Federal judge refuses to dismiss lawsuit over fatal NOPD beating
9th May 2016 · 0 Comments
U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier on May 2 decided not to dismiss a lawsuit stemming from a pre-Katrina beating in Faubourg Tremé involving two NOPD officers that left a 48-year-old man dead.
Barbier’s ruling allows the family of Raymond Robair, a handyman, to move forward with their claims that the City of New Orleans and former NOPD Supt. Eddie Compass are liable for the 2006 fatal beating.
The two officers involved in the case — former NOPD officer Melvin Williams and former NOPD officer Matthew Dean Moore — have already been tried and convicted in the case. Williams was sentenced to more than 21 years for kicking and beating Robair with a baton and Moore was sentenced to more than five years behind bars for submitting a false police report and lying to FBI officials about the incident.
In their lawsuit, Raymond Robair’s two adult daughters contend that their father’s fatal beating is part of a larger pattern of excessive force and unconstitutional policing in New Orleans.
The lawsuit also argues that Robair might be alive today if Officer Williams, a 16-year veteran who reportedly had a history of abusing civilians had been terminated years earlier.
Judge Barbier said Monday that the plaintiffs had presented sufficient evidence “from which one could make a reasonable inference of a persistent, widespread practice by NOPD officers of conducting unlawful seizures and using excessive force rising to the level of a custom having the force of official City policy.”
Nola.com/The Times-Picayune reported that a trial date has been set for March 27, 2017.
After he was beaten by police, Robair was dropped off outside a downtown New Orleans hospital, where he was subsequently pronounced dead.
The Robair case and several high-profile NOPD cases led to a U.S. Department of Justice investigation and scathing report in 2011 that said the NOPD was rife with corruption and abuse. These cases also paved the way for a federally mandated NOPD consent decree aimed at bringing the troubled police department up to federal standards for constitutional policing. Implementation of the NOPD consent decree began in August 2013 and is still under way.
Meanwhile after years of planning, the City of New Orleans’ juvenile court system last week celebrated the opening of a new facility near City Park that is located on a tract of land designed to be more storm-resilient.
The campus, located on Milton Street in Gentilly, coordinates all the services needed to turn young lives around.
“Every service a child may need is here — the school system — everything the youth needs to have a second chance,” Chief Juvenile Court Judge Candace Anderson told FOX 8 News.
The new center adjoins the Youth Study Center, a detention facility for 40, and is expected to make the system operate more efficiently than before.
The center was funded in large part by a $31 million grant from FEMA, and an expansion is already in the works. That expansion will be designed to handle juvenile offenders who may be tried as adults.
In other news, Orleans Parish Sheriff Marlin Gusman is in the process of reducing the inmate population at the new Orleans Parish Prison by more than half, The New Orleans Advocate reported last week.
The news comes as Sheriff Gusman has been under criticism for allegedly not bringing OPP up to federal standards for constitutional jailing and efforts by some to remove him from his current post as Orleans Parish Sheriff.
Orleans Parish Prison is currently under a federally mandated consent decree aimed at implementing a major overhaul of the troubled jail facility which has seen more than its share of negative media publicity in recent years.
The corrections expert monitoring conditions at the facility recently recommended inmates be relocated until deputies could be properly trained.
Court documents show that by May 14, 600 inmates will be transferred to other jails around the state. Only 533 inmates will remain housed in the new $150 million jail.
WWL News reported that Gusman said the move will allow his office to have the appropriate staffing levels to comply with the requirements of the OPP federal consent decree.
This article originally published in the May 9, 2016 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
