Case against cops in Ronald Greene’s death could fall apart as judge considers dismissals
9th October 2023 · 0 Comments
By Wesley Muller
Contributing Writer
(lailluminator.com) — After dismissing several charges against white police officers indicted in the 2019 killing of Black motorist Ronald Greene, the presiding judge could further dismantle the prosecution’s case at a hearing this week.
Union Parish Judge Thomas Rogers is set to hear motions Oct. 12 to toss one of the two remaining malfeasance in office charges against Union Parish Sheriff’s Deputy Chris Harpin and the negligent homicide and malfeasance charges against Louisiana State Police Trooper Kory York.
Greene died May 10, 2019, following a vehicle pursuit outside of Monroe. State Police body camera footage of the incident shows a group of officers beating, choking, stunning and dragging Greene before leaving him shackled in a prone position until he died.
Harpin and the four state troopers involved in the incident faced zero accountability for more than two years until the body camera footage was leaked to The Associated Press, casting doubt on State Police’s initial claim that Greene died in a car wreck.
It took an additional year of public pressure, internal investigations and legislative hearings before District Attorney John Belton, who represents Union and Lincoln parishes, brought the case to a grand jury in November 2022. Belton said he waited until federal authorities shared with him their findings from a civil rights investigation that did not result in federal charges.
The grand jury returned indictments against Lt. John Clary, Capt. John Peters, Trooper Dakota DeMoss, York and Harpin.
So far, Judge Rogers has been receptive to the defendants’ arguments, which have chipped away at the charges and now threaten to dismantle the core of the case. In July, Rogers dismissed the indictments against DeMoss and Peters, excusing both troopers entirely from the case. Each faced one count of obstructing justice.
Rogers then ordered another dismissal. Harpin was originally indicted on three counts of malfeasance, but Rogers dismissed one of those after prosecutors admitted to mistakes made in their charging documents.
The judge threatened to toss another malfeasance count against Harpin unless prosecutors submitted more details to support their allegations. Rogers asked for specific body camera video timestamps of when Harpin allegedly committed the crime.
The prosecution submitted the timestamps, which staved off Rogers’ immediate threat to dismiss the charge. But it also prompted Harpin’s attorney, Eugene Cicardo, to file a new motion challenging the evidence.
In a phone call on Thursday of last week, Cicardo said he is asking the judge to combine Harpin’s two remaining malfeasance charges into a single count because the state is essentially charging him twice for the same crime.
Harpin’s first malfeasance charge alleges he committed simple battery when he used pepper spray on Greene, who was lying on the ground handcuffed.
The other malfeasance charge also alleges Harpin committed simple battery, but Cicardo argues it’s part of the same encounter.
The prosecutors pointed to passages in a report from use-of-force expert Seth Stoughton, who testified before the grand jury. Stoughton described footage from Clary’s body camera video that shows Harpin possibly stomping or stepping on Greene while he was lying on the ground in handcuffs, though the footage provides only a partial view from behind a vehicle. It shows Harpin raising his knee “in a position consistent with placing his foot onto Mr. Greene,” the report noted.
About 16 seconds later, the footage shows Harpin and two troopers bending over Greene while Greene cries out and makes loud noises consistent with expressions of pain. Then one of the officers, believed to be Harpin, can be heard saying, “Yeah! Yeah, that shit hurts, doesn’t it?”
In his motion, Harpin’s attorney argues the two counts of battery are actually the same alleged crime. He cites case law, from State v. Coker, in which the Louisiana Supreme Court vacated concurrent sentences after a police chief was convicted on multiple counts of battery for the same incident.
“When a defendant commits two sexual acts in the same sexual encounter with the same victim, he has committed one crime, not two,” one of the justices in the case stated.
York, who faces the bulk of the charges with a count of negligent homicide and multiple malfeasance charges, hopes to walk entirely from the case next week. His attorney, Mike Small, is asking the judge to dismiss the entire indictment because prosecutors improperly used information from an internal State Police investigation in which York was compelled to answer questions.
State law holds that statements an officer gives during an internal investigation cannot be used against the officer in a criminal proceeding. Belton’s office sent the internal affairs file to Stoughton, the state’s use-of-force expert, who cited it on one page of his roughly 300-page document.
During a hearing in August, Small argued that single citation should warrant dismissal of the entire indictment against his client. The state responded with an affidavit from Stoughton saying he would have reached the same conclusions without the internal affairs file.
If Judge Rogers sides with York, it would all but dismantle what is perhaps the most high-profile case of Belton’s career as a district attorney and one of the most prominent police brutality cases Louisiana has seen.
Frustrated with the state’s failures so far, Greene’s family and supporters held a rally last week calling on the U.S. Department of Justice to file civil rights charges against the officers, though it’s unclear if the DOJ would be willing to do so after it ended its probe into the incident last year and turned over its files to Belton.
This article originally published in the October 9, 2023 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
