ACLU Justice Lab files suits against La. law enforcement
4th January 2022 · 0 Comments
By Ryan Whirty
Contributing Writer
As the calendar ticks over into a new year, the ACLU of Louisiana has collected information on hundreds of race-driven cases of violence and abuse by law-enforcement agencies in the state against people of color as part of the ACLU’s Justice Lab Project.
As a result of the effort, the ACLU of Louisiana has assisted in filing roughly 30 lawsuits across the state against numerous police departments in Louisiana, including several allegations charging the Louisiana State Police and the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office.
In all, the Justice Lab project has filed lawsuits against 25 law enforcement agencies in the state after receiving more than 400 complaints of racially-motivated violence within communities of color, especially incidents of abuse toward Black and Latinx citizens. To carry out the project, the ACLU has enlisted the assistance of dozens of partner law firms, 20 law school legal clinics and 150 in-house volunteers.
“We’ve experienced tremendous success in Justice Lab’s first year and this is only the beginning,” said ACLU of Louisiana Executive Director Alanah Odoms in a press release. “Through this campaign, we’ve been able to respond to the needs of our communities of color, who have had enough of the oppressive policing practices that have devastated this state for years. As we grow the campaign over the next decade, ACLU of Louisiana will work towards dismantling the systemic racism that plagues policing from the ground up, eventually shifting the numerous false narratives that condone police abuse here in Louisiana and across the nation. Together, we will continue the fight for Black lives and build a future where no child has to grow up in fear of being killed by the police.”
Of particular focus in the Justice Lab effort is the long-standing practice of qualified immunity, under which police officers and law enforcement departments are shielded from legal consequences for their abusive and corrupt agencies.
To that end, the ACLU achieved a significant victory with a lawsuit filed on behalf of Raynaldo Sampy against police officers of the city of Lafayette when the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana ruled that Sampy can in fact sue the Lafayette police department despite the fact that he had been convicted of crimes in the case at hand.
With the decision, the court rejected the long-standing police practice that was established by the case of Parisi v. Heck, which blocks a plaintiff who has been convicted of a crime from collecting civil damages for violations of his or her constitutional rights if the plaintiff can’t prove that the violations and the underlying criminal conviction are separable and conceptually distinct.
As a result, Sampy was allowed to proceed with his lawsuit against the Lafayette police officers, who, with the new ruling, lost on the grounds of both qualified immunity and the Heck defense.
In conjunction with its Justice Lab project, the ACLU of Louisiana has also reached out to other investigative agencies to help in cleaning up race-based police violence. In June 2021, Odums wrote to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland asking the federal Justice Department to examine the racist policing tactics of the Louisiana State Police.
“For years, LSP officers, acting under color of law, have systematically violated Black people’s fundamental constitutional rights,” Odums wrote to Garland. “Federal intervention is appropriate to investigate and remedy LSP’s pattern and practice of racially profiling, assaulting, and killing Black people, and subsequently hindering impartial investigations. We urge the Department to use all applicable authority to investigate LSP.
“LSP’s documented history of racism against Black people unsurprisingly leads to a discriminatory use of excessive force against them,” she added. “In addition to the [Ronald] Greene, [Aaron] Bowman, and [Antonio] Harris cases, numerous other state and federal lawsuits demonstrate a need to investigate LSP’s unconstitutional policy, practices and customs.”
Then, in November, the ACLU sent a similar letter to Duane E, Evans, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Louisiana, to scrutinize the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Department’s long-running pattern of racist police actions against people and communities of color. The letter also targeted the JPSO’s propensity for preventing proper investigation into accusations of abuse, and for engaging in victim blaming instead of holding correct, abusive officers accountable for their violent actions.
“JPSO’s deep-rooted racism and history of misconduct is not without consequences,” Odums wrote. “But rather than institute reforms in response to public outrage over JPSO’s racist policing regime, the Sheriff’s Office prefers to blame the victims and their families for ‘spreading a false narrative for the sake of trying to get a payday.’”
Odums’ letter went on to say, “This is a disturbing, albeit not a surprising, response from the head of a department tasked with maintaining public safety. Nonetheless, the dominant narrative requires correction. Only an independent and external body – in this case, the USAO for the Eastern District of Louisiana – is equipped to discover the truth and the stories of those unnamed victims brutalized and traumatized by JPSO.”
This article originally published in the January 3, 2022 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
