Danziger cops seek release while awaiting new trial
21st March 2016 · 0 Comments
Four former NOPD officers convicted for a post-Katrina shooting that left two unarmed people dead and four others wounded on the Danziger Bridge in eastern New Orleans asked a federal judge Tuesday to let them out of jail on bond as they await a second trial.
The officers were convicted in the deadly 2005 shootings that claimed the lives of 17-year-old James Brissette and 40-year-old Ronald Madison, a mentally disabled man, were granted new trials after it was learned that several key federal prosecutors were posting comments online about several active U.S. Department of Justice cases.
Attorneys representing former NOPD Sgts. Robert Gisevius and Kenneth Bowen and former officers Anthony Villavaso and Robert Faulcon said the four have been locked up for nearly six years, despite the overturning of their convictions in 2013. They remain jailed, and await a new trial, on civil rights charges arising from the incident that occurred less than a week after Hurricane Katrina flooded 80 percent of New Orleans.
The Danziger case was one of several post-Katrina cases that led to a federally mandated NOPD consent decree that began in August 2913 that is aimed at overhauling the troubled police department.
U.S. District Judge Kurt Engelhardt ordered a new trial citing prosecutors’ misconduct — including anonymous online comments about the case. A New Orleans-based federal appeals court has rejected prosecutors’ arguments to re-instate the convictions and defense lawyers say Engelhardt should now release them on bond.
“The defendants are willing to submit to whatever conditions of release the court deems necessary to assure their appearance at trial,” the bond motion states.
According to The Associated Press, defense lawyers say the four have spent almost as much time in what amounts to pre-trial detention as others who pleaded guilty in connection with the case. They also say that the four have had little or no contact with their children since they were locked up, and that Gisevius has never seen a daughter born a week after he was taken into custody.
“All of the defendants need to go home, even if temporarily, to provide their children with the guidance they were denied during those critical six lost years,” the motion says.
Two people died and four were hurt on Sept. 4, 2005, at the Danziger Bridge. Police said at the time of the shooting that the officers were responding to a report of other officers down when they came under fire.
However, after hearing from five dozen witnesses and examining 400 pieces of evidence during a month-long trial, a federal jury convicted Bowen, Gisevius, Faulcon and Villavaso for opening fire and for efforts to cover up wrongdoing. Former Sgt. Arthur “Archie” Kaufman faces a new trial in the cover-up alone.
Faulcon was sentenced to 65 years in prison; Bowen and Gisevius, 40 years; Villavaso, 38; and Kaufman, now out on bond, six.
The online posting scandal that led to the overturned convictions in the Danziger case also cost then U.S. Attorney Jim Letten, the longest-serving U.S. attorney in the nation’s history, his job.
After the Danziger convictions were overturned, a number of grassroots and civil rights leaders in New Orleans accused the U.S. Attorney’s Office of undermining the Danziger case in order to give the convicted officers an escape clause.
“It’s been 11 years and there’s still no justice,” the Rev. Raymond Brown, a community activist and president of National Action Now, told The Louisiana Weekly. “There’s no justice to be found for victims of police brutality and unconstitutional policing in New Orleans. Not even the long arm of the U.S. Department of Justice or a federal consent decree can change that.”
This article originally published in the March 21, 2016 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
