headed to prison and a third awaiting trial.
It's the latest twist for someone who staked his career on law and order, first as a Dade prosecutor, then as a 19-year defense attorney, and finally as a county court judge.
But that life came crashed down in embarrassing fashion.
BUSTED
In 1991, federal agents videotaped Shenberg accepting cash for giving a defense attorney the name of a confidential informant who had been marked for murder. Shenberg -- who earned about $90,000 a year and later lost his state pension -- famously told a fellow judge he needed the money to put his son through college.
The investigation netted several other Miami-Dade judges and lawyers. After a 10 ½-month trial, Shenberg was convicted of racketeering conspiracy and extortion.
Today, Shenberg admits: ``I was a crummy criminal.''
But he doesn't shy away from his past. On his new website -- PrisonPlanning.com -- he even displays his prison ID card and a lengthy description of his time in the pen.
Released from a Miami halfway house in February 2008, and having just completed court supervision earlier this year, the idea for the consulting firm came from Shenberg's volunteer work helping inmates with the Aleph Institute, a nonprofit that supports Jewish prisoners.
``I wish I had had someone like me before I went in -- and that's with 20-something years in the criminal justice system. Prison is a whole other world,'' he said.
DIPLOMACY, SMARTS
Shenberg says he survived through a mix of diplomacy and savvy in a ``world inside a world'' segregated by race and internal prison class, where outcast groups like ``cooperators'' and child molesters stuck together.
Mostly, he says, he learned humility.
``All of a sudden you go from being in control of your life to someone controlling your life,'' he recalled. ``You go from telling people what to do to begging people on the outside to send you a magazine, or to help your family out.''
His company, run with his wife from their Arizona condo, is one of a handful of for-profit consulting companies nationwide aimed at walking prisoners and their families through the experience.
Herbert J. Hoelter, executive director and co-founder of the nonprofit National Center on Institutions and Alternatives, said Shenberg's effort will be positive for clients, though probably not too lucrative.
``I think it's helpful. To me, it's not a big for-profit money-maker thing,'' Hoelter said. ``But people need assistance, whether they can afford it or not. Prison is a searing experience.''
For business, Shenberg -- whose mother still lives in Miami -- is soliciting lawyers in Miami-Dade. He says he doesn't expect to rake in the money, but wants to help.
``There is use for his services. A lot of attorneys are ill-equipped to give out the type of information he is giving, or don't have the inclination or the time,'' said Miami defense attorney Jose Quiñon, who represented co-defendant Alfonso Sepe, a Circuit Court judge.
``Maybe [Shenberg] can help some people, and at the same time put some food on the table. He's paid his debt to society.''
POTENTIAL CLIENTS
Shenberg's target clientele: white-collar convicts who will likely be allowed to surrender, rather than being thrown in the slammer straight from the courtroom.
Shenberg offers advice on free videos, but he stresses the benefits of dialogue that books and Web pages can't provide. That may run a couple of hundred bucks for a telephone consultation, or up to $1,500 for a face-to-face meeting.
The advice starts with the practical: Before surrender, get your teeth deep-cleaned by a dentist, make copies of your medical records and, if needed, pack two pairs of glasses. Lockdowns are inevitable, so stock extra food and books in your cell.
There's also the philosophical: Prison isn't fair. Stay under the radar. Don't gripe. Accept that some guards live to make your life hell.
Shenberg thinks he's earned credibility. He spent time at nine facilities, including in Miami and Mississippi, and two short but hellacious stints at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, where he was locked up 23 out of 24 hours.
When Shenberg first arrived at Miami's federal prison, one inmate marked him for stabbing because he mistakingly thought he was the judge who had sentenced him. The plot fell apart when the inmate learned Shenberg was in fact not his judge.
``Three weeks later, we had a great relationship,'' Shenberg said.
In the Miami penitentiary, Shenberg refused extra protection or to be placed in special housing -- even when a newspaper article about Operation Court Broom circulated among prisoners.
Just as he didn't cooperate with federal agents in Court Broom, he chose not to complain to guards, lest he end up in special housing alienated from the prison populace.
And while some inmates hustled by gambling or washing laundry for food, he was lucky to have family replenishing his commissary account. So he worked resodding sports fields and handing out sports equipment and ceramics supplies. And, as he got closer to release, he began to work on a plan for his new business -- something he hopes his clients will be able to emulate.
``We want people to get something beneficial out of a terrible situation,'' he said.
Sunday, November 21, 2010
TSA pat-down leaves traveler covered in urine
By Harriet Baskas
A retired special education teacher on his way to a wedding in Orlando, Fla., said he was left humiliated, crying and covered with his own urine after an enhanced pat-down by TSA officers recently at Detroit Metropolitan Airport.
“I was absolutely humiliated, I couldn’t even speak,” said Thomas D. “Tom” Sawyer, 61, of Lansing, Mich.
Sawyer is a bladder cancer survivor who now wears a urostomy bag, which collects his urine from a stoma, or opening in his stomach. “I have to wear special clothes and in order to mount the bag I have to seal a wafer to my stomach and then attach the bag. If the seal is broken, urine can leak all over my body and clothes.”
On Nov. 7, Sawyer said he went through the security scanner at Detroit Metropolitan Airport. “Evidently the scanner picked up on my urostomy bag, because I was chosen for a pat-down procedure.”
Due to his medical condition, Sawyer asked to be screened in private. “One officer looked at another, rolled his eyes and said that they really didn’t have any place to take me,” said Sawyer. “After I said again that I’d like privacy, they took me to an office.”
Sawyer wears pants two sizes too large in order to accommodate the medical equipment he wears. He’d taken off his belt to go through the scanner and once in the office with security personnel, his pants fell down around his ankles. “I had to ask twice if it was OK to pull up my shorts,” said Sawyer, “And every time I tried to tell them about my medical condition, they said they didn’t need to know about that.”
Before starting the enhanced pat-down procedure, a security officer did tell him what they were going to do and how they were going to it, but Sawyer said it wasn’t until they asked him to remove his sweatshirt and saw his urostomy bag that they asked any questions about his medical condition.
“One agent watched as the other used his flat hand to go slowly down my chest. I tried to warn him that he would hit the bag and break the seal on my bag, but he ignored me. Sure enough, the seal was broken and urine started dribbling down my shirt and my leg and into my pants.”
The security officer finished the pat-down, tested the gloves for any trace of explosives and then, Sawyer said, “He told me I could go. They never apologized. They never offered to help. They acted like they hadn’t seen what happened. But I know they saw it because I had a wet mark.”
Humiliated, upset and wet, Sawyer said he had to walk through the airport soaked in urine, board his plane and wait until after takeoff before he could clean up.
“I am totally appalled by the fact that agents that are performing these pat-downs have so little concern for people with medical conditions,” said Sawyer.
Sawyer completed his trip and had no problems with the security procedures at the Orlando International Airport on his journey back home. He said he plans to file a formal complaint with the TSA.
When he does, said TSA spokesperson Dwayne Baird, “We will review the matter and take appropriate action if necessary.” In the meantime, Baird encourages anyone with a medical condition to read the TSA’s website section on assistive devices and mobility aids.
The website says that travelers with disabilities and medical conditions have “the option of requesting a private screening” and that security officers “will not ask nor require you to remove your prosthetic device, cast, or support brace.”
Sawyer said he's written to his senators, state representatives and the president of the United States. He’s also shared details of the incident online with members of the nonprofit Bladder Cancer Advocacy Network, many of whom have offered support and shared their travel experiences.
“I am a good American and I want safety for all passengers as much as the next person," Sawyer said. "But if this country is going to sacrifice treating people like human beings in the name of safety, then we have already lost the war.”
Bladder Cancer Advocacy Network executive director Claire Saxton said that there are hundreds of thousands of people living with ostomies in the United States. “TSA agents need to be trained to listen when someone tells them have a health issue and trained in knowing what an ostomy is. No one living with an ostomy should be afraid of flying because they’re afraid of being humiliated at the checkpoint.”
Eric Lipp, executive director of Open Doors Association, which works with businesses and the disability community, called what happened to Sawyer “unfortunate.”
“But enhanced pat-downs are not a new issue for people with disabilities who travel," Lipp said. "They've always had trouble getting through the security checkpoint."
Still, Lipp said the TSA knows there’s a problem. “This came up during a recent meeting of the agency’s disability advisory board and I expect to see a procedure coming in place shortly that will directly address the pat-down procedures for people with disabilities.”
A retired special education teacher on his way to a wedding in Orlando, Fla., said he was left humiliated, crying and covered with his own urine after an enhanced pat-down by TSA officers recently at Detroit Metropolitan Airport.
“I was absolutely humiliated, I couldn’t even speak,” said Thomas D. “Tom” Sawyer, 61, of Lansing, Mich.
Sawyer is a bladder cancer survivor who now wears a urostomy bag, which collects his urine from a stoma, or opening in his stomach. “I have to wear special clothes and in order to mount the bag I have to seal a wafer to my stomach and then attach the bag. If the seal is broken, urine can leak all over my body and clothes.”
On Nov. 7, Sawyer said he went through the security scanner at Detroit Metropolitan Airport. “Evidently the scanner picked up on my urostomy bag, because I was chosen for a pat-down procedure.”
Due to his medical condition, Sawyer asked to be screened in private. “One officer looked at another, rolled his eyes and said that they really didn’t have any place to take me,” said Sawyer. “After I said again that I’d like privacy, they took me to an office.”
Sawyer wears pants two sizes too large in order to accommodate the medical equipment he wears. He’d taken off his belt to go through the scanner and once in the office with security personnel, his pants fell down around his ankles. “I had to ask twice if it was OK to pull up my shorts,” said Sawyer, “And every time I tried to tell them about my medical condition, they said they didn’t need to know about that.”
Before starting the enhanced pat-down procedure, a security officer did tell him what they were going to do and how they were going to it, but Sawyer said it wasn’t until they asked him to remove his sweatshirt and saw his urostomy bag that they asked any questions about his medical condition.
“One agent watched as the other used his flat hand to go slowly down my chest. I tried to warn him that he would hit the bag and break the seal on my bag, but he ignored me. Sure enough, the seal was broken and urine started dribbling down my shirt and my leg and into my pants.”
The security officer finished the pat-down, tested the gloves for any trace of explosives and then, Sawyer said, “He told me I could go. They never apologized. They never offered to help. They acted like they hadn’t seen what happened. But I know they saw it because I had a wet mark.”
Humiliated, upset and wet, Sawyer said he had to walk through the airport soaked in urine, board his plane and wait until after takeoff before he could clean up.
“I am totally appalled by the fact that agents that are performing these pat-downs have so little concern for people with medical conditions,” said Sawyer.
Sawyer completed his trip and had no problems with the security procedures at the Orlando International Airport on his journey back home. He said he plans to file a formal complaint with the TSA.
When he does, said TSA spokesperson Dwayne Baird, “We will review the matter and take appropriate action if necessary.” In the meantime, Baird encourages anyone with a medical condition to read the TSA’s website section on assistive devices and mobility aids.
The website says that travelers with disabilities and medical conditions have “the option of requesting a private screening” and that security officers “will not ask nor require you to remove your prosthetic device, cast, or support brace.”
Sawyer said he's written to his senators, state representatives and the president of the United States. He’s also shared details of the incident online with members of the nonprofit Bladder Cancer Advocacy Network, many of whom have offered support and shared their travel experiences.
“I am a good American and I want safety for all passengers as much as the next person," Sawyer said. "But if this country is going to sacrifice treating people like human beings in the name of safety, then we have already lost the war.”
Bladder Cancer Advocacy Network executive director Claire Saxton said that there are hundreds of thousands of people living with ostomies in the United States. “TSA agents need to be trained to listen when someone tells them have a health issue and trained in knowing what an ostomy is. No one living with an ostomy should be afraid of flying because they’re afraid of being humiliated at the checkpoint.”
Eric Lipp, executive director of Open Doors Association, which works with businesses and the disability community, called what happened to Sawyer “unfortunate.”
“But enhanced pat-downs are not a new issue for people with disabilities who travel," Lipp said. "They've always had trouble getting through the security checkpoint."
Still, Lipp said the TSA knows there’s a problem. “This came up during a recent meeting of the agency’s disability advisory board and I expect to see a procedure coming in place shortly that will directly address the pat-down procedures for people with disabilities.”
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Prosecutors: Burge should spend decades in prison
By Andy Grimm, Tribune reporter
Federal prosecutors will seek at least 24 years in prison for disgraced former Chicago police Cmdr. Jon Burge, saying his torture of criminal suspects decades ago shook public confidence in law enforcement and the criminal justice system.
Such a stiff sentence for Burge's conviction on perjury and obstruction of justice is sure to stir debate at his sentencing Jan. 20. The probation office has recommended that Burge face 15 to 21 months in prison under federal sentencing guidelines, while his lawyers have said they would seek probation, noting that when Burge was convicted when he was 62 and had prostate cancer.
In court papers filed last week, prosecutors disputed the probation office's findings, saying Burge deserved a sentence of about 24 to 30 years under the sentencing guidelines. The government cited the "stain" that Burge's torture of suspects left on the department and the more than $30 million the city has spent on lawyers and payouts to Burge's victims as a result of many lawsuits.
"Defendant's criminal acts have tainted and prejudiced the thousands of hard-working dedicated police officers who have followed in Burge's polluted wake," Assistant U.S. Attorneys David Weisman and April Perry wrote in the filing. "These officers also have faced trying circumstances, and have had to confront society's ills. But unlike the defendant, the majority of these officers did not succumb to the principle that the ends justify the means."
A jury convicted Burge in June on all three counts of obstruction of justice and perjury for lying in a 2003 civil lawsuit when he denied he knew of or took part in torture under his command at the Calumet Area headquarters on the city's South Side.
For years it looked as if Burge would escape criminal charges altogether. He was fired from the Police Department in 1993 for torturing a cop killer, but a four-year investigation by special Cook County prosecutors concluded in 2006 that the statute of limitations on the claims of abuse had long passed. It wasn't until 2008 that federal prosecutors figured out a way to indict him — not for the tortures themselves, but for lying about them.
At Burge's trial, five ex-cons alleged torture by Burge's "Midnight Crew" of detectives in the 1970s and 1980s. According to the testimony, Burge smothered one with a bag, played Russian roulette with another and shocked a third on the genitals with an electrical device the detectives used because it inflicted pain but "left no marks" on the suspect, prosecutors said. The abuse tainted dozens of criminal investigations.
Burge's attorney did not return a call Monday seeking comment. At his trial, his attorneys suggested that the decorated veteran officer was heroic, a notion attacked by prosecutors in their latest filing.
"He was no hero. Rather, the men and women who … honorably and honestly serve the community are the heroes," they wrote. "Perhaps these officers were not promoted through the ranks as quickly as the defendant was, and perhaps they were not present at press conferences promoting their own ill-obtained achievements, but they were, and are, heroes because they serve with honor and integrity."
Federal prosecutors will seek at least 24 years in prison for disgraced former Chicago police Cmdr. Jon Burge, saying his torture of criminal suspects decades ago shook public confidence in law enforcement and the criminal justice system.
Such a stiff sentence for Burge's conviction on perjury and obstruction of justice is sure to stir debate at his sentencing Jan. 20. The probation office has recommended that Burge face 15 to 21 months in prison under federal sentencing guidelines, while his lawyers have said they would seek probation, noting that when Burge was convicted when he was 62 and had prostate cancer.
In court papers filed last week, prosecutors disputed the probation office's findings, saying Burge deserved a sentence of about 24 to 30 years under the sentencing guidelines. The government cited the "stain" that Burge's torture of suspects left on the department and the more than $30 million the city has spent on lawyers and payouts to Burge's victims as a result of many lawsuits.
"Defendant's criminal acts have tainted and prejudiced the thousands of hard-working dedicated police officers who have followed in Burge's polluted wake," Assistant U.S. Attorneys David Weisman and April Perry wrote in the filing. "These officers also have faced trying circumstances, and have had to confront society's ills. But unlike the defendant, the majority of these officers did not succumb to the principle that the ends justify the means."
A jury convicted Burge in June on all three counts of obstruction of justice and perjury for lying in a 2003 civil lawsuit when he denied he knew of or took part in torture under his command at the Calumet Area headquarters on the city's South Side.
For years it looked as if Burge would escape criminal charges altogether. He was fired from the Police Department in 1993 for torturing a cop killer, but a four-year investigation by special Cook County prosecutors concluded in 2006 that the statute of limitations on the claims of abuse had long passed. It wasn't until 2008 that federal prosecutors figured out a way to indict him — not for the tortures themselves, but for lying about them.
At Burge's trial, five ex-cons alleged torture by Burge's "Midnight Crew" of detectives in the 1970s and 1980s. According to the testimony, Burge smothered one with a bag, played Russian roulette with another and shocked a third on the genitals with an electrical device the detectives used because it inflicted pain but "left no marks" on the suspect, prosecutors said. The abuse tainted dozens of criminal investigations.
Burge's attorney did not return a call Monday seeking comment. At his trial, his attorneys suggested that the decorated veteran officer was heroic, a notion attacked by prosecutors in their latest filing.
"He was no hero. Rather, the men and women who … honorably and honestly serve the community are the heroes," they wrote. "Perhaps these officers were not promoted through the ranks as quickly as the defendant was, and perhaps they were not present at press conferences promoting their own ill-obtained achievements, but they were, and are, heroes because they serve with honor and integrity."
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Lancaster County Man Dies After Police Use Taser On Him
LANCASTER COUNTY, Pa. -- A Lancaster County man died after police used a Taser on him early Saturday morning.
Robert Neill Jr., 61, died after he become unresponsive after police used a Taser on him twice and sprayed him with Mace, state police said.
The incident happened at about 4 a.m. Saturday at Neill's home in the 300 block of Marietta Avenue in Mount Joy.
Several police departments assisted, including Mount Joy Borough police, Susquehanna Regional police and state police from Ephrata.
According to police, Neill said that he had been harassed by his neighbors. When officers arrived, they said Neill was combative and aggressive.
That is when officers used a Taser on him and sprayed with Mace him. Neill died on the way to the hospital.
"Police officers acted appropriately and used the proper amount of force to subdue Mr. Neill," said state police Lt. William White.
An autopsy was performed Monday, but state police said they are waiting for toxicology results to determine the cause and manner of Neill's death.
Robert Neill Jr., 61, died after he become unresponsive after police used a Taser on him twice and sprayed him with Mace, state police said.
The incident happened at about 4 a.m. Saturday at Neill's home in the 300 block of Marietta Avenue in Mount Joy.
Several police departments assisted, including Mount Joy Borough police, Susquehanna Regional police and state police from Ephrata.
According to police, Neill said that he had been harassed by his neighbors. When officers arrived, they said Neill was combative and aggressive.
That is when officers used a Taser on him and sprayed with Mace him. Neill died on the way to the hospital.
"Police officers acted appropriately and used the proper amount of force to subdue Mr. Neill," said state police Lt. William White.
An autopsy was performed Monday, but state police said they are waiting for toxicology results to determine the cause and manner of Neill's death.
Monday, November 8, 2010
NSC Study Shows You are More Likely to Killed By a Cop Than a Terrorist
After 9/11, the fear of another attack on U.S. soil cleanly supplanted the fear of having one`s penis chopped off by a vengeful lover in the pantheon of irrational American fears.
While we`re constantly being told that another attack is imminent and that radical Islamic fundamentalists are two steps away from establishing a caliphate in Branson, Missouri, just how close are they? How do the odds of dying in a terrorist attack stack up against the odds of dying in other unfortunate situations?
The following ratios were compiled using data from 2004 National Safety Council Estimates, a report based on data from The National Center for Health Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau. In addition, 2003 mortality data from the Center for Disease Control was used.
-- You are 17,600 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack
-- You are 12,571 times more likely to die from cancer than from a terrorist attack
-- You are 11,000 times more likely to die in an airplane accident than from a terrorist plot involving an airplane
-- You are 1048 times more likely to die from a car accident than from a terrorist attack
--You are 404 times more likely to die in a fall than from a terrorist attack
-- You are 87 times more likely to drown than die in a terrorist attack
-- You are 13 times more likely to die in a railway accident than from a terrorist attack
--You are 12 times more likely to die from accidental suffocation in bed than from a terrorist attack
--You are 9 times more likely to choke to death on your own vomit than die in a terrorist attack
--You are 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist
--You are 8 times more likely to die from accidental electrocution than from a terrorist attack
-- You are 6 times more likely to die from hot weather than from a terrorist attack
SOURCE: The Progressive Review
While we`re constantly being told that another attack is imminent and that radical Islamic fundamentalists are two steps away from establishing a caliphate in Branson, Missouri, just how close are they? How do the odds of dying in a terrorist attack stack up against the odds of dying in other unfortunate situations?
The following ratios were compiled using data from 2004 National Safety Council Estimates, a report based on data from The National Center for Health Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau. In addition, 2003 mortality data from the Center for Disease Control was used.
-- You are 17,600 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack
-- You are 12,571 times more likely to die from cancer than from a terrorist attack
-- You are 11,000 times more likely to die in an airplane accident than from a terrorist plot involving an airplane
-- You are 1048 times more likely to die from a car accident than from a terrorist attack
--You are 404 times more likely to die in a fall than from a terrorist attack
-- You are 87 times more likely to drown than die in a terrorist attack
-- You are 13 times more likely to die in a railway accident than from a terrorist attack
--You are 12 times more likely to die from accidental suffocation in bed than from a terrorist attack
--You are 9 times more likely to choke to death on your own vomit than die in a terrorist attack
--You are 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist
--You are 8 times more likely to die from accidental electrocution than from a terrorist attack
-- You are 6 times more likely to die from hot weather than from a terrorist attack
SOURCE: The Progressive Review
Violence After Sentence in Oakland Killing
By JESSE McKINLEY and MALIA WOLLAN
Published: November 5, 2010
OAKLAND — Protesters vandalized storefronts and clashed with the police here on Friday night after a white former transit police officer was given what they considered to be a light sentence for the killing an unarmed black man. But protests initially seemed less violent than others that have surrounded the controversial case.
The authorities said one officer was hit by a car — perhaps by a police vehicle — and another officer’s gun was stolen and turned on him. That protester was arrested, Police Chief Anthony W. Batts said, and a police spokesman said 152 people had been arrested. “You have a very aggressive crowd,” Chief Batts said.
The demonstrations started after Judge Robert Perry of Superior Court in Los Angeles sentenced the former officer, Johannes Mehserle, to two years in state prison. But the judge dismissed a component of the charges that would have led to more prison time.
With time already served, Mr. Mehserle could be released from prison as early as next year. He was convicted in July of involuntary manslaughter in the death of Oscar Grant III, who was shot while lying face down on New Year’s Day 2009. He had been removed from a Bay Area Rapid Transit train after a fight, and Mr. Mehserle said that he had mistaken his gun for a Taser. He was acquitted of the more serious charge of second-degree murder.
The jury found that Mr. Mehserle was eligible for additional prison time because he had used a gun in the crime. But Judge Perry rejected that finding.
The shooting and subsequent verdict drew an angry reaction from Mr. Grant’s family, who thought Mr. Mehserle should have been convicted of murder, and sparked riots in Oakland.
The crowd on Friday initially assembled for a peaceful rally in front of Oakland City Hall, which had closed early, as had many businesses. But after the rally wrapped up, several hundred of the protesters began to roam downtown Oakland, vandalizing vehicles and businesses.
In Oakland, tensions between the city’s sizable black population and its police force are longstanding, even though the city has a black mayor and police chief. The mayor, Ron Dellums, had pleaded for calm, and police officers were out in force, with days off canceled and police helicopters hovering overhead.
But frustrations seemed present nonetheless. At the rally, Michael Johnson, a 26-year-old graduate student and medical case manager, said the sentence was a part of historic inequality.
“I’m indignant today,” Mr. Johnson said.
Published: November 5, 2010
OAKLAND — Protesters vandalized storefronts and clashed with the police here on Friday night after a white former transit police officer was given what they considered to be a light sentence for the killing an unarmed black man. But protests initially seemed less violent than others that have surrounded the controversial case.
The authorities said one officer was hit by a car — perhaps by a police vehicle — and another officer’s gun was stolen and turned on him. That protester was arrested, Police Chief Anthony W. Batts said, and a police spokesman said 152 people had been arrested. “You have a very aggressive crowd,” Chief Batts said.
The demonstrations started after Judge Robert Perry of Superior Court in Los Angeles sentenced the former officer, Johannes Mehserle, to two years in state prison. But the judge dismissed a component of the charges that would have led to more prison time.
With time already served, Mr. Mehserle could be released from prison as early as next year. He was convicted in July of involuntary manslaughter in the death of Oscar Grant III, who was shot while lying face down on New Year’s Day 2009. He had been removed from a Bay Area Rapid Transit train after a fight, and Mr. Mehserle said that he had mistaken his gun for a Taser. He was acquitted of the more serious charge of second-degree murder.
The jury found that Mr. Mehserle was eligible for additional prison time because he had used a gun in the crime. But Judge Perry rejected that finding.
The shooting and subsequent verdict drew an angry reaction from Mr. Grant’s family, who thought Mr. Mehserle should have been convicted of murder, and sparked riots in Oakland.
The crowd on Friday initially assembled for a peaceful rally in front of Oakland City Hall, which had closed early, as had many businesses. But after the rally wrapped up, several hundred of the protesters began to roam downtown Oakland, vandalizing vehicles and businesses.
In Oakland, tensions between the city’s sizable black population and its police force are longstanding, even though the city has a black mayor and police chief. The mayor, Ron Dellums, had pleaded for calm, and police officers were out in force, with days off canceled and police helicopters hovering overhead.
But frustrations seemed present nonetheless. At the rally, Michael Johnson, a 26-year-old graduate student and medical case manager, said the sentence was a part of historic inequality.
“I’m indignant today,” Mr. Johnson said.
Friday, November 5, 2010
City's 'stop and frisk' policy draws lawsuit
By WENDY RUDERMAN, BARBARA LAKER & CATHERINE LUCEY
Philadelphia Daily News
CITY POLICE have targeted thousands of minority residents and illegally stopped and searched them for no reason under Mayor Nutter's amped-up "stop and frisk" policy, a team of prominent civil-rights attorneys allege in a lawsuit filed yesterday.
The class-action lawsuit - filed in federal court by the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania and the law firm of Kairys, Rudovsky, Messing & Feinberg - claims that Nutter and Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey "instituted more aggressive stop-and-frisk practices," and then, "with deliberate indifference," failed to properly train, supervise and discipline officers who routinely violate civil rights.
"These unconstitutional actions have had and continue to have a devastating effect on the lives of many Philadelphians," attorney Paul Messing said. "Beyond that, these police practices have had no real impact on stemming criminal conduct in our city. They just subject innocent people to humiliating and degrading treatment."
The suit was filed on behalf of eight black and Latino men, including state Rep. Jewell Williams, a former Temple University police officer who plans to run for city sheriff in next year's Democratic primary.
Officers handcuffed Williams in March 2009 and placed him into the back seat of a squad car after he inquired about the well-being of two elderly men whom police had detained - then subsequently released - during a car stop in Williams' North Philly neighborhood.
Williams, who was stopped about three car-lengths back, said he emerged from his state-leased Chrysler after he overheard an officer threatening to beat up one of the elderly men. Williams alleged that another officer ordered him to "get back in the f---ing car," even though Williams said he identified himself as a state legislator.
In an interview yesterday, Williams said the nightmarish incident "was like a flashback to the civil-rights era."
"You can command attention and respect without calling a person an 'm-effer,' " Williams said. "When you use 'm-effer' and all kinds of words like that, what comes next is pushing and shoving. . . . Those are words that, in my opinion, were used in slavery days."
When asked how the lawsuit might affect his bid for sheriff, Williams said he hoped that voters would want a sheriff who stands up for their civil rights and wouldn't "turn his head to bad things."
Ramsey declined to comment, citing the open lawsuit. City Solicitor Shelley Smith, however, said Ramsey has beefed up police training and supervision, responded quickly to allegations of abuse and meted out discipline when warranted. Last month, Ramsey added more investigators to the Internal Affairs Bureau.
"The Police Department and Commissioner Ramsey take seriously the need to protect the constitutional rights of citizens," Smith said.
Yesterday afternoon, Nutter said he had not yet reviewed the suit. But he said the "stop and frisk" policy was legal and effective if used correctly. Since taking office in January 2008, Nutter has championed "stop, question and frisk" policing as part of a plan to fight crime and get guns off the street.
Nutter stressed that overall crime, including violent crime, is down and said race is not a factor in who gets searched. He also noted that "stop and frisk" - in which police stop people suspected of criminal activity and pat them down for illegal weapons - was being used before he became mayor.
ACLU attorney Mary Catherine Roper said: "You can't go into a neighborhood as an officer and say, 'This is a high-crime area; everybody is under suspicion.' That's not what our country is about."
Citing Police Department statistics, the lawsuit says that pedestrian stops have jumped dramatically, from 102,319 in 2005 to 253,333 in 2009 - an increase of 148 percent. Of those pedestrians stopped in 2009, about 72 percent were African-American and only 8 percent led to arrests.
"Most of those arrests had nothing to do with the reason they were stopped," Messing said. "The charges were often for disorderly conduct because they complained they were stopped for no reason."
In response to the argument that "stop and frisk" has reduced violent crime, Messing said, "This is a high price to pay - constitutional violations on a massive scale in an effort to find a microscopic amount of criminal activity."
The lawsuit, which names nine officers individually and at least 12 as "John Does," asks the court to bar police from stopping and frisking residents on the basis of race or nationality or without reasonable suspicion. The suit also seeks court-mandated training, supervision and discipline to eliminate the "unconstitutional" policy.
The named plaintiffs in the suit seek unspecified compensatory damages.
Among the plaintiffs are John Cornish and Carl Cutler, both 65, who were detained in the incident connected to state Rep. Williams; Mahari Bailey, a Georgetown-educated lawyer who has been stopped four times since 2008, all allegedly without cause; and Fernando Montero, a Princeton graduate who works as a University of Pennsylvania ethnographer and is working on a book about the Latino community.
Other plaintiffs are Timothy Streaty, 32, who worked several years at a pharmaceutical company; Gregory Blackmon Jr., 21, a Simon Gratz High School graduate who has worked as a carpenter; and Preston Fulton, 21, who, the suit says, has been unlawfully stopped numerous times by officers in North Philadelphia and in one case was pushed against a wall and frisked.
Philadelphia Daily News
CITY POLICE have targeted thousands of minority residents and illegally stopped and searched them for no reason under Mayor Nutter's amped-up "stop and frisk" policy, a team of prominent civil-rights attorneys allege in a lawsuit filed yesterday.
The class-action lawsuit - filed in federal court by the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania and the law firm of Kairys, Rudovsky, Messing & Feinberg - claims that Nutter and Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey "instituted more aggressive stop-and-frisk practices," and then, "with deliberate indifference," failed to properly train, supervise and discipline officers who routinely violate civil rights.
"These unconstitutional actions have had and continue to have a devastating effect on the lives of many Philadelphians," attorney Paul Messing said. "Beyond that, these police practices have had no real impact on stemming criminal conduct in our city. They just subject innocent people to humiliating and degrading treatment."
The suit was filed on behalf of eight black and Latino men, including state Rep. Jewell Williams, a former Temple University police officer who plans to run for city sheriff in next year's Democratic primary.
Officers handcuffed Williams in March 2009 and placed him into the back seat of a squad car after he inquired about the well-being of two elderly men whom police had detained - then subsequently released - during a car stop in Williams' North Philly neighborhood.
Williams, who was stopped about three car-lengths back, said he emerged from his state-leased Chrysler after he overheard an officer threatening to beat up one of the elderly men. Williams alleged that another officer ordered him to "get back in the f---ing car," even though Williams said he identified himself as a state legislator.
In an interview yesterday, Williams said the nightmarish incident "was like a flashback to the civil-rights era."
"You can command attention and respect without calling a person an 'm-effer,' " Williams said. "When you use 'm-effer' and all kinds of words like that, what comes next is pushing and shoving. . . . Those are words that, in my opinion, were used in slavery days."
When asked how the lawsuit might affect his bid for sheriff, Williams said he hoped that voters would want a sheriff who stands up for their civil rights and wouldn't "turn his head to bad things."
Ramsey declined to comment, citing the open lawsuit. City Solicitor Shelley Smith, however, said Ramsey has beefed up police training and supervision, responded quickly to allegations of abuse and meted out discipline when warranted. Last month, Ramsey added more investigators to the Internal Affairs Bureau.
"The Police Department and Commissioner Ramsey take seriously the need to protect the constitutional rights of citizens," Smith said.
Yesterday afternoon, Nutter said he had not yet reviewed the suit. But he said the "stop and frisk" policy was legal and effective if used correctly. Since taking office in January 2008, Nutter has championed "stop, question and frisk" policing as part of a plan to fight crime and get guns off the street.
Nutter stressed that overall crime, including violent crime, is down and said race is not a factor in who gets searched. He also noted that "stop and frisk" - in which police stop people suspected of criminal activity and pat them down for illegal weapons - was being used before he became mayor.
ACLU attorney Mary Catherine Roper said: "You can't go into a neighborhood as an officer and say, 'This is a high-crime area; everybody is under suspicion.' That's not what our country is about."
Citing Police Department statistics, the lawsuit says that pedestrian stops have jumped dramatically, from 102,319 in 2005 to 253,333 in 2009 - an increase of 148 percent. Of those pedestrians stopped in 2009, about 72 percent were African-American and only 8 percent led to arrests.
"Most of those arrests had nothing to do with the reason they were stopped," Messing said. "The charges were often for disorderly conduct because they complained they were stopped for no reason."
In response to the argument that "stop and frisk" has reduced violent crime, Messing said, "This is a high price to pay - constitutional violations on a massive scale in an effort to find a microscopic amount of criminal activity."
The lawsuit, which names nine officers individually and at least 12 as "John Does," asks the court to bar police from stopping and frisking residents on the basis of race or nationality or without reasonable suspicion. The suit also seeks court-mandated training, supervision and discipline to eliminate the "unconstitutional" policy.
The named plaintiffs in the suit seek unspecified compensatory damages.
Among the plaintiffs are John Cornish and Carl Cutler, both 65, who were detained in the incident connected to state Rep. Williams; Mahari Bailey, a Georgetown-educated lawyer who has been stopped four times since 2008, all allegedly without cause; and Fernando Montero, a Princeton graduate who works as a University of Pennsylvania ethnographer and is working on a book about the Latino community.
Other plaintiffs are Timothy Streaty, 32, who worked several years at a pharmaceutical company; Gregory Blackmon Jr., 21, a Simon Gratz High School graduate who has worked as a carpenter; and Preston Fulton, 21, who, the suit says, has been unlawfully stopped numerous times by officers in North Philadelphia and in one case was pushed against a wall and frisked.
Feds: Ohio Jail's Stun-Gun use Unconstitutional
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) -- The Justice Department says jailers in a central Ohio county regularly break the law and violate inmates' civil rights with excessive stun-gun use.
U.S. officials say Franklin County deputies use stun guns to subdue inmates who aren't acting up and regularly shock inmates who are naked or restrained and for minor rule violations. The county includes Columbus.
The Justice Department's Wednesday filing in U.S. District Court in Columbus also alleges jailers routinely use stun guns on inmates who are disabled, pregnant or under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
The government wants to join a lawsuit against Franklin County brought last summer by a legal rights group.
U.S. officials say Franklin County deputies use stun guns to subdue inmates who aren't acting up and regularly shock inmates who are naked or restrained and for minor rule violations. The county includes Columbus.
The Justice Department's Wednesday filing in U.S. District Court in Columbus also alleges jailers routinely use stun guns on inmates who are disabled, pregnant or under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
The government wants to join a lawsuit against Franklin County brought last summer by a legal rights group.
Maricopa County to pay $2 million in shooting by its deputies in post-Katrina duties
by Yvonne Wingett and JJ Hensley - Nov. 3, 2010 12:29 PM
The Arizona Republic
The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors will pay $2 million to a Louisiana man who claimed deputies working for the Sheriff's Office shot him in the eye while on assignment to aid New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina.
The Board of Supervisors approved the payment on a 4-0 vote at a Wednesday meeting; Supervisor Fulton Brock was absent for the vote.
Asked why the supervisors decided to settle the case, spokeswoman Cari Gerchick responded, "It was a business decision made to minimize taxpayer expense."
Gerchick referred questions to county Risk Manager Peter Crowley, who said, "It's just one of those cases where we felt it was in the county's best interest to settle."
The Sheriff's Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Sheriff's deputies Aaron Brown and Jason Lier were among the members of the Sheriff's Office that flew to Louisiana in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in September 2005.
According to a complaint filed in federal court, Naquin was driving on a highway outside New Orleans when he crossed paths with Brown and Lier, who were driving an unmarked SUV.
Naquin's truck and the SUV briefly reached an impasse when one of the highway's lanes narrowed. According to the complaint, as the SUV and truck pulled alongside each other, Naquin saw the SUV's passenger-side window roll down and the barrel of a rifle come out, pointed at him.
Naquin did not see Brown or Lier wearing any clothes indicating they were law enforcement, and in the fallout from the hurricane, Naquin assumed the worst and sped off, according to the complaint. Brown and Lier continued to follow Naquin and activated the emergency lights under the grill of their unmarked SUV.
"Because of his experience and, in particular, his rescue work in New Orleans, Plaintiff knew that ordinary people, with no official status, had been using products such as under-the-grill lights for nefarious purposes," according to the court documents.
The deputies eventually turned off their emergency lights and stopped behind Naquin at an intersection, according to the court documents. According to the complaint, Naquin said he felt threatened and got out of his truck, unarmed, with his palms turned upward and asked Lier and Brown, "What do you (expletive) want?"
The passenger pointed a rifle at Naquin, according to the complaint, and shot the Louisiana resident in the left eye.
With a portion of his eyeball in his palm, Naquin asked the deputies why they had shot him, according to the complaint.
Paramedics took Naquin to a hospital where he had surgery, but physicians could not save his eye. Naquin alleges that Lier was the passenger and shooter and that Brown was the driver.
Lier is no longer employed with the Sheriff's Office while Brown remains a deputy.
The Arizona Republic
The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors will pay $2 million to a Louisiana man who claimed deputies working for the Sheriff's Office shot him in the eye while on assignment to aid New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina.
The Board of Supervisors approved the payment on a 4-0 vote at a Wednesday meeting; Supervisor Fulton Brock was absent for the vote.
Asked why the supervisors decided to settle the case, spokeswoman Cari Gerchick responded, "It was a business decision made to minimize taxpayer expense."
Gerchick referred questions to county Risk Manager Peter Crowley, who said, "It's just one of those cases where we felt it was in the county's best interest to settle."
The Sheriff's Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Sheriff's deputies Aaron Brown and Jason Lier were among the members of the Sheriff's Office that flew to Louisiana in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in September 2005.
According to a complaint filed in federal court, Naquin was driving on a highway outside New Orleans when he crossed paths with Brown and Lier, who were driving an unmarked SUV.
Naquin's truck and the SUV briefly reached an impasse when one of the highway's lanes narrowed. According to the complaint, as the SUV and truck pulled alongside each other, Naquin saw the SUV's passenger-side window roll down and the barrel of a rifle come out, pointed at him.
Naquin did not see Brown or Lier wearing any clothes indicating they were law enforcement, and in the fallout from the hurricane, Naquin assumed the worst and sped off, according to the complaint. Brown and Lier continued to follow Naquin and activated the emergency lights under the grill of their unmarked SUV.
"Because of his experience and, in particular, his rescue work in New Orleans, Plaintiff knew that ordinary people, with no official status, had been using products such as under-the-grill lights for nefarious purposes," according to the court documents.
The deputies eventually turned off their emergency lights and stopped behind Naquin at an intersection, according to the court documents. According to the complaint, Naquin said he felt threatened and got out of his truck, unarmed, with his palms turned upward and asked Lier and Brown, "What do you (expletive) want?"
The passenger pointed a rifle at Naquin, according to the complaint, and shot the Louisiana resident in the left eye.
With a portion of his eyeball in his palm, Naquin asked the deputies why they had shot him, according to the complaint.
Paramedics took Naquin to a hospital where he had surgery, but physicians could not save his eye. Naquin alleges that Lier was the passenger and shooter and that Brown was the driver.
Lier is no longer employed with the Sheriff's Office while Brown remains a deputy.
Thursday, October 28, 2010
New report questions NYPD's 'Stop and Frisk'
By Jim Hoffer
NEW YORK (WABC) -- A new report is calling into question the legality of the NYPD's Stop and Frisk policy.
The study by a Columbia University law professor makes the claim that the highly-touted crime fighting tool is based on race, not crime.
It's a rather damning report that challenges the NYPD's claims that stopping and frisking hundreds of thousands of people every year is constitutional.
The findings claim the practice is actually targeting blacks and Latinos and yields few results.
To the NYPD, Its "Stop and Frisk" practice is one of its greatest crime fighting tools.
To many of those stopped, it seems like racial profiling.
Now, a new report by a Columbia University Law Professor finds race may drive the policy.
Professor Jeffrey Fagan analyzed 2.7 million stops made during a 6 year period and found police "often used race in lieu of reasonable suspicion" to make the stops.
7% of the time, data he says, shows police had no legal justification for the stops.
24% of the time, the stops lacked enough details to assess whether they were constitutional.
"That's a huge problem and means hundreds of thousands of people are having their rights violated," said Darius Charney, of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
The Center for Constitutional Rights commissioned the study which also found that 50% of the time people were stopped for the vague reason of "furtive movements".
6% of the stops led to arrests and most surprising, in less than 1% of the stops were any guns found.
"A rate of .1% of the time finding an illegal gun on someone they stop really calls into question the effectiveness of this practice and really the purpose of it," Charney said.
"Had me against the wall and pat me down," said Emmanuel Candelario, a Fordham graduate student.
Earlier this year, Candelario told Eyewitness News how he had been stopped and frisked at least 10 times in the last five years.
"It's a really big problem, you feel unsafe when police are around because at any time you might get stopped frisked," Candelario said.
The NYPD insists "Stop and Frisk" has made the city one of the nation's safest.
"I am proud of the men and women of the NYPD, I know they're saving lives," Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said.
The report is part of an ongoing lawsuit filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights against the city.
The city is expected to come out with its own "Stop and Frisk" study in the coming weeks.
(Copyright ©2010 WABC-TV/DT. All Rights Reserved.)
NEW YORK (WABC) -- A new report is calling into question the legality of the NYPD's Stop and Frisk policy.
The study by a Columbia University law professor makes the claim that the highly-touted crime fighting tool is based on race, not crime.
It's a rather damning report that challenges the NYPD's claims that stopping and frisking hundreds of thousands of people every year is constitutional.
The findings claim the practice is actually targeting blacks and Latinos and yields few results.
To the NYPD, Its "Stop and Frisk" practice is one of its greatest crime fighting tools.
To many of those stopped, it seems like racial profiling.
Now, a new report by a Columbia University Law Professor finds race may drive the policy.
Professor Jeffrey Fagan analyzed 2.7 million stops made during a 6 year period and found police "often used race in lieu of reasonable suspicion" to make the stops.
7% of the time, data he says, shows police had no legal justification for the stops.
24% of the time, the stops lacked enough details to assess whether they were constitutional.
"That's a huge problem and means hundreds of thousands of people are having their rights violated," said Darius Charney, of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
The Center for Constitutional Rights commissioned the study which also found that 50% of the time people were stopped for the vague reason of "furtive movements".
6% of the stops led to arrests and most surprising, in less than 1% of the stops were any guns found.
"A rate of .1% of the time finding an illegal gun on someone they stop really calls into question the effectiveness of this practice and really the purpose of it," Charney said.
"Had me against the wall and pat me down," said Emmanuel Candelario, a Fordham graduate student.
Earlier this year, Candelario told Eyewitness News how he had been stopped and frisked at least 10 times in the last five years.
"It's a really big problem, you feel unsafe when police are around because at any time you might get stopped frisked," Candelario said.
The NYPD insists "Stop and Frisk" has made the city one of the nation's safest.
"I am proud of the men and women of the NYPD, I know they're saving lives," Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said.
The report is part of an ongoing lawsuit filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights against the city.
The city is expected to come out with its own "Stop and Frisk" study in the coming weeks.
(Copyright ©2010 WABC-TV/DT. All Rights Reserved.)
Saturday, October 23, 2010
NY jury awards $17.5M to diabetic jailed sans meds
The Associated Press
updated 10/19/2010
NEW YORK — A jury ordered New York City on Tuesday to pay $17.5 million to a diabetic man who suffered a seizure after police refused to give him his insulin while he was in jail, the man's lawyer said.
Jose Vargas, 43, now lives in a nursing home confined to a wheelchair with diminished mental faculties and motor and coordination skills, his lawyer Seth Harris said after Tuesday's verdict.
"If a doctor was present in central booking (when Vargas was in custody) the city could have saved themselves all of this money," Harris said.
In a statement Tuesday, the city's lawyer department said they were disappointed with the verdict and expect to file an appeal based on "a number of legal and factual issues." It didn't cite those issues.
Harris said $10 million of the settlement was for Vargas' future nursing home care.
Police took away Jose Vargas' bag containing his insulin and needles when he was arrested in September 2006 on a felony charge of criminal sale of a controlled substance, Harris said. Vargas later pleaded guilty to misdemeanor criminal facilitation of a drug sale, Harris said.
As police transported him to a police precinct and then to central booking in Brooklyn, Vargas complained to them that he needed the insulin, Harris said,
"He's complaining each and every step of the way that he needs his insulin," said Harris, who added that no one responded as 58 hours passed.
At central booking, "he becomes shaky, dehydrated and anxious," Harris said. "He has a diabetic seizure on the floor of his cell."
Vargas suffered additional seizures at the hospital, Harris said.
"Now he's in a wheelchair for the rest of his life, and he's 43," Harris said.
updated 10/19/2010
NEW YORK — A jury ordered New York City on Tuesday to pay $17.5 million to a diabetic man who suffered a seizure after police refused to give him his insulin while he was in jail, the man's lawyer said.
Jose Vargas, 43, now lives in a nursing home confined to a wheelchair with diminished mental faculties and motor and coordination skills, his lawyer Seth Harris said after Tuesday's verdict.
"If a doctor was present in central booking (when Vargas was in custody) the city could have saved themselves all of this money," Harris said.
In a statement Tuesday, the city's lawyer department said they were disappointed with the verdict and expect to file an appeal based on "a number of legal and factual issues." It didn't cite those issues.
Harris said $10 million of the settlement was for Vargas' future nursing home care.
Police took away Jose Vargas' bag containing his insulin and needles when he was arrested in September 2006 on a felony charge of criminal sale of a controlled substance, Harris said. Vargas later pleaded guilty to misdemeanor criminal facilitation of a drug sale, Harris said.
As police transported him to a police precinct and then to central booking in Brooklyn, Vargas complained to them that he needed the insulin, Harris said,
"He's complaining each and every step of the way that he needs his insulin," said Harris, who added that no one responded as 58 hours passed.
At central booking, "he becomes shaky, dehydrated and anxious," Harris said. "He has a diabetic seizure on the floor of his cell."
Vargas suffered additional seizures at the hospital, Harris said.
"Now he's in a wheelchair for the rest of his life, and he's 43," Harris said.
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