Judge overturns some convictions in Danziger case
24th October 2011 · 0 Comments
A federal judge Thursday acquitted a police sergeant of a charge he stomped on a dying, mentally disabled man who was gunned down on the Danziger Bridge in eastern New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, overturning parts of a jury verdict that convicted five current or former officers of civil rights violations.
While U.S. District Judge Kurt Engelhardt upheld the majority of the officers’ convictions, he ruled that jurors didn’t hear sufficient evidence to convict Sgt. Kenneth Bowen of stomping on 40-year-old Ronald Madison after another officer shot and fatally wounded the man. The shooting occurred just days after several levee breaches flooded 80 percent of New Orleans in 2005.
Engelhardt also ruled that there was insufficient evidence to convict Bowen and three other officers of con spiring to falsely prosecute shooting victim Jose Holmes, who wasn’t arrested or charged with wrongdoing after police wounded him.
But the judge left most of the verdict intact and rejected defense attorneys’ bids for a new trial.
U.S. Attorney Jim Letten said his office is reviewing Engelhardt’s ruling and weighing options, including whether to appeal.
“The majority of the counts and the serious counts are intact, but all the counts are important to us,” Letten told The Associated Press.
Police shot and killed Madison and 17-year-old James Brissette Jr. and wounded four others on the bridge less than a week after Katrina’s landfall.
All five defendants, including a retired police investigator who wasn’t charged in the shootings, were convicted of engaging in a brazen cover-up that included a planted gun, fabricated witnesses and falsified reports.
Jurors convicted them of all 25 counts they faced. Engelhardt ordered acquittals in three of those 25 counts.
Bowen’s attorney, Frank DeSalvo, said he hopes the ruling will help the officers at sentencing by Engelhardt.
“Nobody is going free. How much it helps us at sentencing, only time will tell,” he said. “The more serious counts are still there.”
The judge said the only testimony supporting federal prosecutors’ claims that Bowen stomped on Madison came from Michael Hunter, one of five former officers who pleaded guilty to participating in a cover-up. Hunter cooperated with the government.
Engelhardt, however, said Hunter’s trial testimony didn’t match the account he gave an FBI agent in an interview.
“Hunter’s assumed and self-serving license to change the ‘truth’ to suit his (or the government’s) purposes or moods is clear on the record,” the judge wrote.
Engelhardt also said prosecutors didn’t present any physical evidence that Madison was beaten or kicked.
Hunter, who is serving an eight-year prison sentence, was the only cooperating officer to provide an eyewitness account of the shootings. He had driven a group of officers to the bridge in a rental truck in response to another officer’s radio call for help. Hunter also testified that he saw Bowen randomly spray gunfire at wounded, unarmed people seeking cover behind a concrete barrier on the bridge.
Engelhardt also overturned the jury’s convictions of Bowen and Sgt. Robert Gisevius on charges they conspired to give false statements that would lead to the bogus prosecution of Ronald Madison’s brother, Lance. Lance Madison was arrested on attempted murder charges and jailed for three weeks before a judge freed him.
Engelhardt refused to acquit a retired police sergeant, Arthur Kaufman, of the same count.
The case was a high-stakes test of the Justice Department’s effort to rid the police department of corruption and brutality. A total of 20 current or former New Orleans police officers were charged last year in a series of federal probes. Most of the cases center on actions during Katrina’s aftermath, which plunged the flooded city into lawlessness and desperation.
The officers convicted of charges stemming from the shootings — Bowen, Gisevius, Officer Anthony Villavaso and former officer Robert Faulcon — face possible life prison sentences. Kaufman, who was convicted in the cover-up, also is scheduled to be sentenced in December.
Faulcon was convicted of fatally shooting Madison, but the jury decided his killing didn’t amount to murder. Faulcon, Gisevius, Bowen and Villavaso were convicted in the death of 17-year-old James Brissette. Jurors didn’t have to decide whether Brissette was murdered because they didn’t hold any of the defendants individually responsible for causing his death.
“Why does it always seem like someone is trying to chip away at the fair and just convictions handed down in the post-Katrina cases that have gone to trial so far?” Ramessu Merriamen Aha asked The Louisiana Weekly. “Why can’t these cases be over and done with so that the families of these shooting victims can at least try to being the healing process?
“Just like the lawyers representing these rogue cops who think they have the right to take innocent lives and conspire to cover these murders up, we’re going to keep fighting for Henry Glover, Raymond Robair and the Danziger Bridge shooting victims. We owe them and ourselves that much.
“We’re also going to keep fighting to make sure that what happened in these cases never happens again to another New Orleans family,” Aha added. “That starts with making sure that the federal consent decree regarding NOPD reforms is implemented properly and demanding that the mayor fires (NOPD Supt.) Ronal Serpas and hires a police chief that is capable of making substantive changes in the department.”
“We are not at all happy about about this latest turn in the Danziger case,” the Rev. Raymond Brown, president of the New Orleans chapter of the National Action Network, told The Louisiana Weekly. “We are still demanding justice for the families of Ronald Madison, James Brissette Jr. and the others who were shot like animals by New Orleans police on the Danziger Bridge. The trial may be over but it is obvious that the struggle to secure justice for these victims of police brutality and murder is far from over.
“None of these officers have apologized to the families of the people they shot or accepted responsibility for their actions,” Brown added. “We are not asking for justice in these cases — we are demanding justice. And we will be watching this case and its aftermath very closely.”
This article was originally published in the October 24, 2011 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper
