“The Police Don’t Always Tell The Truth”: The Killing Of Walter Scott Sheds Light On The Problem Of Police Lying
Yesterday The New York Times published a video showing a police officer, Michael T. Slager, fatally shooting a black man, Walter L. Scott, as he ran away from the officer.
The video is disturbing enough by itself. But it becomes even more troubling when we consider how radically at odds the visual evidence seems to be with the police incident report filed on the killing. As the Times notes, Slager “said he had feared for his life because the man had taken his stun gun in a scuffle after a traffic stop on Saturday.” Yet the video shows Scott killed in flight, something like 20 feet away when the final bullet hit. After the shooting, Slager is shown placing an object next to Scott’s prone body. According to the Times, police reports also claim that officers performed CPR on Scott, an assertion not borne out in the video.
The death of Walter Scott will add more tinder to the already blazing political debate over police violence. The apparent contradictions between the incident report and the video highlight an overlapping but distinct problem: The police don’t always tell the truth. Police violence and police lying are two separate problems, although they also reinforce each other. Police violence flourishes in part because of the prevalence of police lying, which is rarely challenged by the criminal justice system.
In the Scott killing, there is good reason to believe that without the powerful counter-evidence provided by the video, which led to Slager being charged with murder yesterday, the police incident report would have been accepted as the official account of the shooting. Indeed, the persuasive power of police testimony extends outside official channels. Prior to the emergence of the video and Slager’s arrest, Slager’s version of events was echoed by the local media in South Carolina as if it were factual.
Police lying doesn’t just act as a shield for police violence, but as a larger source of corruption in the criminal justice system. Criminal cases are always narrative battles: Prosecutors and defense attorneys compete to win cases by presenting the most plausible stories consistent with admissible evidence. The police play a crucial part in this system as a supplier of narrative facts, in the form of both reports and testimony under oath.
As Ohio State law professor Michelle Alexander noted in a 2013 article in The New York Times, there is a powerful social presumption that we should put our faith in cops. “As a juror, whom are you likely to believe: the alleged criminal in an orange jumpsuit or two well-groomed police officers in uniforms who just swore to God they’re telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but?” Alexander said that this abiding faith in the police is misplaced: “In this era of mass incarceration, the police shouldn’t be trusted any more than any other witness, perhaps less so.”
Alexander’s contention rests on a strong scholarly literature about “testilying”—the practice of police officers committing perjury to secure a conviction, usually against someone they think is guilty. In a classic 1996 article for the Colorado Law Review, Vanderbilt Law professor Christopher Slobogin demonstrated that both “reportilying” (falsifying police reports) and “testilying” are pervasive in many American jurisdictions.
Police perjury, Slobogin argues, occurs because “police think they can get away with it. Police are seldom made to pay for their lying.” Not just prosecutors but even many judges see themselves as sharing a common set of goals with the police of making sure the guilty get punished. Working in a shared enterprise, they are loath to challenge police perjury. “Prosecutors put up with perjury because they need a good working relationship with the police to make their cases,” Slobogin notes.
Slobogin documented his case by citing a compelling 1992 study by Myron Orfield of the Chicago criminal justice system showing that a large percentage of judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys acknowledge the reality of police perjury: “In his survey of these three groups (which together comprised 27 to 41 individuals, depending on the question), 52 percent believed that at least ‘half of the time’ the prosecutor ‘knows or has reason to know’ that police fabricate evidence at suppression hearings, and 93 percent, including 89 percent of the prosecutors, stated that prosecutors had such knowledge of perjury ‘at least some of the time.’”
If officer Slager did fabricate his incident report in the Scott killing, he wasn’t being a bad apple but rather adhering to a dishonesty that is all too common in American police forces. Such is the credence given to police reporting that Slager’s rendition of events was only overturned by the compelling counter-narrative offered by the video, shot by a civilian onlooker.
Videos, including police body cameras, are not a panacea to the problem of police violence. The 1992 Rodney King trial alone should remind us that compelling visual testimony can be overridden by the social trust many jurors give to police. Still, in a society where both the state and many citizens are too credulous about police testimony, videos are often the best way to break the stranglehold of the official narrative.
By: Jeet Heer, Senior Editor, The New Republic, April 9, 2015
“Higher Courts Let Prosecutors Get Away With Murder”: Supreme Courts Bear Responsibility For Conduct They Accept From Attorneys
For anyone studying the bubbling issue of prosecutor misconduct, the LAT states—Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas—form a good lab. March alone brewed up:
—belated charges against a prosecutor in Texas, where the defendant was executed a decade ago;
—soul-searching in Louisiana, where a prosecutor bemoaned his win that sent an innocent man to prison;
—and absolution in Arkansas, where the state’s Supreme Court informed me that a prosecutor who withheld critical evidence from a man on trial for his life did not violate any rules of professional conduct.
The Texas case centered on Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in 2004 for the arson murder of his three young daughters. Now the State Bar of Texas has filed a formal petition accusing the prosecutor of obstructing justice by making false statements and concealing evidence favorable to Willingham’s defense.
“Before, during and after the 1992 trial, [Jackson] knew of the existence of evidence that tended to negate the guilt of Willingham and failed to disclose that evidence to defense counsel,” the bar said.
It won’t help Willingham, who protested his innocence to the end. But the move suggests that at least some Texans are paying attention.
Next door in Louisiana, a former prosecuting attorney reflected on a conviction he’d won that kept a man on death row for 30 years—and held himself accountable.
“As a prosecutor and officer of the court, I had the duty to prosecute fairly,” attorney A.M. “Marty” Stroud III wrote to a Shreveport newspaper. “Part of my duty was to disclose promptly any exculpatory evidence relating to trial and penalty issues of which I was made aware. My fault was that I was too passive. I did not consider the rumors about the involvement of other parties…”
Stroud agreed that Louisiana owed significant monetary compensation to the man whom he’d helped convict. Yet, he wrote, “The state does not accept any responsibility for the damage suffered by one of its citizens. The bureaucratic response appears to be that nobody did anything intentionally wrong, thus the state has no responsibility. This is nonsensical.”
Noting that evidence that would have cleared the defendant was available at the time of the trial, Stroud wrote: “The easy and convenient argument is that the prosecutors did not know of such evidence, thus they were absolved of any responsibility for the wrongful conviction.”
Stroud dismissed that argument. And he refused to absolve himself.
Last year, 125 men and women were released from prison because they were wrongfully convicted, according to a report by the National Registry of Exonerations. Two-thirds of those cases were overturned because prosecutors either reopened investigations themselves or cooperated with other investigators to ensure that justice was done.
But supreme courts, who bear the ultimate responsibility for the conduct they will accept from attorneys, have stood by like indulgent parents, tolerating outrageous behavior and even ruling that others must too.
(In the infamous Louisiana case of Connick v. Thompson, the U.S. Supreme Court decided in 2011 that a prosecutor could not be held liable for withholding evidence in a murder case because the defendant, who was a month from execution before the withheld evidence was discovered, had not shown that the prosecutor’s office displayed “deliberate indifference” to its duties.)
Echoes of that protectionism can be heard in the Arkansas case of Tim Howard, who will be retried later this month for a double murder that occurred 18 years ago near where these three states join. As I wrote here before, Howard is being retried because after he was sentenced to death, investigations turned up potentially exculpatory evidence that had been withheld from his attorneys.
I know firsthand how loath state officials have been to hold his prosecutor accountable. Four years ago, when I learned of the withheld evidence, I wrote an article for my newspaper first. Then, as a citizen, I wrote a letter to the state supreme court’s Committee on Professional Conduct, complaining about what the prosecutor, Tom Cooper, had done.
Supreme courts routinely sanction lawyers for offenses as minor as misspelled words in briefs or as serious as defrauding clients or showing up drunk in court. I thought that withholding evidence in a death case constituted a gross violation of the court’s Rules of Professional Conduct.
While I didn’t say as much in my letter, I viewed Cooper’s failure to turn over key evidence as horrific neglect, at best. To my mind, it rose to the same level as that of a surgeon who killed by failing to sterilize an instrument, or a driver who ran over a kid while texting. Given the high stakes of a capital trial, there seemed no kinder way to spin it.
The director of the court’s Office of Professional Conduct promptly notified me that he would wait for a court to rule on whether the misconduct I alleged—and which the state’s attorney general by then had tacitly acknowledged—had actually occurred.
The letter also informed me, in all caps and bold type, that I must not disclose the nature of my complaint to anyone, including, ironically, members of the news media. If I did, the letter warned, I could be held in contempt of court and “punished by fine or jail.”
While Howard’s case wound its way back to court for a ruling, I reflected on the Arkansas Supreme Court’s threat. I concluded that it was unlawful, a violation of First Amendment.
I wrote to the committee explaining my concern, but after receiving no response I filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the state Supreme Court’s Committee on Professional Conduct. That was in 2011.
Arkansas’s attorney general represented the committee. My attorney, Jeff Rosenzweig, argued that the boiler-plate letter I’d received, which went to all persons filing complaints about attorneys, constituted prior restraint and struck at the heart of free-speech protections—protections that were voted into the Bill of Rights particularly so that citizens could discuss their elected officials.
The state never did admit error. But in January 2013, we settled. I withdrew my lawsuit and the court ordered that henceforth the content of complaints could be discussed.
The following November, the judge hearing Howard’s claim about the withheld evidence concluded that misconduct had indeed occurred, though he softened his ruling by opining that the misconduct had been “inadvertent.” Nevertheless, he vacated Howard’s conviction, opening the way for the new trial that will take place this month.
As soon as the judge announced his finding of misconduct, I wrote again to the Office of Professional Conduct. Pointing out that a court had now made a finding of misconduct, I would renew my complaint against Cooper.
Sixteen months passed without a response. During that time I learned that, of the hundreds of attorneys the committee has sanctioned during the past 25 years, not one has been a prosecutor.
I began to think that my letter about Cooper, like my earlier ones about the First Amendment, would be totally ignored. But in the middle of March, just three days after my article about Howard’s upcoming trial appeared here, a letter from the director of the Office of Professional Conduct arrived at my office.
Could it be? A judge had found misconduct serious enough to warrant a new trial for a man who’d spent 16 years on death row, and would the state Supreme Court’s Committee on Professional Conduct finally break with its long tradition and actually punish a prosecutor instead of threatening those who dared to complain about one?
Nope.
This latest letter advised me that, though my complaint against Cooper was “carefully reviewed,” “sufficient evidence” had not been found that Cooper—the former prosecutor who is now a judge—had violated even one tiny rule of professional conduct.
No doubt most defendants facing a judge would love to murmur the word “inadvertent” and be graciously forgiven. But that doesn’t work in America’s courts—unless you’re a prosecuting attorney.
By: Mara Leveritt, The Daily Beast, April 6, 2015
“Sobering Findings”: Study; Killers Are Less Likely To Be Executed If Their Victims Are Black
Black people are much more frequently executed for killing white people than white people are for killing black people, and capital punishment is rarely used at all when victims are black — especially when they’re male.
That’s according to a paper that’s set to be published in the journal Politics, Groups, and Identities.
The researchers — Frank Baumgartner, Amanda Grigg, and Alisa Mastro —compared homicide victim data with data on the victims of every inmate executed in the US from 1976 through 2013 (that’s 1,369 executions).
Here’s some of what they say the data revealed:
While 47 percent of all homicide victims were black, blacks made up 17 percent of the victims of inmates who were executed.
As a London School of Economics blog post on the paper pointed out, “this suggests not only that blacks are treated particularly harshly for the murder of whites, but also that homicides with black victims are treated less seriously than those with white victims.”
This comparison of the race of all homicide victims to the race of homicide victims of individuals who were later executed makes that even clearer and further illustrates the connection between a victims’ race and his or her killer’s fate:
The researchers found that it was exceptionally hard to find examples of killers of black male victims who were executed. “Black men, especially among the relatively young, have a statistical risk of homicide victimization many times higher than any other racial or gender group, ” they wrote, “but their killers rarely face the death penalty.”
They titled the paper #BlackLivesDontMatter, altering the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag that’s been used in protests against police-involved deaths of African-American men, to reflect the sobering findings.
By: Jenée Desmond-Harris, Vox, February 25, 2015
“What It Means To ‘Love America'”: To Believe We Should Evolve And Change Toward Becoming A More Diverse And Just Society
On May 30, 2013, Kalief Browder was finally released after more than three years in Rikers Island. His crime? There wasn’t one. He was accused of stealing a backpack and the backlog in the courts meant that Browder, who refused to plead guilty to a crime he didn’t commit, stayed behind bars until the prosecutor finally dropped the case. He attempted suicide while in prison.
Meanwhile, it was announced today that Maureen McDonnell, wife of former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, has been sentenced to one year and a day. The former governor received just a two year sentence. That means that after being convicted in federal court on fourteen counts of corruption, both McDonnells will likely serve less time in jail than a black teenager who was never convicted and never even went to trial.
This is what FBI Director James Comey meant in his speech last week, titled “Hard Truths About Law Enforcement and Race” when he said, “there is a disconnect between police agencies and many citizens – predominantly in communities of color.” Comey went on to say that bridging that divide is a two-way street that requires law enforcement and communities of color seeing each other more fairly and equally.
But as Jonathan Capehart has pointed out, unlike when President Barack Obama or Attorney General Eric Holder discusses race, the right and its organs like Fox News paid Comey no attention. Because when a white male Republican law enforcement official points out the racial imbalance in America’s justice system, the right wing noise machine suddenly goes silent.
And that goes to the heart of former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s ghoulish, repulsive, race-baiting assertion that President Obama doesn’t “love America.” The fact is that Giuliani’s view of America and its history privileges the powerful, so any acknowledgment of the Kalief Browders of the world must be a sign that someone doesn’t “love America.” This has also been manifested in the growing national fight over AP History classes, which conservatives now complain are insufficiently patriotic. Last fall, thousands of students fought back against the right wing ideologues on the Jefferson County School Board here in Colorado a valuable lesson in civil disobedience; and more recently an proposal by Republicans in the Oklahoma state legislature to defund AP history classes gained national attention.
Maybe some of us love our country enough to believe its judicial system should hold the powerful as much to account as the powerless. Maybe some of us love our country enough to believe access to health care shouldn’t depend on your income, that a poor kid with asthma deserves a doctor as much as a rich one. Maybe some of us love our country enough to believe that sacrificing our soldiers to war shouldn’t be done out of dishonesty or caprice.
Maybe some us love our country enough to believe that Dr. Marting King Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail is a profoundly patriotic document. Maybe some of us love our country enough to believe that we should embrace and correct its flaws, not turn a cruel and blind eye to them. Maybe some of us love our country enough to believe it should evolve and change toward becoming a more diverse and just society, not remain calcified by class.
And maybe some of us love our country enough to believe that it is the Rudy Giulianis of the world, and his cowardly enablers like Bobby Jindal and Scott Walker, who betray what we stand for and who we aspire to be as a nation.
By: Laura K. Chapin, U. S. News and World Report, February 20, 2015
“Washington, Carver, And… Zimmerman”: We Can’t Let Our Heroes Be Vilified By The Mainstream Liberal Media
As George Zimmerman finds himself in the news again for yet another charge of domestic violence, I am reminded of the thing that baffled me most in this bizarre series of events. It wasn’t just that Zimmerman was acquitted; it was his elevation to hero status amongst many of the citizens of this country. And he didn’t even have to cross the Delaware River to surprise the Hessian forces at Trenton, or even discover 300 uses for peanuts. To become a hero, all Zimmerman had to do was shoot an unarmed black teenager.
That’s all it took for one group of people in this country to back him, the diehard supporters of the Second Amendment. You know; the group that ignores the first line of the Second Amendment and thinks our forefathers were specifically referring to their personal right to own assault rifles. The group that was angry at 20 six-year-old kids for having the nerve to get killed, which might affect the number of rounds their magazines can carry.
After all, the Second Amendment says nothing of being responsible, so apparently you can’t support the amendment without supporting every bizarre case of someone using a firearm to kill someone else, especially if it’s an unarmed black teen, because we all know that person will eventually become an unarmed black man.
Zimmerman has been given the royal treatment ever since, beginning with the police not pressing charges or even opting to do an investigation. It was this no-harm-no-foul attitude that prompted national outrage. Hence a theatrical trial was put on to appease the masses.
Immediately people in this country began sending money to their hero, somewhere in the neighborhood of $200,000. After all, we can’t let our heroes be vilified by the mainstream liberal media.
And everyone in this country is entitled to representation, usually in the form of a court-appointed attorney. But not for Zimmerman. He received representation from a million-dollar lawyer, Mark O’Mara, who has stated that he still hasn’t received one penny for his services. But that doesn’t matter; he’s representing a hero who shot an unarmed black teen. Heck, why is that even against the law?
On to the theater as the trial commenced. I wondered how the prosecutors could win this case without it making them look incompetent or of showing favoritism for not pressing charges to begin with. Maybe that explains their effort, or lack thereof, during the play… uh, I mean trial.
For example, Zimmerman’s wife did not even testify to the fact that she had left George the day before and he was very upset about that. But really, what does a person’s state-of-mind have to do with their actions? Heck, he was even referred to as a Neighborhood Watch captain by everyone, including the media, even though he was not actually part of any chapter, and Neighborhood Watch volunteers are not allowed to carry weapons. Hence the word “watch.”
And when the defense presented an “expert” witness to testify that a 29-year-old, five-feet-nine, 220 pound man toting a loaded Kel Tec 9 millimeter pistol was no physical match for a 17-year-old, six-feet-one, 140 pound boy carrying a pack of Skittles, his testimony was not even questioned. And we all know of disclosure, so the prosecution had to know what this person would testify to.
I can find no studies that show that a four-inch height difference gives a person any advantage at all in a physical confrontation. In professional boxing, four inches means nothing. It is strictly the weight that matches opponents. So why was this “expert” testimony not questioned?
After the trial, Zimmerman’s status as a hero continued with his tour of the facility that manufactured the gun that he used. What a proud moment that must have been for the company to not only have someone purchase their product, but use it to kill an unarmed black teen.
Then, in perhaps the most bizarre of all events associated with this craziness, Zimmerman listed a painting on eBay, a painting that looked like a PhotoShop rendering of a clipart image with patriotic words added, and it sold for over $100.000. That means someone out there dished out that kind of dough just to own something from their hero, because the actual value of the painting from an artistic perspective would probably be under a buck.
I guess I’m from the proverbial old school. I remember when heroes were scrutinized just a little more. I remember when that term was reserved for people who did extraordinary things like firemen who rush into burning buildings to save lives, or soldiers who give their all to save a fallen friend or to protect our country, or any number of events where ordinary people put their own safety at risk to help others
But here we have George Zimmerman, and when all the dust is settled, we have a man who has done nothing out of the ordinary other than face several charges of violence and walked away as if made of Teflon. The only other thing George Zimmerman ever did in his life that was of note that makes him different than almost every other citizen of this country, was to shoot an unarmed black teenager.
And that, to millions, makes him a hero.
By: Neal Wooten, The Blog, The Huffington Post, January 13, 2014
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