by Megan Rose

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

A federal judge ruled in March that ProPublica’s lawsuit against the secretary of defense should move forward, as the news organization seeks to increase public access to the military’s court proceedings and records.

ProPublica sued in 2022, claiming the Pentagon has failed to issue rules ensuring that the services comply with a law that was supposed to make the military justice system more transparent.

Although ProPublica’s lawsuit originated from a single high-profile arson case in which the Navy refused to release records, the suit challenges the overall legality of the Pentagon’s current guidance, which allows the services to shroud much of the court-martial process in secret.

ProPublica has asked the court to order Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to issue proper rules for the release of records and other key information, such as hearing schedules. The government tried to get that part of the lawsuit dismissed, arguing that Austin had already used his rightful discretion to decide how to implement the law. An order “dictating the precise content of DOD guidance is beyond the jurisdiction of the courts,” the said.

The judge disagreed, writing that ProPublica has “plausibly alleged that the issued guidelines are clearly inconsistent with Congress’ mandate.” This is most apparent, the judge said, in the allegation that the Navy denies the public access to all records in cases that end in acquittals.

“We’re thrilled with this ruling,” said Sarah Matthews, deputy general counsel for ProPublica. “It recognizes that the military’s current guidelines clearly fail to ensure public access as required by Congress. That’s huge and should be a wake-up call to the Department of Defense, regardless of the outcome of this case.”

In 2016, Congress passed a law requiring the U.S. military’s six branches to increase public access to its court records, envisioning a system similar to federal courts, where the public has real-time electronic access to dockets, records and filings. It wasn’t until last year — seemingly spurred by ProPublica’s lawsuit — that Caroline Krass, general counsel for the Defense Department, issued new guidance for court records. But rather than making the system more transparent as lawmakers intended, Krass’ guidance mostly reinforced the individual services’ policies, which keep court records largely inaccessible to the public.

Under the guidance, services do not have to make any records public until more than a month after a trial ends; have the discretion to permanently suppress key trial information, such as transcripts and exhibits; and are allowed to keep the entire record secret indefinitely in cases when the defendant is found not guilty.

As a result, the Navy withholds records during most, if not all, court-martial proceedings. The lead-up to a court-martial, and all related pretrial records, are never made public by the Navy. The public doesn’t know if a sailor or Marine has been charged with a crime unless the case goes to trial. And although Article 32 hearings, which determine if there’s enough evidence for trial, are supposed to be public, the Navy provides no notice of when the service is holding them.

The U.S. Army’s policies are similarly secretive. The service updated its rules late last year after Krass’ guidance was issued but, like the Navy, kept restrictions in place and gave officials broad discretion in many cases to decide whether to release any documents at all.

Lt. Col. Ruth Castro, an Army spokesperson, said if court records are requested by the public, the decision to release them is made by several high-level officials to “ensure consistency” and “properly balance the privacy issues of the accused, minors and victims.”

The Army also does not tell the public about Article 32 hearings, which “lets military officials decide to keep cases secret that might be embarrassing to the military,” said Frank Rosenblatt, president of the National Institute of Military Justice, a group that aims to improve fairness in the court-martial system. “Whether a case is in the ‘public interest’ should be decided by the public, not military officials.”

Since the Army, Navy and Marine Corps make up about three quarters of the military, the public is largely in the dark about the majority of the military’s criminal justice system.

In the last year, ProPublica has requested that the Navy provide the records for more than 90 cases of sexual assault and has received only partial documents for 32 cases that were already over.

“Collectively, the Navy’s policies prevent any meaningful oversight of its court system, including any visibility into how it handles sexual assault cases, a matter of paramount public importance,” ProPublica’s lawsuit states.

The military’s handling of sexual assault was deemed so inadequate by Congress that commanders were recently stripped of ​​the power to press or drop charges in those cases. Last summer, President Joe Biden signed an executive order finalizing Congress’ mandate to give the power instead to a special prosecutor. The Navy’s current policies prevent the public from learning whether the new system is any better than how it previously handled such cases.

ProPublica’s lawsuit began in 2022 when the news organization fought for the release of court records in the case against Seaman Recruit Ryan Mays, who had been accused of setting fire to the USS Bonhomme Richard. The $1 billion amphibious assault ship burned for more than four days and was destroyed in 2020. A ProPublica investigation showed the Navy prosecuted Mays with little evidence and ignored a judge’s recommendation to drop the case. Mays was found not guilty at his court-martial.

ProPublica was successful in getting the Navy to release hundreds of pages of court-martial documents in the Mays case. ProPublica had sued the judge in the Mays case along with top Pentagon officials, but the court dismissed the judge from the suit since the Mays case is over.

In the ongoing lawsuit, ProPublica is also arguing that the records are owed to the public under the First Amendment and common law, which the Navy did not try to dismiss at this time.

The judge ordered the parties to file motions by September, which could resolve the case.

This post was originally published on Articles and Investigations – ProPublica.

by Richard A. Webster, Verite News

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Verite News. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Janice Parker walked into the medical ward at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola several years back, looking for her son, Kentrell Parker.

He should have been easy to find. The 45-year-old New Orleans native had been bedridden since an injury in a prison football game left him paralyzed from the neck down more than a decade earlier. His bed was usually positioned near a window by the nurses’ station.

When she didn’t see him there, Janice Parker feared the worst. Her son is completely dependent on staff to keep him alive: to feed him, clean him after bowel movements, change his catheter and prevent him from choking. Because he struggles to clear his throat, even a little mucus can be life-threatening.

A nurse pointed toward a door that was ajar. Janice Parker’s son was alive, but she was disturbed by what she saw: He was alone in a dark, grimy room slightly larger than a bathroom, with no medical staff or orderlies nearby. He was there, he told his mother in a raspy voice, because a nurse had written him up for complaining about his care. This was his punishment — the medical ward’s version of solitary confinement. He told her he had been in the room for days, Janice Parker said during a recent interview. “There was no one at his bedside. And he can’t holler for help if needed,” she said.

For years, Janice Parker said, she has complained to nurses and prison officials — in person, over the phone and through an attorney — about the neglect that she has witnessed on her frequent visits and that her son has described. He has told her that he’s gone days without food. He has developed urinary tract infections because his catheter hasn’t been changed. At one point, Janice Parker said, he developed bedsores on his back because nurses hadn’t shifted his body every few hours.

Her complaints have gone nowhere, she said. “I don’t know what to do anymore,” she said.

Parker has spoken to nurses and prison officials about the neglect that she has witnessed and that her son has described, but her complaints have gone nowhere. (Kathleen Flynn, special to ProPublica)

Kentrell Parker is among the most frail inmates in Louisiana’s prison system, requiring constant care from a medical system that has largely failed to meet the needs of people like him. The deficiencies of Angola’s medical system are well documented: Department of Justice reports in the 1990s, a court-monitored lawsuit settlement in 1998 and a federal judge’s opinions in another lawsuit filed in 2015.

Case Study: “Patient 22” Choked on Sausage After Brain Injury

– U.S. District Judge Shelly Dick

In a November 2023 opinion, U.S. District Judge Shelly Dick wrote that Angola’s medical care had not significantly improved since she ruled in 2021 that it amounted to cruel and unusual punishment.

Among the cases she cited to illustrate her conclusion was “Patient 22.” What happened to this inmate, she wrote, was “the most egregious example” of the prison’s substandard care and its practice of relying on inmate orderlies rather than trained professionals to provide medical care.

The 60-year-old patient, who had previously suffered a traumatic brain injury, was transferred to Angola’s emergency medical unit and then to an outside hospital after he was kicked in the face by another inmate, according to a medical expert for the plaintiffs.

The inmate returned to the prison, where he was sent to the medical ward for two and a half months, suffering repeated falls while there. Medical staff placed him in a “locked room with nothing but a mattress on the floor,” the judge wrote. A doctor who testified on behalf of the prison said putting a mattress on the floor was appropriate because of the inmate’s risk of falling.

Although a speech therapist had recommended a diet of soft food because the inmate had trouble swallowing, the prison failed to provide one, the judge wrote. In January 2021, the patient choked on a piece of sausage and died. An inmate orderly administered CPR until emergency medical services arrived.

In court filings and testimony, the state pointed to an apparent conflict in medical records regarding the patient’s recommended diet. A doctor who testified on behalf of the prison said the death was accidental, and he didn’t believe that it showed a violation of the standard of care.

In 1994, the Justice Department reported that Angola inmates were punished for seeking medical care, with seriously ill patients placed in “isolation rooms.” Prison staff failed to “recognize, diagnose, treat, or monitor” inmates’ medical needs, including “serious chronic illnesses and dangerous infections and contagious diseases.” Two decades later, a federal judge wrote that Angola’s medical care has caused “unspeakable” harm and amounts to “abhorrent cruel and unusual punishment.”

For years, Jeff Landry, Louisiana’s new governor, defended the quality of Angola’s medical care. When he was attorney general, a post he held from 2016 until January, he argued that inmates are entitled only to “adequate” medical care, which is what they got. During the pandemic, Landry opposed releasing elderly and medically vulnerable prisoners, warning that it could result in a “crime wave” more dangerous than the “potential public-health issue” in the state’s prisons.

And now that Landry has moved to the governor’s mansion, the number of inmates who rely on the medical care in Louisiana’s prisons is likely to grow. Soon after Landry was sworn in, he called for a special legislative session on crime. Over nine days in February, lawmakers worked at a dizzying pace to overhaul the state’s criminal justice system. They passed a law that requires prisoners to serve at least 85% of their sentences before they can reduce their incarceration through good behavior. Another law ends parole for everyone but those who were sentenced to life for crimes they committed as juveniles.

The “truth in sentencing” law will nearly double the number of people behind bars in Louisiana in six years, from about 28,000 to about 55,800, according to an estimate by James Austin of the JFA Institute. The Denver-based criminal justice nonprofit studies public policy regarding prison and jail populations, including the jail in New Orleans.

Austin projects that the law will add an average of five years to each new prisoner’s incarceration, resulting in a growing number of older inmates who will further burden prisons’ medical systems. The share of inmates 50 and older already has risen substantially in the past decade, from about 18% in 2012 to about 25% in 2023, according to figures from the Department of Public Safety and Corrections.

Although these laws aren’t retroactive and won’t affect Parker’s chance of release, they could be devastating for future inmates in his condition. Louisiana has three programs that allow for its sickest inmates to be released; two of them will be eliminated and inmates will be eligible for the third only after serving the vast majority of their sentences, according to state Rep. Debbie Villio, R-Kenner, who spearheaded the legislation.

Absent additional resources, Austin said, a medical system that for decades has struggled to care for its most vulnerable will “only worsen.” He called what is happening in Louisiana “one of the most dramatic plans to increase prison population I’ve ever seen.”

Jeff Landry, Louisiana’s new governor and formerly the state attorney general, has defended the quality of Angola’s medical care. (Matthew Hinton/AP)

Villio said in an email that she disagreed with Austin’s projections. (The Landry administration didn’t respond to questions from Verite News and ProPublica.) The nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Office, however, estimated that the state’s expenses are likely to rise because inmates will be held longer.

All told, the bills Landry signed seem designed to ensure that “everyone will die in prison,” said Bruce Reilly, deputy director of Voice of the Experienced, a New Orleans nonprofit that advocates for the rights of the incarcerated.

“More and more sentences of 30 to 60 years, which are not uncommon, will be death sentences,” he said. “And we do not all age gracefully or go quietly in our sleep.”

“They Don’t Even Try to Pretend to Show Compassion”

After a jury found Parker guilty in the 1999 murder of his girlfriend, Kawana Bernard, he was sentenced to life without parole and sent to Angola. The sprawling maximum security prison, which holds about 3,800 inmates on the site of a former slave plantation, was once known as “the bloodiest prison in America” because of rampant violence. That reputation remains.

The Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola (Kathleen Flynn)

Still, it wasn’t until her paralyzed son was sent to the prison’s medical unit that Janice Parker truly feared for his life.

In the years that he has been held there, at least 17 prisoners have died after receiving substandard health care, according to U.S. District Judge Shelly Dick, who ruled in 2021 that Angola’s medical care was unconstitutional and in November 2023 that the state had failed to significantly improve it.

“If he stays there,” Janice Parker said, “he’s gonna die.”

Though Parker’s movements are now limited to facial expressions and slight shifts of his head, he was once known as “Coyote” for his relentless style of play as a cornerback for the East Yard Raiders in the prison’s full-pads football league. After the team won the prison championship in 2009, he was chosen for Angola’s all-star team.

They traveled to Elayn Hunt Correctional Center to compete against its best players. After Angola dominated most of the game, its coaches pulled their starters to prevent injury, Derrick Magee, a former teammate, said in an interview. Parker insisted on playing.

Kentrell Parker, second from left, poses in 2010 with teammates from the East Yard Raiders in a photograph held by his mother. The players are holding championship belts from Angola’s Crunch Bowl in 2009, according to former teammate Derrick Magee. Parker was paralyzed in a game soon after. (Kathleen Flynn, special to ProPublica)

Magee said the memory of what happened during that game continues to haunt him nearly 14 years later. The opposing team ran a short run play. As their fullback drove a few yards forward, Parker drilled him, driving his neck into the player’s torso. Nearly a dozen others piled on.

The whistle blew. One by one, the players stood up. Parker, however, lay on the grass. “What’s going on, Coyote?” Magee asked.

“Man, I can’t move,” Parker replied.

He had suffered a traumatic spinal cord injury in his neck. Dr. Raman Singh, the medical director for the Department of Corrections at the time, summarized Parker’s condition in a letter a month after his injury: “He requires total assistance with all activities of daily living.”

After about 19 months of treatment outside the prison, Parker was taken back to Angola and admitted to its hospital, which includes a 34-bed ward for prisoners who need long-term or hospice care, according to the Department of Corrections.

Janice Parker has observed the conditions in the medical ward on her frequent visits, nearly every month for more than a decade. The smell of urine and feces permeates the infirmary. Tables and medical equipment are covered in dust and grime, she said. Patients, suffering from open wounds and sores, scream in pain throughout the day.

On one visit, she said, clumps of her son’s hair had fallen out and the bare patches of his scalp were covered in scabs. He told her he hadn’t been bathed in weeks. Another time, she found him lying in his own feces, suffering from an infection after bacteria had “entered his blood from his stool,” according to the 2015 lawsuit filed by her son and other inmates, in which Angola’s medical care was ruled unconstitutional.

Kentrell Parker’s sister, Keoka, said that during the many visits she has made to Angola, not once has she seen a nurse check on her brother or any other inmate. Instead, it’s the inmate orderlies — untrained men who in many cases have been convicted of violent crimes — who care for the patients.

“The certified people — the people with degrees, the nurses — they don’t turn my brother over, they don’t feed him, they don’t wash his face, they don’t give him therapy or exercise him,” Keoka Parker said. “They don’t even try to pretend to show compassion.”

The Department of Corrections didn’t respond to questions from Verite News and ProPublica about the complaints by Parker’s family; in documents filed in response to his lawsuit, it denied all allegations related to him.

Like her mother, Keoka Parker said she lives in terror of a phone call from the prison informing her that her brother has died because of medical complications or neglect.

Keoka Parker (Kathleen Flynn, special to ProPublica)

For Lois Ratcliff, whose son spent several years in Angola’s hospital after an infection paralyzed him from the waist down, that fear was realized.

Ratcliff said she visited her son, Farrell Sampier, at least every other weekend in the prison hospital between 2013 and 2019. She often sat and talked with Parker. Seeing them suffer needlessly left her so depressed, she said, that she contemplated suicide. Ratcliff often wondered whether the cruelty was the point.

“I’ll never be able to get that out my head, the things I seen, and how they treat the people,” she said.

During a 2018 visit, Ratcliff said, she found Parker lying in his bed, his face surrounded by flies. The nurses did nothing and refused to let her help him, she said. Unable to swat the flies as they buzzed about, Parker did the only thing he could to bring himself some relief: He ate them.

Case Study: “Patient 38” Locked in an Isolation Room With a Serious Infection

– U.S. District Judge Shelly Dick

Dick, the federal judge, cited a medical expert’s conclusion that “Patient 38” had died because of delayed medical care as one example of Angola’s substandard care.

This inmate, who had an artificial heart valve and suffered from diabetes, hypertension and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, developed symptoms of a potentially life-threatening infection, Dick wrote. In response, Angola’s medical staff treated him for the flu, giving him Tylenol and an antiviral drug, and locked him in a room, a medical expert for the plaintiffs testified.

The inmate’s condition worsened over the next three days, when his lab results showed signs of sepsis, a bacterial infection and kidney failure, Dick wrote. On the third morning, his vital signs indicated he had gone into shock, but there’s no record that a doctor provided care, according to medical experts for the plaintiffs. Based on his vital signs, the plaintiffs’ experts wrote, the patient “should have been sent to a hospital. Instead, he received no care.”

About an hour later, the patient was found on the floor of his isolation room, the judge wrote. Staff tried to revive him, but he was pronounced dead at a local hospital after cardiorespiratory arrest stemming from pneumonia, the judge wrote.

A medical expert hired by the state said the patient’s care met constitutional standards and that it was appropriate to treat him for flu rather than pneumonia. “The Court is dumbfounded to understand how treating these symptoms as flu can be justified without so much as a physical examination,” Dick wrote.

In 2015, Parker and Sampier were among a dozen named plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit against the Department of Corrections; the agency’s secretary, James LeBlanc; Angola’s warden; and the assistant warden in charge of medical care. The suit alleged that the prison’s medical care caused inmates to suffer serious harm, including the “exacerbation of existing conditions, permanent disability, disfigurement, and even death.”

Dick ruled in favor of the plaintiffs in 2021. In a November 2023 opinion supporting that ruling, she concluded that the prison knew inmates were sick but failed to provide them with adequate treatment, worsening their conditions and in several cases leading to their deaths. That 100-page opinion confirms many of the allegations made by Parker’s family: untrained inmates doing the work of nurses, patients locked in isolation rooms, unsanitary conditions and a medical staff that routinely ignored patients’ needs.

The judge’s ruling came too late for Ratcliff. In 2019, her 51-year-old son died at an outside hospital while in Angola’s custody. His autopsy indicated that he had suffered a stroke.

The state has appealed Dick’s ruling; it went before the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals this month. Newly elected Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, who was Landry’s top lawyer when he held that office, argued that prison administrators have made significant improvements, including the addition of air conditioning to several dorms, telemedicine and specialty clinics.

“I believe that the judges should give us credit for what we have done to improve conditions,” Murrill said in court.

She also pushed back against the very premise of the lawsuit, denying that medical care at the prison was ever lacking or unconstitutional. The state has argued that Dick’s ruling was based largely on a review by plaintiffs’ medical experts of the most difficult cases and that the judge didn’t consider whether problems stemmed from medical error or differences in medical judgment.

“We never conceded there was a violation in the first place,” Murrill told judges.

The Cost of Being Tough on Crime

The legal fight over Angola’s health care system was part of a broader battle to improve conditions within Louisiana’s prisons and unseat the state as the per-capita incarceration capital of the country, if not the world. In 2017, two years after inmates filed suit, a bipartisan coalition of inmate advocates, law enforcement officials and politicians pushed through a package of bills to revamp the state’s criminal justice system and help inmates like Parker.

That effort was hailed nationally and placed Louisiana at the forefront of a movement to combat mass incarceration. But it would be relatively short-lived. Landry would soon promise to roll back most of these changes as he campaigned for governor on a platform of fighting a post-pandemic spike in crime.

Case Study: “Patient 29” Had 108-Degree Temperature, but Prison Staff Didn’t Try to Cool Him

– U.S. District Judge Shelly Dick

This 28-year-old inmate had requested help repeatedly but was never assessed by a medical provider, the judge wrote. In March 2020, the inmate called for help again, complaining of stomach and back pain. He was evaluated by an EMT, but there was no indication that he received any treatment.

That afternoon, the man was found on the floor, foaming at the mouth with a temperature of 108.2 degrees — “obviously a heat stroke,” according to a medical expert who testified for the plaintiffs. Medical staff did not try to cool the inmate with ice, Dick wrote. Instead, they inserted a catheter in an apparent effort to test his urine for illicit drugs.

An expert for the defense testified that there was no reason to administer ice. “You can only do so much when someone isn’t breathing and doesn’t have a heartbeat,” he said. “This was essentially a dead man.”

That, Dick wrote, was the least of the failures. The larger problem, she wrote, is that the inmate’s calls for help were dismissed. The way this patient was treated, she wrote, showed “an attitude of general indifference.”

In a January filing in federal appeals court, lawyers for the state wrote that prison medical staff use ice in heat stroke cases “when appropriate.” Even if the state were to concede that the patient should have been cooled with ice, lawyers argued, “This case would be at most a case of medical negligence.”

In 2017, Department of Corrections officials went to the state Capitol to warn lawmakers that medical costs were taking up an exorbitant portion of their budget. LeBlanc, the corrections secretary, cited one chronically ill inmate who cost the agency more than $1 million a year. He told lawmakers that one of the best ways to tackle the problem was to reduce the prison population, in part by releasing terminally ill or bed-bound inmates.

“I have inmates in Angola that are in fetal positions, who are paralyzed from the neck down, are in hospice,” LeBlanc said in a 2017 interview. “Their life is over, it’s done, they’re finished. Why do we need to keep them in prison? There’s no reason for that. They can spend their last few days with their family.”

Lawmakers responded by dialing back some of the state’s more draconian penalties. They softened a “three strikes” sentencing law that put people in prison for life even for nonviolent offenses and created a medical furlough program that allowed bed-bound inmates and those unable to perform basic self-care to be released to a health care facility. All told, legislation enacted in 2017 resulted in a 26% decrease in the state’s prison population by the end of 2021 and nearly $153 million in savings by June 2022.

While those changes saved money and freed up space in prisons, the programs to release infirm patients were flawed, said Dr. Anjali Niyogi, founder of the Formerly Incarcerated Transitions Clinic and co-author of a legislative task force report about those programs. The process was complicated, it was unclear how decisions were made and prison officials often overruled the opinion of medical professionals, she said.

Case in point: Although Parker was initially sent to a medical facility after he was injured, the Department of Corrections brought him back to Angola. (Janice Parker has a copy of a letter from LeBlanc to Angola’s warden saying it was because Parker’s condition had changed, but her attorney was told years later that it had been because of an unspecified behavioral issue.) Since then, Parker has been repeatedly denied any kind of medical release, even though Angola’s medical director, unit warden and a mental health team have recommended it.

In 2019, prison officials recommended that Kentrell Parker be approved for a medical furlough, which would allow him to serve the remainder of his sentence in a health care facility. Department of Public Safety and Corrections Secretary James LeBlanc declined to move Parker’s case forward to the state Committee on Parole, which has the final say. Parker’s family said LeBlanc has never explained his decision. (Obtained by Verite News and ProPublica. Highlighting by ProPublica.)

The Department of Corrections declined to comment on Parker’s attempts to be released, saying any information would be contained in department documents provided by his family to Verite News and ProPublica.

In 2022, state Sen. Royce Duplessis, D-New Orleans, tried to address shortcomings in the medical release programs. But by then, the political dynamics had shifted. Gov. John Bel Edwards, a moderate Democrat, was on his way out; Landry was taking high-profile stands against crime as he laid the groundwork for his gubernatorial campaign.

Villio, a Landry ally, led the charge against Duplessis’ bill. When advocates contended that even prisoners convicted of violent crimes should be allowed to die with dignity, she responded: “Did the victims of murder have an opportunity to die with dignity? Were the victims of rape dignified in that act?”

She took a similar message into last month’s legislative session as the new chair of the powerful House Committee on the Administration of Criminal Justice. Her bill requiring inmates to serve at least 85% of their sentences represents a dramatic change; today, inmates serve an average of 40%, largely because of credit earned for good behavior, said Austin, the consultant who projected how Villio’s bill would affect the state’s prison population.

But Villio told fellow lawmakers that her bills raising the minimum time served and ending parole wouldn’t increase the prison population or spending. She reasoned that because the bills would create certainty in sentencing, they would spur judges to issue shorter sentences. “There is no intent to ramp up the prison population,” she said in a February legislative committee hearing.

The Legislative Fiscal Office, however, concluded otherwise. The bill ending parole could add between $5.7 million and $14.2 million to the Department of Corrections’ costs, legislative staffers wrote. The truth in sentencing bill would “likely result in a significant increase” in spending, they wrote — at least $5 million in the first full fiscal year, based on Department of Corrections figures. The department estimated those costs would increase every month.

Landry’s current budget proposal would increase funding for the Corrections Department by about $53 million, or 7.4%, but it does not project a significant expansion in the incarcerated population, nor would it increase health care funding.

Tennessee attorney David Louis Raybin, who helped draft a truth in sentencing law there in 1979, said he knows what Louisiana is in for. Tennessee’s law was repealed six years later, after a string of riots in the state’s overcrowded prisons. But in 2022, Tennessee lawmakers adopted yet another truth in sentencing law over Raybin’s objections.

“It takes about three years for this to have its effect. But once it does, it hits with a vengeance,” said Raybin, a self-described conservative Democrat who previously worked as a prosecutor and helped draft the state’s death penalty statute. “You guys are going to get whacked down there. Your population is going to go through the ceiling.”

Three days after the legislative session ended, Janice Parker visited her son. He was in severe pain from a distended stomach and a blockage in his catheter. She said the prison’s medical staff didn’t answer her questions about what was wrong and refused to send him to a hospital.

As she sat by her son’s bedside and held his limp hand, she didn’t have the heart to tell him that their fears of what would happen if Landry became governor had come true: Louisiana was returning to its punitive roots.

Though her son still is technically eligible for some sort of medical release, she worried that after 14 years of suffering and disappointment, news of the changes would sever his last thread of hope.

Janice Parker holds a photo of herself with her son that was taken as she visited him at Angola. (Kathleen Flynn, special to ProPublica)

Case study document illustrations by ProPublica.

This post was originally published on Articles and Investigations – ProPublica.

by Anna Clark

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

A bill moving through the Michigan House of Representatives would fix flaws in a 7-year-old compensation fund that the state set up to help wrongfully convicted people rebuild their lives.

Sponsored by Rep. Joey Andrews, a Democrat, along with 14 other Democrats, the bill would be the first substantive reform of the Wrongful Imprisonment Compensation Act’s eligibility requirements. If it becomes law, many people who would otherwise be denied compensation would become eligible for relief.

“This is going to be huge for a lot of people,” said Kenneth Nixon, co-founder and president of the nonprofit Organization of Exonerees. He spent nearly 16 years in prison before his conviction was vacated.

WICA, passed in 2016, was intended as a lifeline for people who experienced extreme injustice by offering $50,000 for each year of wrongful imprisonment. But, as a ProPublica investigation detailed in January, the bipartisan law’s narrow requirements have resulted in delays in compensation, partial settlements or even complete denials. Only people whose cases are overturned based on “clear and convincing” new evidence that they weren’t a perpetrator or an accomplice have been eligible for WICA compensation, a higher standard of proof than for other civil claims. This has meant that some former prisoners — for instance, those whose convictions were overturned for insufficient evidence — can be left out.

In Charles Perry’s case, which ProPublica highlighted, judges acknowledged that there was new evidence of innocence, but because his conviction was officially overturned due to prosecutorial misconduct and ineffective counsel, he got nothing.

Michigan has had 173 wrongful convictions in state courts since 1989, the fifth-most in the country, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. After an average of nearly 11 years in prison, many of these individuals are released with no home, no job prospects, no transportation and no resources to navigate trauma.

For years, advocates, a state commission and even some state Supreme Court justices have urged the Legislature to revisit the law. “I don’t like administering legal rules that I can’t explain to the people they impact,” wrote one justice in a concurring statement in Perry’s case. “Please fix it, legislators.”

On several key matters, the new bill proposes doing so. Significantly, it would change the standard of proof for former inmates to a “preponderance” of evidence showing they were not the perpetrator or an accomplice, instead of “clear and convincing” evidence, which is considered more daunting. In testimony to the House Criminal Justice Committee in March, where he serves as majority vice chair, Andrews said the higher standard is usually reserved for when the government takes away a person’s rights.

It’s “a very unusual burden of proof to be using in a civil matter,” he said, and it works against “the purpose of compensating the innocent,” especially in old cases when evidence has deteriorated and witnesses are no longer available.

The bill would also allow certain exceptions to the new evidence requirement. An individual would also qualify for relief if there was insufficient evidence to support their conviction, or if new evidence was available but the court reversed or vacated their conviction for other reasons.

Wolf Mueller, an attorney who said he represented at least 20 WICA claims, said the changes would make a big difference to a law he described as poorly written.

“If you shouldn’t have been tried in the first place, because there was insufficient existing evidence to convict you, then you should be compensated,” Mueller said. “You are just as much wrongfully convicted as somebody else who was lucky enough to find new evidence.”

At the committee hearing, Robyn Frankel, an assistant attorney general who directs the office’s Conviction Integrity Unit and heads the section responding to WICA claims, testified for the bill. The proposed changes, she said, would “remedy a number of difficulties that we were experiencing in the application of the law.”

For example, Frankel said, “removing the requirement that new evidence be the reason for the dismissal was prompted by our realization that more often than not, specific explanations are not provided at the time a case is dismissed.”

The bill would also make a number of other reforms. Among them: Pretrial detention would count as time spent wrongfully imprisoned, and people pardoned by the governor would be eligible to file a claim.

An analysis by the House Fiscal Agency said the bill would result in “an indeterminate, but likely marginal annual increase in claims and awards” for compensation. Average yearly compensation under WICA over the last four fiscal years has totaled about $9.8 million, it said.

Two weeks ago, the House Criminal Justice Committee voted to favorably report a substitute version of the bill, tweaking it to account for the pardon process. Eight members supported the recommendation, three opposed and two abstained.

Rep. Graham Filler, the committee’s minority vice chair, abstained after asking at the hearing about why there’d be a different standard of proof for a WICA claim than for a conviction.

To that, Marla Mitchell-Cichon, counsel to the Innocence Project at Thomas M. Cooley Law School, said the difference is that a WICA claim is not a criminal matter. A full House vote is anticipated in April or May, a legislative aide to Andrews said in an email.

As the bill moves forward, Andrews said in an interview with ProPublica that he hopes more colleagues sign on, including Republicans. Next step after the House would be the state Senate, which also is led by Democrats.

If the bill becomes law, wrongfully convicted people whose cases were overturned based on insufficient evidence would have an 18-month window to show they are eligible for compensation under the new reforms. However, people who were ineligible for reasons other than insufficient evidence would still not qualify, and people whose claims were already denied, or ended in settlements, would not be eligible to file again.

Kenneth Nixon, who received partial compensation after his conviction was overturned, stands outside of a property he purchased with the goal of opening an adult foster care home there. The WICA settlement has helped, he said. “It’s a project to help people. I want to be helpful wherever I can to society,” said Nixon. “The cash has helped with getting stuff done.” (Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica)

Nixon, on behalf of the Organization of Exonerees, is pushing for the bill to go still further. In a March 11 letter to the committee, he argued that past claimants should be allowed to benefit from the reforms. “Fairness requires that the positive changes to WICA benefit all exonerees, not just those with claims in the future,” he wrote. In 2022, Nixon received a settlement for less than he anticipated from WICA.

In the letter, Nixon also expressed concern that innocent people whose cases were overturned for reasons other than insufficient or new evidence — such as improper jury instruction or ineffective counsel — could still be excluded. And, he said, the compensation amount should be adjusted yearly for inflation, as the $50,000 allotted when WICA passed in 2016 is worth less in 2024. (Had the original amount kept up with inflation, it would now be about $64,700 per year.)

It’s important to get WICA right, Mueller said. The compensation “is not just life-changing from a monetary standpoint; it’s a dignity standpoint,” he said. “Somebody recognized that they had been wronged and wanted to make it right.”

This post was originally published on Articles and Investigations – ProPublica.

by Clifton Adcock and Garrett Yalch, The Frontier, and Sebastian Rotella and Kirsten Berg, ProPublica

This article was produced for ProPublica in partnership with The Frontier. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published. Additional funding for this story was provided by the Pulitzer Center.

Qiu He remembers sitting handcuffed on her front porch, her two small children huddled next to her, as state anti-drug agents carrying semi-automatic rifles trooped in and out of her house.

Serving a search warrant, the agents had forced open the front door and arrested her after she allegedly resisted them, according to an affidavit. During the raid last April, agents said they found ledgers, bags of marijuana, a loaded .380-caliber pistol and other evidence they collected as part of an investigation alleging that she is a central figure in an illegal scheme involving at least 23 marijuana operations in central Oklahoma.

She spent the night in jail. Almost a year later, authorities have still not charged her with a crime. But a few days after her arrest, a judge signed an order freezing her bank accounts and agents seized almost a million dollars from the accounts as suspected criminal proceeds. She is fighting the state’s action to confiscate the money, saying she did nothing illegal.

The ledgers, He said, were records for her legitimate businesses. Her biggest tenants are marijuana businesses, which deal mostly in cash, as does the clientele of her consulting firm catering to Chinese immigrants. The gun, she said, was legally purchased by her husband.

“At this point, I don’t love Oklahoma,” said He, who also uses the first name Tina. “I don’t feel safe here. I don’t feel secure here.”

On a recent sunny Sunday afternoon, she was at the bubble tea shop she owns in Edmond, the upscale suburb of Oklahoma City where she lives. The stylishly dressed 39-year-old wore a fuzzy black baseball cap over her short, burgundy-dyed hair. She was joined by a friend, another entrepreneur in the marijuana business, who asked to be identified only as Sharon, the English name she uses.

The eatery, called Oklaboba, is a cheerful, brightly lit space, and business was brisk. But the conversation at the women’s table was somber. Sharon mentioned the murder in January of an Asian friend: Robbers invaded his marijuana farm in rural Okfuskee County and shot him in the neck. There have been no arrests.

The two women said many Asian immigrants they know invested their life savings in Oklahoma’s marijuana boom only to see their licenses revoked, their crop destroyed and their assets seized when authorities accuse them of operating illegally. They said anti-Asian bias plays a role in the state’s crackdown on marijuana growers and has caused people who are trying to do business legally to lose everything.

Since the number of licensed marijuana farms peaked at more than 9,400 in December 2021, the Oklahoma Medical Marijuana Authority and the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Control have taken a more aggressive approach toward license compliance.

Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond also formed his office’s own organized crime task force that regularly conducts raids on alleged illegal operations.

“We are sending a clear message to Mexican drug cartels, Chinese crime syndicates and all others who are endangering public safety through these heinous operations,” Drummond said. “And that message is to get the hell out of Oklahoma.”

Jeremiah Ross, an Oklahoma City attorney who worked with He, said he has represented dozens of Asian clients accused of breaking marijuana laws over the past few years. Ross said he sees a distinct anti-Asian bias in marijuana licensing and law enforcement.

“The white folks and the locals aren’t having any problems with their [license] renewals,” Ross said. “They’re not having armed guards show up at their grow facility and chop all their plants down.”

Mark Woodward, spokesperson for the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics, rejected such allegations. He said the agency “has identified and shut down illegal grows, as well as made arrests on illegal farms tied to organized crime from China, Mexico, Russia, Bulgaria, Armenia and the Italian mob over the last three years, as well as numerous American-owned operations.”

Woodward said he did not have readily available information on He’s case and why she has not been charged.

Porsha Riley, spokesperson for the Oklahoma Medical Marijuana Authority, said the agency is committed to fairness and equity for all license holders.

“We want to assure the public and the medical marijuana industry that we do not discriminate against any licensee,” Riley said. “Our enforcement and compliance efforts are conducted impartially, without bias or prejudice. We remain dedicated to upholding these principles and ensuring a level playing field for all.”

Sharon, who asked that her full name be withheld because she fears retaliation, said she no longer trusts the state to regulate her marijuana business fairly.

“Tell me it’s not racism, because Asians are absolutely feeling it,” Sharon said. Referring to the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics, she said, “A lot of people are afraid to poke the bear.”

He’s encounters with law enforcement remind her of the authoritarian regime in her native land, which she left seeking freedom, she said.

“In China, there is one voice and you are not allowed to speak,” she said. “Oklahoma is worse than China.”

Her defiance is atypical in a community that tends to avoid public conflict — and criticism of the Chinese government. ProPublica and The Frontier reported last week that Chinese organized crime has come to dominate the illicit marijuana market in Oklahoma and across the U.S., and that the criminal networks have alleged connections to the Chinese state. He’s story offers a view from inside an immigrant community that she says feels besieged on multiple fronts.

She said she studied business administration and management at Renmin University in Beijing and came to the United States in 2010. In 2020, after years of making good money in commercial real estate development in New York, the economic and cultural disruption of the pandemic made her think it was time for a change, she said.

At the time, she lived in Flushing, a large Chinese immigrant enclave. She was “a city girl” who couldn’t find Oklahoma on the map, she said. But she liked country music and thought a slower-paced life on the plains would let her spend more time with her kids.

“I was thinking I wanted to restart my life,” she said. “So I wanted to go out to see what’s going on.”

She arrived at the peak of Oklahoma’s marijuana boom: a get-rich-quick frenzy of investors, workers, gangsters and money converging from across the country and as far away as China. At first, she said, she wanted to develop ventures serving the burgeoning Chinese population. She opened Oklaboba and bought rental properties in Oklahoma City. Like many other newcomers, she shuttled back and forth with her children to New York, where her husband remained.

She said she got involved in marijuana after helping the owner of a farm who she says had been taken advantage of by a law firm operating a “straw owner” scheme. The 2018 medical marijuana law requires marijuana farms to be 75% owned by residents who have lived in the state at least two years. But some attorneys in the state have paid longtime residents to pose as majority owners to get licenses and buy property. With He’s help, the man was able to get full ownership of the business in his own name and get out from under the straw owner arrangement, she said.

He said she established a consulting firm for investors in the cannabis industry and accumulated hundreds of Chinese clients. Records show she was the registered agent for numerous marijuana and real estate holding companies, and she owned the properties on which many of those companies were located.

She says it was all legitimate. But she soon found herself in the crosshairs of law enforcement. The investigation of a suspected trafficking ring led state anti-drug agents to a New York commercial real estate developer who was an associate of He, court records show. Authorities allege that she was his business partner in marijuana-related activity in Oklahoma, but she said it was only a buyer-seller relationship, as she had bought businesses with active marijuana licenses from him.

Investigators came to suspect that the developer and He were “heavily involved” in the illicit marijuana trade and orchestrating straw owner schemes, court records say. Agents busted a series of illegal grows allegedly linked to He and the developer. When agents raided two sites one morning last April and a tenant called He, she rushed to the property to confront them and demand a search warrant, court records say. What happened next, He said, felt like retaliation for challenging the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics.

That evening, a well-armed team of agents showed up at her house with another search warrant. The warrant shows it was requested by agents after the confrontation with He at her business and was signed by a judge only minutes before the raid on her house that night.

The raid left her children terrified, her marriage under strain and her house in shambles, she said.

“My house was destroyed,” she said. “I couldn’t do anything. The jail, they were treating me like a criminal.”

Although He said the pistol that agents found was legally owned by her husband, not her, she said she has taken firearms courses and owns a gun for protection in an increasingly dangerous business.

Ross said when he heard that He’s house was being searched, he was surprised. She was a small business owner, someone who helped the Chinese community in Oklahoma City, the mom of two young boys, not some mobster, Ross said.

It was already night when Ross arrived at He’s house to see if she needed help. She and the children were still sitting on the porch as agents continued their search. Ross was denied entry by law enforcement.

The agents “snatched her up, left her kids there, took her to jail and didn’t release her until the following morning. And they never filed a single charge,” Ross said. “Why in God’s name are they going after her? This is out of control.”

Despite her ordeal, He considers herself lucky because other Chinese immigrants don’t have the financial means or the language skills to fight back. Marijuana in Oklahoma has become a “lose-lose” scenario thanks to what she called a byzantine system choked with costly compliance requirements and arbitrary decisions.

“You set up a game and didn’t know how to play it,” she said. “And yet they call me the super game-player.”

Many Chinese investors have lost faith in the Oklahoma authorities, fearing they will be the next target, she said. Once her legal problems are resolved, she wants to go somewhere else. Maybe Maryland, which just legalized recreational marijuana. Maybe it’s time to think big, she said: a marijuana Starbucks, a marijuana Uber.

At the same time, she’s not sure it’s worth it.

“I don’t want to do this business anymore,” she said. “I don’t want the pressure.”

This post was originally published on Articles and Investigations – ProPublica.

by Sebastian Rotella and Kirsten Berg, ProPublica, and Garrett Yalch and Clifton Adcock, The Frontier

This article was produced for ProPublica in partnership with The Frontier. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published. Additional funding for this story was provided by the Pulitzer Center.

The photos look like a routine encounter between a senior Chinese diplomat and immigrants in the American heartland: dutiful smiles, casual clothes, a teapot on a table, Chinese and U.S. flags on the wall.

But behind the images, there is a potentially concerning story. During two trips to Oklahoma, Consul General Zhu Di of the Chinese embassy visited a cultural association that has been a target of investigations into Chinese mafias that dominate the state’s billion-dollar marijuana industry. And the community leaders posing with him in the photos? A number of them have pleaded guilty or been prosecuted or investigated for drug-related crimes, according to court documents, public records, photos and social media posts.

“He’s meeting with known criminals,” said Donnie Anderson, the director of the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Control, in an interview.

There is no indication of wrongdoing by the consul general, who is one of China’s top diplomats in the United States. Still, the encounters in Oklahoma reflect a pattern of contacts around the world between China’s authoritarian government and diaspora leaders linked to criminal activity — a subject of increasing concern among Western national security officials, human rights groups and Chinese dissidents.

U.S. and foreign national security officials have alleged that the Chinese state maintains a tacit alliance with Chinese organized crime in the U.S. and across the world. Mobsters overtly support pro-Beijing causes and covertly provide services overseas: engaging in political influence work, moving illicit funds offshore for the Chinese elite and helping persecute dissidents, according to Western officials, court cases and human rights groups. Chinese officials reciprocate by tolerating and sometimes supporting their illicit activities, according to those sources.

And this alleged state-mafia partnership has used influential Chinese cultural organizations in foreign countries to project power, according to Western officials. As ProPublica has reported, the leaders of diaspora associations who interact with Chinese and local governments in Europe and elsewhere include accused organized crime figures.

In the United States, Chinese criminal networks have expanded their wealth and influence by taking over much of the nation’s illicit marijuana trade, ProPublica reported last week.

It was in that context that the consul general traveled to Oklahoma.

In November 2022, a Chinese gunman killed four fellow immigrants and wounded another at an illegal marijuana farm in Oklahoma. The consul general hurried to Oklahoma City to discuss the murders with representatives of the community and offer help to relatives of the victims, according to Chinese officials, a participant in a meeting and media reports and photos. Zhu returned for another visit in June, photos and media reports show.

During both trips, meetings took place at the local branch of the American Fujian Association on Classen Boulevard, which in 2020 was the scene of a violent clash that left a convicted criminal with a gunshot wound and two others facing trial. Two years after that shooting, one of the accused assailants died and the other was wounded in the quadruple murder at their marijuana farm. Law enforcement agencies have also investigated the association’s headquarters, a ground-floor suite in a minimall, as a suspected illegal casino and a hub of other illicit activity, according to court records and senior officials.

(Li Zhaoyin via SinoVision, annotations by ProPublica)

During a second visit in June 2023, shown below, the diplomat met with some of the same people, as well as Chuan Min Zhang (circled), who had pleaded guilty to drug-related offenses.

(Li Zhaoyin via SinoVision, annotation by ProPublica)

Although the consul general did not respond to questions addressed to him for this article, officials at the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C., said he simply did his duty by going to Oklahoma in response to the deaths of Chinese nationals. While declining to discuss the visits, a consular official said in an interview that the embassy was not aware of the crimes linked to the association and the people who met with Zhu.

In a written statement sent by email, the embassy’s spokesperson, Liu Pengyu, said Chinese officials travel to different states “to understand the living conditions and development of overseas Chinese in the United States, help them better observe the laws and regulations of their country of residence, and encourage them to actively serve and integrate into local communities so as to play a positive role in promoting friendship between the peoples of China and the U.S.”

But U.S. law enforcement experts see a troubling global pattern in ongoing relationships between Chinese government officials and community leaders with criminal ties. Because Chinese officials closely monitor the diaspora, it’s very likely they know about such ties, the experts said.

“These diaspora associations are tools of the Chinese state,” said Donald Im, a former senior official at the Drug Enforcement Administration. “The presence of criminal elements in the leadership suggests an alliance, directly or indirectly, between the Chinese state and organized crime.”

Freedom House, a human rights organization, summed up China’s global reach in a report in 2021, describing a “framework of influence that encompasses cultural associations, diaspora groups, and in some cases, organized crime networks.”

The activities of the 14K triad, one of the Chinese criminal groups that are the dominant money launderers for Latin American drug lords and the Chinese Communist Party elite, highlight another suspected connection to the Chinese state, current and former law enforcement officials say.

The 14K has expanded its portfolio to play a command role over marijuana trafficking networks in Oklahoma and other states, according to Anderson, Im and other current and former officials. The Treasury Department has accused a Macao boss of the 14K of being prominent in the Chinese Communist Party and advancing China’s foreign influence through business ventures and Chinese cultural groups in Asia and the Pacific.

And U.S. federal agents are investigating cases in which Chinese provincial officials allegedly work with criminal groups to get drug money that they then use to finance infrastructure projects in China or abroad in the Belt and Road Initiative, the international public works program that has expanded China’s global might, according to current and former U.S. officials.

“All these provinces are competing with each other and using criminal networks and triads to find revenue for government projects,” Im said. “The marijuana industry in the U.S. is benefiting regional governors and provinces in China. Drug money is like an ad hoc bank for Chinese economic projects and policies.”

Oklahoma authorities admit that it is hard for them to get a grip on the influx of criminal groups, let alone trace a trail back to the Chinese state. Monitoring the activities of foreign diplomats, officials and spies is the jurisdiction of federal agencies working in the secretive realm of counterintelligence.

Nevertheless, state and federal agents have detected interactions between their suspects and Chinese government officials using surveillance, open sources, and photos and communications found in electronic devices, Anderson and other officials said. And the brazen movement of large amounts of money between China and the players in the illicit marijuana trade shows that Chinese officials are either aware or involved, the officials said.

“Our investigations indicate that there are Chinese officials pulling the strings, making money off of and involved in the illegal marijuana industry in Oklahoma,” Anderson said. “Money is invested here and it’s from China, to set up organizations. These are transnational organizations. And money is going back to China.”

Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said during a committee hearing last year that the Chinese government seems “fully aware” of marijuana-related organized crime activity in the United States, but it is “looking away … to increase a negative influence on Americans.”

The Chinese embassy spokesperson called such accusations “groundless,” “irresponsible speculation” and “slander.”

“We urge relevant sides to respect facts, stop fabricating lies, stop discrediting and smearing the Chinese government and diplomatic officials, and stop fomenting and spreading anti-China narratives,” Liu said.

Checkered Pasts

Many owners and workers at Oklahoma marijuana farms are Fujianese immigrants who arrived in recent years from other U.S. states, particularly New York, according to law enforcement officials and Chinese American leaders.

Some are law-abiding. Others are gunslinging gangsters. And still others operate in a gray area created by the national trend toward decriminalization, which has reduced risks and increased rewards associated with black-market marijuana.

ProPublica and The Frontier have identified over a dozen national leaders of Fujianese associations from the East Coast involved in Oklahoma’s marijuana boom. A number of these leaders, who include U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents, have suspected or confirmed links to illegal activity. Yet they interact with Chinese diplomats, Communist Party leaders and even Chinese security officials, according to photos, media reports and interviews. Some also mix with U.S. politicians.

A case in point: an accused drug trafficker named Yunda Chen, known as “Big Boss Yunda,” who traveled regularly between his home in Atlanta and his marijuana farms in Oklahoma, according to court records.

Using vehicle surveillance and a drone, state anti-drug agents followed couriers working for Chen as they transported bales of marijuana and cash shipments, some in Oklahoma and others that were destined for New York, Tennessee and other states in the national black market, court records say. The agents recruited an undercover informant — a local resident whom Chen paid $2,500 and a pound of dope a month to appear on registration documents and medical marijuana licenses as majority owner of his farms, court records say. FBI translators helped translate intercepted phone calls in which Chen used code words to set up deals, talked to suspects linked to alleged trafficking and money laundering in other states, and discussed a fight among more than 20 combatants over a debt in New York, court records say.

Authorities arrested Chen in Florida in December 2022 and charged him and five others in a trafficking conspiracy. Agents raided five farms in Oklahoma and seized nearly 50,000 marijuana plants and several guns, court documents say. They also found workers living in “poor and unsafe” conditions, said Mark Woodward, spokesperson for the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics.

Last June, prosecutors hit Chen with an additional charge of witness intimidation after he sent a text message warning an accused accomplice “not to talk about the things that don’t concern you” in upcoming testimony, court records say. (Chen is awaiting trial and has not yet entered pleas because defense lawyers requested delays of arraignments. He and his lawyers did not respond to requests for comment.)

The aid of the FBI and the rare use of wiretaps in a state case reflect its significance. As far as investigators were concerned, Chen was a major trafficker.

“He’s as big a player as any we’ve touched,” Woodward said. “He was running a more organized system than many we have dealt with — large scale, more hierarchy.”

In the simultaneously tightknit and far-flung subculture of Fujianese immigrants, though, Chen is a well-connected leader.

He lives in a large house on several acres bordering a country club in suburban Atlanta and owns a chain of restaurants and a catering business, public records show. (In 2012, court records show, he agreed to pay $225,000 in back wages to settle a Labor Department lawsuit accusing him of wage theft from employees who endured conditions that a federal investigator described as “deplorable.” Chen denied wrongdoing and disputed some of the findings in the settlement.)

While serving as executive vice chair of the American Lianjiang Association, which represents people from a coastal district of Fujian, Chen has joined Chinese diplomats and Communist Party officials at U.S. events, according to media reports and photos posted on social media.

Among those events: In 2017, photos and media reports show he spoke at a reception in Atlanta that was attended by a Chinese consul general who was based in Houston. In 2019, he participated with prominent Chinese Communist Party members in a gala and symposium held by his association in New York to “conscientiously study” President Xi Jinping’s campaign for the “reunification” of China and Taiwan — a perennial flashpoint in military tensions with the United States.

Chen is also active in U.S. politics. He went to Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp’s inauguration ceremony in Atlanta in 2019 and donated $6,600 to the governor’s general election campaign, according to public records, photos and social media posts. He has contributed thousands to other local politicians and socialized with them, according to public records and media reports. He received an award from a minority business association in 2019. (A spokesperson for the Kemp campaign declined to comment.)

As of last year, Yunda Chen remained a “specially appointed policy consultant” of the Lianjiang association, according to a Chinese media report.

Like the Big Boss in Georgia, Virginia-based businessman Bi Chao Chen (no relation to Yunda) has interacted with Chinese diplomats, Fujian provincial officials and even representatives of the Ministry of Public Security — the law enforcement juggernaut that oversees China’s police forces — media reports and photos show.

In 2018, he was among leaders who met with a Ministry of Public Security delegation that visited New York, according to a news report that gave few details about the meeting. Photos and media reports also show him at a 2019 dinner with leaders of a powerful organization that is part of the United Front, the influence and intelligence wing of the Chinese Communist Party.

U.S. prosecutors alleged last year that officials of the United Front worked with the public security ministry to set up an illegal Chinese police station in a Fujianese association in New York to monitor and intimidate U.S. dissidents, according to a federal criminal complaint and statements by federal officials. It was one of dozens of such stations directed by Chinese security forces and operating in diaspora associations around the world. The two Chinese-American defendants in the New York case have pleaded not guilty, and the Chinese government has denied any illegal activity on the part of the overseas police stations.

Bi Chao Chen, who appears in a photo with a defendant in the federal case, has had his own run-ins with the law.

In 2015, he was convicted of assault and battery after he menaced a man with a knife, forced him to the ground and stole $5,000 from him in Hampton, Virginia, court records show. He also has multiple convictions in connection to a wildlife poaching operation he led and an additional arrest for assault and battery in which he was not charged, court records show.

In Oklahoma, he has had ties to at least two marijuana ventures, public records show. His name appears on a state marijuana license, limited liability corporation documents and the front gate of a vast expanse of greenhouses and indoor cultivation structures west of Tulsa whose registered agent was a lawyer now facing trial for hatching fraudulent ownership schemes, court records show. Another person who has a marijuana license registered at the same location was involved in a violent dispute in 2021 that ended in an assailant shooting at her with a pistol, court documents say.

In 2022, DEA agents searched the second location, located on the grounds of a former horse racing track, in an investigation into money laundering and marijuana trafficking in Oklahoma and Colorado that has resulted in three guilty pleas, according to court records, which also show that another defendant awaits trial. Chen has had a limited liability corporation registered at the address of the farm.

Authorities have not charged Bi Chao Chen in those cases. He and a lawyer did not respond to email and phone requests for comment.

Chinese officials are likely aware of the questionable backgrounds of these and other leaders because Chinese intelligence agencies systematically gather granular information on overseas communities, according to Western officials, academic reports, human rights groups and Chinese dissidents.

Many immigrants from Fujian, a coastal province with a history of organized crime and official corruption, come from modest backgrounds and entered the U.S. illegally, said Yaqiu Wang, research director for China, Hong Kong and Taiwan at Freedom House. Because they often visit family or do business in China, they feel pressure to develop good relationships with Chinese officials, she said.

“The CCP has leverage over them,” Wang said. “If you want to go back to China, if you need a passport or you want to clean up a criminal record in China, you need to demonstrate loyalty.”

And if leaders show loyalty, Chinese officials are increasingly willing to engage with them — even those who are organized crime figures, experts said.

“As the Chinese government has been expanding its power across the world, the organized crime connections with the state have grown,” a former national security official said. “They have gotten much closer. Chinese government influence has expanded. There is a lot of incentive to work together.”

The Chinese embassy did not respond to questions about specific cases. In an interview, a Chinese consular official acknowledged that Chinese officials have regular contact with U.S. diaspora associations. But the official rejected the idea that the Chinese government has detailed knowledge about community leaders and works with them even if they are involved in criminal activity.

“We have five million Chinese nationals living in the USA,” said the consular official, who requested anonymity because they are not the official spokesperson. “We just have some connection with different organizations, regardless of specific persons. … We couldn’t be able to know everybody.”

In Oklahoma City, the associations themselves have kept law enforcement busy.

Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, Anderson and other officials told ProPublica and The Frontier that members of Fujianese associations are targets of investigations into organized crime. Leaders of associations in Oklahoma City did not respond to requests for comment.

During a raid last year on the Fuzhou Chamber of Commerce, police busted an illegal casino, arrested three suspects and seized drugs and $79,000 in cash from 18 people, including two who had criminal convictions and several involved in the marijuana industry, according to court documents and public records. Surveillance had detected numerous cars in the parking lot that were connected to narcotics investigations, court records say. (Of the three arrested, one was charged and has pleaded not guilty, another was extradited to Colorado on a warrant in a marijuana cultivation case, and the third has not been charged.)

A block away on Classen Boulevard at the American Fujian Association, city inspectors found card tables, video slot machines and other signs of an illegal casino in 2020, court records show. The police vice squad has investigated alleged gambling in the ground-floor suite, according to court testimony and public records. No charges have been filed in that case. Leaders of the organization did not respond to requests for comment.

Two years after the shooting in 2020 at the association, the two accused assailants became victims in the quadruple murder at the marijuana farm in Kingfisher County. As a result, investigators revisited the 2020 shooting looking for links to organized crime and the farm massacre, and they learned that the killer and some of his victims had spent time at the association.

Despite the troubles of the American Fujian Association, Consul General Zhu chose to meet there with community leaders days after the quadruple murder, according to photos, media reports and a participant in the meeting at the association. During that visit in November 2022, the diplomat talked to relatives of the victims about funeral arrangements and the transport of one of the bodies to New York, according to a media report and a participant at the meeting

Those present included prominent Fujianese figures from New York who have invested in Oklahoma’s marijuana boom, media reports and photos show. One of them was Pan Muyong, a veteran national leader of several groups.

Pan Muyong, circled, at the America Changle Association in Manhattan, where U.S. prosecutors allege an illegal Chinese police station was helping monitor and intimidate dissidents. The blue sign on the left says Fuzhou Police Overseas Service Station. (Louis Zhao/YouTube)

“We are deeply anxious and uneasy,” Pan told the visitors from the embassy, according to a report by SinoVision, a Chinese-language media outlet. “We Chinese operate farms and grow marijuana with the licenses approved by the local government and within the scope of the law, not illegally as reported by the media.”

Pan has been an executive of the America Changle Association in New York, according to media reports and photos. Last year, federal prosecutors charged two other leaders of that association with operating the illegal Chinese police station in Manhattan.

Photos and media reports place Pan with the defendants during the period of time when, according to the federal criminal complaint, they allegedly helped Chinese security forces monitor dissidents in the United States. A video shows Pan giving a speech in the association offices that housed the allegedly illegal police station — with a sign about the station visible on a wall.

Pan interacts regularly with Chinese diplomats and other officials, according to photos and media reports. Last year, he and other pro-Beijing leaders held signs as they protested the visit of Taiwan’s president to New York, video and media reports show. Pan and other Oklahoma-connected leaders are also active in New York politics, attending campaign events and making donations, according to photos, media reports and campaign records.

Pan has not been charged with a crime. He did not respond to emails and declined a telephone request for comment.

But four people who posed for photos with him and the consul in Oklahoma City have pleaded guilty or been charged or investigated for offenses including drug trafficking, illegal firearms possession and obstructing officers, court records show.

Ling Chen, for example, pleaded guilty last June to maintaining a place for selling drugs in a case in which authorities confiscated $42,000 from her and two other defendants, court records show. Chuan Min Zhang pleaded guilty in 2021 to possession of cocaine and acquiring drug proceeds, a felony that resulted in the forfeiture of $32,000, court records show. Ke Xiang Chen has pleaded not guilty and awaits trial after an arrest last October for alleged possession of ketamine and ecstasy and acquiring drug proceeds, court records show.

None of the three responded to requests for comment in emails, by phone and through lawyers.

The fourth, Qiu He, was arrested last April in the investigation of an alleged network that set up illegal marijuana farms, court records show. She has not been charged with a crime and denied any wrongdoing in an interview with ProPublica and The Frontier. She is fighting to recover almost a million dollars seized by anti-drug agents.

He, who had a grandparent from Fujian, said members of the community asked her to attend the 2022 meeting with the consul general to translate Mandarin for people who only spoke a Fujianese dialect. But she said she knows little about the association and has not returned.

In addition to He, three other people in the photos with the consul general have surfaced in investigations of fraudulent owner schemes for marijuana farms. Although they have not been charged with crimes in relation to those investigations, Ling Chen, Jun Can Zhang and Weixing Feng have jointly owned marijuana farms with people who are being prosecuted or investigated for serving as paid straw owners for dozens of growing operations, court documents and public records show. They did not respond to requests for comment.

Ling Chen, Ke Xiang Chen and Junli Zhang also managed or had an ownership interest in Lucky Zhang’s, a restaurant and nightclub near the Fujianese association that was outfitted with high-tech lighting and individual karaoke rooms, court documents and public records show. Detectives zeroed in on the club as a suspected site of human trafficking after they learned that young Asian women living at a house were being transported regularly to Lucky Zhang’s and spending the night there, court documents say. Police raided the club on Nov. 5, 2022, and again on Feb. 15, 2023, making arrests and seizing drugs and cash, according to court documents, interviews and social media posts.

The November raid resulted in the prosecution in which the manager, Ling Chen, pleaded guilty, court records show. Another defendant arrested at the club pleaded not guilty and awaits trial on charges of acquiring drug proceeds and possession of ketamine with intent to distribute, according to court records.

Junli Zhang did not respond to email and phone requests for comment. Zhang was also the chair of the association on Classen Boulevard during both of the consul general’s visits, according to Chinese media reports.

Last June, the consul general returned to Classen Boulevard for the second visit. Zhu’s stated goal was to gain “an in-depth understanding of the production, life and work conditions of the farms run by overseas Chinese in Oklahoma,” according to Chinese-language media reports. He listened to “a work report” from the association’s chair, one article said.

“Overseas Chinese will always be members of the big family of the Chinese nation,” the diplomat said, according to the media report. “No matter where you go, the eyes of the motherland are never far away and are always watching and caring about you.”

This post was originally published on Articles and Investigations – ProPublica.

by Sebastian Rotella and Kirsten Berg, ProPublica, and Garrett Yalch and Clifton Adcock, The Frontier

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. This article was produced in partnership with The Frontier.

It seemed an unlikely spot for a showdown between Chinese gangsters: a marijuana farm on the prairie in Kingfisher County, Oklahoma.

On a Sunday evening in late November 2022, a blue Toyota Corolla sped down a dirt-and-gravel road in the twilight, passing hay meadows and columns of giant wind turbines spinning on the horizon. The Corolla braked and turned, headlights sweeping across prairie grass, and entered the driveway of a 10-acre compound filled with circular huts and row after row of greenhouses. Past a ranch house, the sedan stopped outside a large detached garage.

The driver, Chen Wu, burst out of the car with a 9 mm pistol in his hand. Balding and muscular, he had worked at the farm and invested in the illegal marijuana operation.

Charging into the garage, Wu confronted the five men and one woman working inside. Like him, they were immigrants from China. Piles of marijuana leaves cluttered the brightly lit room, covering a table and stuffed into plastic bins and cardboard boxes.

Stacks and boxes of marijuana fill the garage where four people were shot to death on a farm, shown in a still image from a sheriff’s deputy’s bodycam video. (Kingfisher County Sheriff’s Department)

Wu aimed his gun at He Qiang Chen, a 56-year-old ex-convict known at the farm as “the Boss.” Chen had a temper; he was awaiting trial in the beating and shooting of a man two years earlier at a Chinese community center in Oklahoma City.

Before Chen could make a move, Wu shot him in the right knee. The boss fell to the floor, writhing in pain.

Wu held the others at gunpoint. He said Chen owed him $300,000 and told his hostages they had half an hour to get him the money.

If they didn’t, he said, he would kill them all.

Both the shooter and his victim were from Fujian, a coastal province known for mafias, immigration and corruption. They had come to America and joined a wave of new players rushing into the nation’s billion-dollar marijuana boom: Chinese mobsters who roam from state to state, harvesting drugs and cash and overwhelming law enforcement with their resources and elusiveness.

Now, their itinerant odysseys had collided in this remote outpost in the heartland. The clash left four people dead and unveiled an international underworld of dangerous dimensions.

Wild West

The bloodshed in Kingfisher County made national headlines, highlighting Oklahoma’s role as the latest and wildest frontier in the marijuana underworld.

From California to Maine, Chinese organized crime has come to dominate much of the nation’s illicit marijuana trade, an investigation by ProPublica and The Frontier has found. Along with the explosive growth of this criminal industry, the gangsters have unleashed lawlessness: violence, drug trafficking, money laundering, gambling, bribery, document fraud, bank fraud, environmental damage and theft of water and electricity.

Chinese organized crime “has taken over marijuana in Oklahoma and the United States,” said Donnie Anderson, the director of the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, in an interview.

Among the victims are thousands of Chinese immigrants, many of them smuggled across the Mexican border to toil in often abusive conditions at farms ringed by fences, surveillance cameras and guards with guns and machetes. A grim offshoot of this indentured servitude: Traffickers force Chinese immigrant women into prostitution for the bosses of the agricultural workforce.

The mobsters operate in a loose but disciplined confederation overseen from New York by mafias rooted in southern China, according to state and federal officials. Known as “triads” because of an emblem used long ago by secret societies, these criminal groups wield power at home and throughout the diaspora and allegedly maintain an alliance with the Chinese state.

In 2018, the mafias set their sights on Oklahoma when the state’s voters approved a ballot measure that legalized the cultivation and sale of marijuana for medicinal purposes. The law did not limit the number of dispensaries or growing operations – known in the industry simply as “grows.” It requires marijuana businesses to have majority owners who have lived in the state for two years, and it bars shipping the product across state lines. But limited enforcement enabled out-of-state investors to recruit illegal “straw owners” and to traffic weed clandestinely across the country. And land was cheap. In this wide-open atmosphere, the industry grew at breakneck speed and, regulators say, is now second only to the oil and gas industry in the state.

Since Colorado became the first state to legalize marijuana for personal use in 2012, a patchwork of marijuana-related legislation has developed across the country. State authorities generally require licenses and put limits on cultivation, and federal law prohibits interstate sales. But steep taxes on legal products and gaps and differences in laws across states have created the conditions for a massive black market to thrive.

A body-camera image shows a law enforcement officer responding to the murders at the marijuana farm. (Kingfisher County Sheriff’s Department)

Oklahoma has quickly become a top supplier of illicit weed. Although street prices fluctuate and calculating the value of a black market is complex, officials estimate the value of the illegal marijuana grown in the state at somewhere between $18 billion and $44 billion a year. State investigators have found links between foreign mafias and over 3,000 illegal grows — and they say that more than 80% of the criminal groups are of Chinese origin.

The federal response, however, has been muted. With the spread of legalization and decriminalization, enforcement has become a low priority for the U.S. Department of Justice, anti-drug veterans say.

“The challenge we are having is a lack of interest by federal prosecutors to charge illicit marijuana cases,” said Ray Donovan, the former chief of operations of the Drug Enforcement Administration. “They don’t realize all the implications. Marijuana causes so much crime at the local level, gun violence in particular. The same groups selling thousands of pounds of marijuana are also laundering millions of dollars of fentanyl money. It’s not just one-dimensional.”

The expansion into the cannabis market is propelling the rise of Chinese organized crime as a global powerhouse, current and former national security officials say. During the past decade, Chinese mafias became the dominant money launderers for Latin American cartels dealing narcotics including fentanyl, which has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. The huge revenue stream from marijuana fuels that laundering apparatus, which is “the most extensive network of underground banking in the world,” said a former senior DEA official, Donald Im.

“The profits from the marijuana trade allow the Chinese organized criminal networks to expand their underground global banking system for cartels and other criminal organizations,” said Im, who was an architect of the DEA’s fight against Chinese organized crime.

U.S. law enforcement struggles to respond to this multifaceted threat. State and federal agencies suffer from a lack of personnel who know Chinese language and culture well enough to investigate complex cases, infiltrate networks or translate intercepts, current and former officials say. A federal shift of priorities to counterterrorism after 2001 meant resources dedicated to Chinese organized crime dwindled — while the power of the underworld grew.

And the shadow of the Chinese state hovers over it all. As ProPublica has reported, the authoritarian regime and the mafias allegedly maintain an alliance that benefits both sides. In exchange for government protection, Chinese mobsters deliver services such as illegally moving money overseas for the Communist Party elite and helping to spy on and intimidate Chinese immigrant communities, according to Western national security officials, case files, Chinese dissidents and human rights groups.

Because China has emerged as the top geopolitical rival of the United States, carrying out brazen espionage and influence activities in this country, the spread of Chinese mafias in Oklahoma and elsewhere also poses a potential national security threat, state and federal officials say.

Leaders of Chinese cultural associations in Oklahoma and other states are allegedly connected to both the illegal marijuana trade and to Chinese government officials, ProPublica and The Frontier have found. A number of influential leaders have been charged with or convicted of crimes ranging from drug offenses to witness intimidation. (A second part of this series further explores that issue.)

“You’d be very naive to sit and say the Chinese state doesn’t know what Chinese organized crime is doing in the U.S.,” Anderson said, “or that there is not a connection between the Chinese state and organized crime.”

In February, 50 U.S. legislators wrote to Attorney General Merrick Garland expressing concern that Chinese nationals, “including those with potential ties to the Chinese Communist Party,” are “reportedly operating thousands of illicit marijuana farms across the country.”

The bipartisan group of lawmakers, who included all but two members of Oklahoma’s congressional delegation, asked whether federal authorities are investigating CCP connections to the marijuana underworld and how much illicit revenue returns to China.

The Department of Justice plans to respond to the questions raised by the legislators, a department spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

“The Department is working on developing a marijuana enforcement policy that will be consistent” with federal guidance related to state legalization initiatives, said the spokesperson, Peter Carr. “Among the federal enforcement priorities under that policy is preventing the revenue from the illegal distribution of marijuana from going to criminal enterprises, gangs, and cartels.”

The department declined to comment about other issues raised in this story.

In response to a list of questions, a spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C., said in an emailed statement that he was “not aware of the specifics” related to Chinese organized crime in the marijuana industry. But the spokesperson, Liu Pengyu, said China wages a determined fight against drugs, the “common enemy of mankind.”

“We always ask our fellow citizens to observe local laws and regulations and refrain from engaging in any illegal or criminal activities while they are abroad,” Liu said in the written statement. “The Chinese government is steadfast on fighting drug crimes, playing an active part in international anti-drug cooperation, and resolving the drug issue with other countries including the US in an active and responsible attitude.”

ProPublica and The Frontier interviewed more than three dozen current and former law enforcement officials in the United States and overseas, as well as academic experts, defense lawyers, farmworkers, Chinese dissidents, Chinese-American leaders, human rights advocates and others. Some sources were granted anonymity to protect their safety or because they were not authorized to speak to the media. Reporters reviewed thousands of pages of court files, government reports, news reports and social media posts in English, Chinese and other languages.

(Stefano Summo for ProPublica) California Dreams

He Qiang Chen came to New York about 30 years ago from the Changle district outside Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian.

Chen and his older brother opened a restaurant and a laundry in the Bronx and became legal U.S. residents. By the early 2000s, they had moved to North Carolina, where they also ran restaurants, according to public records and law enforcement officials. They shuttled back and forth to New York, buying properties in and around Flushing, which has a vibrant Chinese business district. The area has also developed a reputation as a bastion of Chinese crime bosses with nationwide reach, leading to a refrain in law enforcement: “All roads lead to Flushing.”

Until about five years ago, public records indicate that Chen’s encounters with the justice system consisted of repeated tickets for speeding and reckless driving.

In 2017, though, the brothers launched into the marijuana racket at a level that would make investigators think they’d been involved in crime for a while. They went to California, where Chen paid $825,000 for a four-bedroom house behind a wrought-iron gate in the San Joaquin Valley about 35 miles from Sacramento.

The semirural lot was near a winery and an equestrian center. But Chen wasn’t interested in genteel pastimes. Along with his romantic companion, a 43-year-old woman from San Francisco named Fang Hui Lee, Chen and his brother got to work converting the spacious barn into a cannabis plantation.

Several associates also established themselves in the Sacramento area. A 39-year-old fellow transplant from North Carolina, Yifei Lin, bought a suburban house and set up a clandestine indoor grow, court records show.

The cross-country move was part of a migration of criminal groups into the marijuana industry. Other destinations included Colorado and the Pacific Northwest. California law limited cannabis for personal use to six plants and required commercial growers to get a license. With criminal penalties diminishing, the goals of legalization were to establish regulation, generate tax revenue and eliminate organized crime from the picture.

Instead, the low risk and fast money set off a feeding frenzy. The players who established clandestine grows included Mexican cartels, Cuban immigrant gangs and longtime locals. But the Chinese crews were the biggest and best organized. They smuggled their product by car, truck and plane to the East Coast, where profit margins were stratospheric.

In this rapacious subculture, mobsters went into subdivisions and snapped up a half dozen homes at a time. In San Bernardino County, east of Los Angeles, a federal court convicted a real estate agent in 2020 for a typical tactic: paying “ghost owners” to fly in from China posing as buyers, sign paperwork and go home, according to case files and interviews.

The bosses brought in recent Chinese immigrants to tend indoor crops, often stealing industrial quantities of water and power from public utility systems for their operations. Grow houses created a nefarious mix of risks: toxic fumes from banned pesticides, deadly fires from makeshift electrical bypasses, volatile chemicals and flammable equipment. The presence of drugs, cash and weapons was a magnet for crime, and the blighted homes hurt property values.

In November 2018, Sgt. George Negrete, a detective for the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Office, got a tip about Chen’s illegal grow.

Doing surveillance on foot from an adjacent water treatment facility, Negrete saw telltale signs, such as spray foam filling the seams of the barn walls to mask heat, light and odor. Utility records showed that the electric bill had spiked from $170 a month to more than $2,000 per month after Chen bought the property, indicating sustained use of air conditioning and high-intensity lights.

On Dec. 13, deputies served a search warrant. They found 3,835 plants and arrested the Chen brothers, Lee and two other men, court documents say. Chen claimed he didn’t speak English. But he admitted he was in charge. He told Negrete that someone had advised him marijuana was a good business.

“They weren’t scared or afraid,” Negrete said in an interview. “It was like regular business for them.”

The crew had slept on mattresses on the floor. Lee apparently supervised the day-to-day work. And deputies found two .40-caliber pistols, court documents say. Firearms were unusual at Chinese-run grows that Negrete had raided.

“It made me think they were at a higher scale in an organization,” the detective said.

Cash and Discipline

The arrests of the Chens and their associates happened during a state-federal crackdown in the Sacramento area known as Operation Lights Out.

On the day of the raid on Chen’s house, federal prosecutors indicted a Sacramento real estate broker, accusing her and other suspects of teaming with financiers in Fujian who wired millions of dollars to acquire houses for indoor grows through fraudulent maneuvers, according to a criminal complaint. Authorities also seized more than 100 houses.

The elaborate and brazen nature of the alleged conspiracy led investigators to believe it involved the triads, according to three former federal officials who declined to be named because they were not authorized to discuss the case.

Suspects used banks in China to wire money to the U.S. defendants in suspicious and obvious increments, according to the criminal complaint and former federal officials. Yet there was no interference from the most powerful police state in the world. Although hard proof was elusive, two former senior U.S. officials told ProPublica they suspected Chinese officials protected the scheme and may have benefited from it financially.

“There was no question in my mind that there was at least Chinese government awareness of this,” a former senior Department of Justice official said. “There was no way they didn’t see the movement of the money going to the same people in the United States. But could we prove it? We suspected Chinese officials were complicit.”

Although the prosecution had a big impact by combining the might of the FBI, DEA, IRS and Homeland Security Investigations, it was one of the few federal offensives against Chinese networks involved in marijuana.

Still, DEA financial investigations around the country revealed that the emerging marijuana empire intersected with the networks laundering billions of dollars for Latin American drug lords. Some of the funds from the laundering returned to China, but a lot was reinvested into new U.S. marijuana ventures, current and former officials said.

The marijuana proceeds were “another massive bucket of money” with which high-level Chinese crime bosses funded interconnected rackets such as the money laundering and migrant smuggling, said former senior DEA official Christopher Urben, who is now a managing partner at the global investigations firm Nardello & Co.

Agents marveled at the scope of the enterprise and the lack of turf wars. Around 2019, the DEA learned that triad bosses had traveled from China to sit-downs in New York, where they issued directives and kept the peace nationwide, according to Urben and other current and former officials. New York had become the command hub for marijuana as well as money laundering.

“The discipline involved is incredible,” Urben said. “How are we having thousands of workers moved into the country and among states? How are all these groups doing this without more conflict or violence? How do you ensure that all these mid-level managers get along, with all this money, all this marijuana? The only way you can do it is with an organized crime apparatus.”

In the federal prosecution in Sacramento, a defendant pleaded guilty this Feb. 27. The real estate broker and two others are still awaiting trial.

Meanwhile, Chen and his associates pleaded no contest to misdemeanors in state courts, which sentenced them to probation. Wasting no time, the crew headed for Oklahoma in 2020.

In contrast to California, Oklahoma did not limit the size of grows. As long as the operations had a nominal local owner and a medical marijuana license, they could spread dozens of greenhouses capable of holding tens of thousands of plants over a cheap parcel of farmland.

Some Chinese groups redeployed by air, according to officials and case files. Federal agents began detecting flights of private planes from California to rural airfields in Oklahoma. Couriers aboard the aircraft carried hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash to buy farmland, sometimes for twice or three times its value. To dodge federal interdiction teams, some pilots filed flight plans for one airstrip, then diverted to another.

And money poured in from China. Around 2020, one group crowdfunded Oklahoma marijuana ventures through an invitation to investors on WeChat, the popular Chinese social media platform, said Mark Woodward, spokesperson of the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics. U.S. investigations show that WeChat, although heavily monitored by Chinese security forces, is often a forum for discussions of criminal activity.

Oklahoma’s marijuana industry surged to “an astronomical level,” said Ray Padilla, a Denver-based DEA agent. He estimated that 90% of Colorado’s illicit producers moved to the neighboring state.

Oklahoma was the new frontier, Padilla said. And it was “absolute insanity.”

Gunplay at the Association

A statue of a panda bear sits like a chunky sentry atop a pillar on Classen Boulevard in Oklahoma City’s Asian District.

Mixing a longtime Vietnamese community with a more recent Chinese one, the boulevard is lined with stores, restaurants, massage parlors, nail salons and, block after block, marijuana dispensaries.

Behind the panda, a ground-floor suite in a corner mini-mall houses the local chapter of the American Fujian Association.

Shortly before dusk on Dec. 8, 2020, a black Mercedes SUV carrying Chen and Lin pulled up at the mini-mall accompanied by two other cars. The crew had driven an hour from their new farm in Kingfisher County. They were looking for Jintao Liu, who had also relocated from Sacramento after his marijuana site got busted, court documents show. Liu and Chen had been feuding since Chen had failed to pay him for organizing a delivery from California.

When Liu had asked him to pay the $2,000 debt, Chen had become infuriated and began to terrorize Liu and his wife with threatening phone calls and texts showing photos of guns. Chen squared off with Liu at a gathering and punched him in the jaw. Later, Chen threatened to kill his wife and three children, court records say.

The reasons for the rage remain somewhat murky. Asked during a court hearing why Chen was so angry if he owed the money, not the other way around, Liu answered, “He did not want to pay. He was this kind of a person.”

On the afternoon that Chen and his crew appeared outside the Fujianese association, Liu was inside watching a friend play cards, according to court testimony. Liu and several other men came out. A brawl ensued.

“Shoot him,” Chen told Lin, according to witnesses.

Lin pulled a gun and fired, the bullet fracturing Liu’s hipbone, according to court documents.

Police soon arrested Chen and Lin. A search of Chen’s house in suburban Edmond turned up three pistols, 27.5 pounds of marijuana, $97,000 in cash and eight vials of ketamine, the party drug of choice in the Chinese underworld, court records say.

Prosecutors charged Chen and Lin with assault and battery with a deadly weapon and drug offenses. The men made bail and went right back to the grow. (Lin has pleaded not guilty. His lawyer declined to comment.)

An Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics agent searches for witnesses and survivors at the Kingfisher County farm where four people were shot to death. (Kingfisher County Sheriff’s Department)

Their farm was about 13 miles from Hennessey, population 2,000. Lin had bought the 10-acre spread for $280,000, court documents say. To evade a state residency law, he paid cash to a local man named Richard Ignacio to pose as the 75% owner of the medical marijuana business and obtain a license, court documents allege. Ignacio had allegedly been drafted as a straw owner by an Oklahoma City accountant, a 20-time felon named Kevin Pham, who has been charged in connection with the Kingfisher farm and other grows, court documents say. Ignacio told investigators that he “earned significant income” acting as a hired front man.

Ignacio pleaded guilty last year to being a straw owner for the Kingfisher farm. He and Pham have pleaded not guilty to other charges and are awaiting trial. They could not be reached for comment.

Lin lived at and managed the place for Chen, according to court records and interviews. For equipment, three companies in China shipped about 440,000 pounds of greenhouse parts. Even among the vast marijuana farms in Oklahoma, the spread was unusually large: it contained over 100 greenhouses and several indoor grow houses, interviews and satellite images show.

The closest neighbor, Gary Hawk, lived about a mile away. He had grown up at the place next door when it was a dairy farm owned by his parents. There was tension with the newcomers from the start. After a neighboring farmer used a plane for crop dusting, men at Chen’s farm threatened to shoot it out of the sky, Hawk said in an interview.

“The mail carrier would go by and she would stop to deliver mail there,” he said. “They would come out of the house and one guy would come out with a machete and one guy would come out with an AR-15. That was just to pick up the mail. ”

The farm employed an armed security officer stationed in a guard hut and as many as two dozen laborers, according to law enforcement officials and others who spent time there. Workers slept in trailers, the garage or the cluttered main house, where meals were prepared throughout the day and there was only one bathroom. During an inspection by fire marshals that found multiple safety violations in 2021, most of the employees presented Chinese identification and U.S. immigration documents.

Neighbors complained about uncollected trash blowing into nearby pastures and endangering cattle, said Sgt. Michael Shults of the Kingfisher County Sheriff’s Department.

“We’ve been out there several times explaining to them you need to put trash up,” Shults said in an interview. “Cattle get into plastics that are blowing around, you know, cattle will eat almost anything.”

Deputies soon became convinced that Chen’s crew, like many others, was trafficking its product on the black market in other states. In April 2021, Shults and other deputies intercepted a vehicle carrying 46.8 pounds of marijuana and arrested the driver, who was from Texas and did not have an Oklahoma cannabis transport license. Surveillance showed that she was one of two suspected couriers who had picked up bales at the farm that day, according to Shults and court documents.

Awash in Weed

By 2021, a mysterious investor had joined the crew at the Kingfisher farm.

Chen Wu (also known as Wu Chen, but not related to the brothers) was in his mid-40s and from Fujian, according to officials and Chinese media reports. There are gaps in his past that investigators are still trying to fill. What they do know suggests he was a heavyweight: He had ties to Chinese criminal networks involved in money laundering, drug trafficking and migrant smuggling across the country and overseas, according to officials and court records.

As a young man, Wu lived illegally in Spain, whose Chinese population has grown rapidly in the past two decades. In 2000, police on the resort island of Mallorca arrested him for entering the country illegally, Spanish law enforcement officials said.

As often happens, though, he managed to stay. He sought work authorization in 2003 and gave an address in a gritty neighborhood of Madrid. Five years later, he got in trouble for using someone else’s identity, officials said, and Spanish police issued an arrest warrant for him in 2010.

But he had already moved on. Wu spent time in the Caribbean, including Cuba. Arriving in the United States around 2016, he bounced around the country pursuing illicit schemes, officials said. In Minnesota, he married the owner of a restaurant and got legal status. During his divorce in 2020, Wu claimed in legal filings to have only about $18,000 to his name, records show.

Yet he moved to Oklahoma and invested in Chen’s farm. After months working there, he argued with his partners over money and left.

By then, the state was awash in weed.

Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics agents and Kingfisher County deputies search through buildings on the 10-acre marijuana farm. (Kingfisher County Sheriff’s Department)

The number of licensed marijuana grows in Oklahoma peaked at nearly 10,000 at the end of 2021. Authorities suspected most of them of trafficking on the black market. One Chinese criminal group oversaw at least 400 grows. Another outfit smuggled truckloads to the East Coast every week, selling each for over $20 million, before investigators dismantled it.

Whether bosses or grunts, most of the newcomers were from New York, where a mob hierarchy oversees the illicit marijuana trade in Oklahoma and swoops in to collect the profits, according to law enforcement officials and court files.

“You have many different levels,” said Anderson, the state anti-drug director. “Some overseeing grows. Then another upper echelon that controls money. … They’re never around except to collect money.”

The boom caused prices to crater, hurting the legal industry. And it brought a generalized surge of crime. At airports, wary-looking Chinese immigrant laborers with backpacks became a familiar sight to law enforcement officers. So did human traffickers accompanying flashily dressed prostitutes to brothels set up for overseers of the marijuana farms. Illegal casinos appeared, seizures of ketamine soared, and robberies and violence plagued grows, dispensaries and stash houses, according to court cases and law enforcement officials.

There was complex criminality as well. In a case investigated by the FBI, a Chinese ring based in New York and Oklahoma allegedly used a cryptocurrency scheme to steal over $10 million from banks and other financial institutions. One defendant, who is now awaiting trial, was involved in a marijuana grow with an associate of Chen’s Kingfisher County crew, according to law enforcement officials and public records.

The victims of another scam were law-abiding Asian Americans. Cybercriminals manipulated the computer system of the Texas Department of Public Safety to obtain thousands of driver’s licenses destined for Asian Americans, tricking authorities into mailing the licenses to marijuana farms in neighboring Oklahoma. The suspects used the licenses for fraudulent purchases or sold them on the underground market. Police arrested the accused mastermind in New York and extradited him to Texas last April to stand trial.

Before marijuana legalization, Oklahoma was “a pretty quiet state,” said Tony Lie, president of the Oklahoma Chinese Association. “We didn’t have any Chinese criminal gangs coming here.”

Lie has lived in Oklahoma for more than 30 years. Members of his longtime organization come from several regions in mainland China as well as Hong Kong and Taiwan. In contrast, most of the newcomers are Fujianese. Lie said the ills of the marijuana industry have hurt the image of Chinese Americans in the state.

“We don’t want people to come to Oklahoma to do something bad for the Chinese community,” Lie said.

The shooting at the Fujianese association in 2020 had opened a window into a fast-evolving underworld.

But it turned out to be just a prelude.

Pitch-Black Night

Shortly before 8 p.m. on Nov. 20, 2022, Kingfisher County Sheriff Dennis Banther alerted his deputies to a hostage incident at a farm near Hennessey.

“Everybody go 10-8,” the text message said: Go in service and rush to the scene.

Shults was the third to arrive. Four gunshot victims lay dead in the garage, and the shooter was on the loose. Deputies feared he was hiding in the sprawl of agricultural buildings known as hoop-houses.

“It was pitch black,” Shults said. “When you’re out there in the pitch dark, in the black night, and you’ve got four people down, been executed, and you don’t know if the shooter’s still on scene or not … it’s find the shooter. Survival.”

Kingfisher County deputies discovered the bodies of four victims among stacks of marijuana in the garage. (Kingfisher County Sheriff’s Department)

The sergeant came upon a wounded man lying in a black Ford F-150 pickup truck. It was Lin, the farm manager who had been the accused gunman at the Fujianese association, according to court documents.

A second survivor emerged from the darkness. A deputy struggled to ask the farmworker urgent questions using Google Translate on his phone. Deputies found another worker who had recorded part of the incident on a cellphone, leaving it near the garage with the camera on before fleeing, according to court documents and interviews.

The survivors said the killer was Wu, who had worked at the farm until about a year earlier. He had arrived in his Toyota Corolla and shot Chen and a dog that was in the garage. Wu then told his hostages he would kill them if they didn’t hand over $300,000 in half an hour.

“The Boss told his girlfriend, who was inside the garage at the time, to call her brother to get the money,” a witness told police.

As minutes passed, Wu became increasingly agitated. The hostages tried to stop Chen’s bleeding by wrapping a long-sleeved shirt around his knee as a makeshift tourniquet.

But Chen “was not doing very well,” the witness said. In a grim exchange, the wounded boss told the gunman “to finish him off.”

Wu pumped two bullets into Chen’s chest. Then, two hostages rushed at the gunman, who let loose a barrage that killed Chen’s brother, Chen’s girlfriend Lee and a newly hired employee. The wounded Lin ran outside and took refuge in the truck.

Although the phone video didn’t capture the actual shooting, it recorded the sound of gunshots and showed the gunman leaving the garage.

Emergency personnel swarmed the scene. A helicopter evacuated the wounded man. Deputies spent all night doing a sweep of the grounds, finding another terrified worker hiding in a barn.

At one point, a sedan with New York plates pulled up to the farm. An Asian man rolled down the window, startling deputies, and said he “was sent” to pick up the workers remaining onsite, a deputy said.

“You need to back him off,” a sheriff’s lieutenant yelled to his deputies. Afterward, they would wonder who had sent him so quickly.

In one area of the dark compound, deputies thought they were trudging through mud. After sunrise, they realized it was human excrement — a sign of the conditions in which the farmworkers lived.

Meanwhile, the gunman sped east toward Florida. From the road, he called people in Florida, including a Chinese organized crime figure suspected of involvement in drugs and human trafficking, according to court records and law enforcement officials familiar with the case.

Investigators believe Wu wanted help from smugglers to flee the country, possibly to Cuba, which doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the U.S., court records say. One affidavit for search warrants for Wu’s phones and online accounts seeks evidence “relating to the planning, preparation and actions taken to facilitate human smuggling.”

Soon after Wu got to Miami Beach, however, a license plate reader detected his car. Police arrested him two days after the murders. During an extradition hearing, Wu told the judge his life was in danger.

“If I go back to Oklahoma, I’ll be killed in the prison or jail,” he said through an interpreter. “I’m afraid I will be killed because these people are mafiosos.”

(Stefano Summo for ProPublica) Aftermath

It seemed ironic: a mass murderer begging the court for protection. But a strange story told by a deputy who brought him back suggests that his fears may have been well founded.

Kingfisher County sheriff’s Lt. Ken Thompson had 25 years of experience transporting prisoners. He and another deputy drove nonstop to Florida in a marked Chevrolet Tahoe. In Miami, they checked into a motel near the airport in the evening, planning to sleep a few hours before picking up Wu from the Miami-Dade County jail, Thompson said in an interview.

They changed their minds, Thompson said, because “a weird deal happened.”

Looking out of the window of his motel room, Thompson said, he saw a car pull up next to his marked police vehicle in the parking lot. Another car appeared, then a third. The three cars drove around the motel as if doing surveillance, he said.

The deputies concluded that they “didn’t really feel comfortable sitting in this place,” Thompson said. They decided to take custody of Wu and hit the road.

After the deputies left the jail with Wu in the back seat, the three cars from the motel reappeared, Thompson said, and shadowed the Tahoe on the highway.

Thompson said he did evasive maneuvers to lose them, exiting abruptly and returning to the highway miles later.

“It’s just a feeling, a gut feeling that you get, and the fact that they all just kind of just paced right around us,” he said. “I mean, they flew right up on us, but then they just locked down to our speed. So it was a weird deal.”

Thompson suspects that people in organized crime somehow located the deputies in Miami. He said he did not know if their goal was to harm Wu, to free him or simply to monitor a case that was causing a commotion.

The prisoner was polite and obedient during the cross-country ride, getting out for bathroom breaks and accepting a McDonald’s breakfast burrito that the deputies offered him. After they crossed the Oklahoma state line, though, his demeanor changed, the lieutenant said.

“You couldn’t pry him out of that car,” Thompson said. “Once he reached Oklahoma, he wouldn’t get out of the car.”

On Feb. 9, Wu pleaded guilty to the four murders and assault and battery. The judge sentenced him to life without possibility of parole. (He declined an interview request.)

The quadruple murder made international headlines and set off a flurry of investigative activity and political attention. A state crackdown has reduced the number of growing operations by almost half, officials say.

Chinese immigrants involved in the marijuana industry say law enforcement has been excessively harsh on them since late 2022. Qiu (Tina) He, who operated a marijuana-related consulting firm that is under investigation, said in an interview that many Asian investors have become disillusioned by what she called discriminatory treatment and the risks of the business. She denied wrongdoing in her case and predicted the state will suffer from the loss of tax revenue if Asian investors leave.

“We are funding Oklahoma,” she said. “Oklahoma City will be like a ghost town if we leave.”

Law enforcement officers search dozens of metal and plastic marijuana grow houses at the Kingfisher farm the day after the quadruple homicide. (Kingfisher County Sheriff’s Department)

The crime in Kingfisher County was a relatively unusual eruption of violence in the Chinese underworld. Law enforcement experts say the frontier atmosphere in Oklahoma is likely a result of the sheer amount of money generated by the cannabis trade and the number of criminals it has attracted. The growing wealth and power of Chinese organized crime is causing clashes elsewhere in the country as well, experts said.

“Maybe it’s more like the Wild West as these groups keep spreading,” said Urben, the former DEA official. “You are going to have violence even if someone is controlling from above. I think there would be even more conflict if the triads were not so involved.”

Additional funding for this story was provided by The Pulitzer Center.

This post was originally published on Articles and Investigations – ProPublica.

by Ken Armstrong

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

When Baltimore police arrested Keyon Paylor in 2014, one of two things was true.

Either Paylor hid a gun that the police found, or the police planted the gun and framed Paylor.

The two things cannot both be true. Even so, the U.S. Department of Justice presented the first version as true while convicting Paylor of being a felon in possession of a firearm, then presented the second version as true while prosecuting a corrupt police detective who had arrested Paylor.

If you find this confounding, you’re not alone. When Paylor later challenged his conviction, the use of conflicting theories by the U.S. Department of Justice did not sit well with a judge on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

“Which is the truth?” the judge, Stephanie Thacker, asked an assistant U.S. attorney during oral argument in 2021.

“Does the government not share at least my concern that the government has talked out of both sides of its mouth on this case?” she asked the prosecutor.

The case of Keyon Paylor — in which the 4th Circuit appeals court issued a strikingly blunt opinion two months ago — is but another in a string of cases in which prosecutors offer one version of the truth while trying one person, then offer a very different version while trying another person.

I wrote about contradictory prosecutions in 2017, and this ruling and others suggest the practice has not abated.

In U.S. v. Driggers, a case involving guns stolen from a train in Chicago, the defendant, Nathan Driggers, was convicted of being a felon in possession of a firearm. When prosecuting a co-defendant named Warren Gates, the federal government contended Gates bought guns from the train robbery from two other men. But in trying Driggers, the government contended Gates bought them from Driggers.

Confused? You are, again, not alone. The government denied using conflicting theories, but the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals wasn’t persuaded. In a 2019 opinion, it wrote, “The government has not explained to us (or to anyone else) how these two conflicting factual representations can coexist, and we are at a loss to reconcile them.” Still, the court upheld Driggers’ conviction.

In the cases I found previously, prosecutors presented shifting theories on which defendant stabbed someone, or chopped someone’s skull, or held someone’s head underwater. Most cases involved a gun: Prosecutors would say one defendant fired a fatal shot, then, in a separate trial, before a different trier of fact, say a different defendant fired it.

In 2009, in Lynn, Massachusetts, a state prosecutor argued that Bonrad Sok fired the single shot that killed a man outside a restaurant; six months later, in a separate trial, the same prosecutor said the shooter was actually Kevin Keo. Both men were convicted.

Sometimes, prosecutors offered not two versions of the truth, but three. In Stuart, Florida, a convenience store clerk was shot and killed in 1982. In a first trial, the prosecution argued John Earl Bush was the shooter; at a second trial, it argued Alphonso Cave was the shooter; at a third trial, it argued J.B. Parker was the shooter. All three men were convicted and sentenced to death. Bush was executed in 1996. Cave died last year while still on death row. Parker’s sentence last year was reduced to life, for reasons unrelated to the prosecution’s contradictory positions.

At least 29 men have been sentenced to death in the U.S. since the 1970s in cases where prosecutors were accused of presenting competing versions of the truth, from what I found searching legal cases. When prosecutors change their version of who did what, it can lead to more serious charges or harsher sentences for more people. But as one federal judge wrote in a capital case, “Such actions reduce criminal trials to mere gamesmanship and rob them of their supposed purpose of a search for truth.”

The U.S. Supreme Court has never ruled squarely on whether conflicting prosecution theories violate due process. Lower courts are divided. In a handful of cases, a court has overturned a conviction or a death sentence, finding the prosecution’s contradictory stances to be fundamentally unfair. But more often than not, courts have allowed the tactic, even as many have described it as unseemly or worse.

Jurors seem more taken aback by the conduct than many judges. For the 2017 article, I called a juror in a Missouri case in which the jury had convicted the defendant of being the second of two robbers in a fatal robbery. When I told her that the same prosecutor had argued, just two weeks before, in a separate trial, that the second robber was someone else, she gasped. “I think our justice system should actually be justice,” she said. Later, as we kept talking, she was so shaken that she began to cry.

The Prosecution’s First Version of the Truth

In January 2014, four Baltimore police officers arrested Paylor. One of the officers was Detective Daniel Hersl.

Hersl wrote up an incident report and probable cause statement, saying this is what happened:

The four officers were in an unmarked police car. They saw Paylor walking. When Paylor noticed the officers, he fled down the street. The officers followed in their car and saw Paylor arrive at his front porch, where he removed what appeared to be a black handgun from his waistband and put it under a chair cushion. Police lifted the cushion and found a loaded handgun.

Paylor, 22 at the time, had prior convictions on gun and drug charges, according to court records. After this arrest, he was indicted by a federal grand jury on a charge of illegal possession of a firearm by a felon.

Paylor’s version of what happened differs from Hersl’s. According to a brief filed by Paylor’s current lawyers, Paylor was simply walking home. When the police detained him in his home’s downstairs, one officer went upstairs and stole thousands of dollars from a bedroom dresser. Police planted the gun on his porch and framed him, Paylor said. After his arrest, he called relatives from a jail phone; in recorded conversations, he denied the gun was his, claimed the police stole his money and said, “Hersl plays a dirty game.”

At that point, Hersl had dozens of misconduct complaints and had been sued multiple times, according to court records. He was so notorious that in 2014, Young Moose, a Baltimore rapper, called Hersl out by name in his song “Fuck The Police.” (In a first-person account, D. Watkins, a University of Baltimore professor, would later call Hersl “arguably the most hated cop in Baltimore.”)

Paylor’s attorney, hoping to use Hersl’s history to discredit him, asked for every internal affairs department file in which Hersl had been accused of misconduct. Prosecutors turned over 30 files to the judge, who, in turn, allowed Paylor’s attorney to see only four of them and part of another, according to court records. Paylor’s attorney believed that provided too little ammunition to impeach Hersl and suggested Paylor plead guilty.

The federal gun charge carried a maximum sentence of 10 years. Paylor was also accused of violating probation on a state charge, for which he was looking at another 15 years.

The government offered Paylor a deal: plead guilty and get five years on the federal charge and time served on the state charge.

Paylor took the deal — and at a hearing in 2015, the Justice Department presented its first version of the truth in this case.

Peter J. Martinez, an assistant U.S. attorney, appeared on behalf of the government. Asked by the judge for a summary of the facts, Martinez adopted Hersl’s version of events. He said if this case had gone to trial, the government would have proved, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the gun was Paylor’s and that he had tried to hide it from the police.

The Prosecution’s Second Version of the Truth

In 2015, the same year Paylor pleaded guilty, the FBI was investigating possible corruption within the Baltimore Police Department. The investigators eventually focused on a special unit called the Gun Trace Task Force. Task force officers, the federal investigation would show, were robbing people, many of them drug dealers who were unlikely to complain — and unlikely to be believed, if they did.

Officers were stealing money and planting evidence, the very sorts of behavior alleged by Paylor. “They were, simply put, both cops and robbers at the same time,” a federal prosecutor would say in court.

Hersl joined that task force in 2016 and became a key suspect.

In March 2017, the FBI arrested Hersl and six other task force officers on federal racketeering charges. (Another task force member would later be arrested, bringing the total to eight.)

The investigation continued after the initial arrests. Investigators listened to recorded phone calls made from jail by people arrested by Hersl and other task force members — and came across the calls made by Paylor.

The federal prosecutors handling this case were Leo Wise and Derek Hines.

Wise wrote a book about the case, “Who Speaks for You? The Inside Story of the Prosecutor Who Took Down Baltimore’s Most Crooked Cops.” “This is a story of belief and disbelief, of how I came to believe that the Task Force’s victims were telling the truth and the police officers were lying,” he wrote.

In the book, Wise wrote of how the recorded jail calls helped corroborate accounts that might otherwise be dismissed: “The jail calls were like time capsules; they told us what had happened and when it happened. If we ever got to trial, they could also help us convince a jury that the victims weren’t lying.”

In June 2017, Hines and FBI agents met with Paylor, according to court records. Paylor reiterated what he’d said in those calls, that he was innocent. Hines then put Paylor before a grand jury, where the Justice Department presented its second version of the truth in this case.

Paylor, under oath, testified that police framed him, planting the gun.

The Justice Department didn’t charge Hersl in connection with the Paylor case, but it did file a motion asking that Paylor’s sentence be reduced, saying Paylor had “provided substantial assistance to the government.” Paylor turned down the offer, telling his lawyer that “the risk of retaliation by the police was too high” if he went through with the motion, according to court records.

“There Cannot Be Two Sides to the Truth”

Hersl was convicted of racketeering offenses in February 2018 and sentenced to 18 years. Seven other members of the Gun Trace Task Force were also convicted. In the fallout, charges were dropped or convictions vacated in more than 800 cases the officers had handled, because their word could not be trusted.

The extent of the police misconduct was so great that the Baltimore city comptroller created a settlement tracker “to memorialize the devastating impact of the Gun Trace Task Force on our City.” To date, the city has settled 41 lawsuits for nearly $23 million, according to the tracker. Hersl was involved in 10 of those settled cases, the tracker says. Justin Fenton, a reporter now with the Baltimore Banner, wrote a book about the scandal, “We Own This City,” which was the basis for an HBO miniseries with the same name. Fenton has also written about the Paylor case.

In March 2018 — one month after Hersl was convicted — Paylor filed a motion asking that his own conviction be vacated. The Justice Department opposed Paylor’s request, and in 2019, a U.S. District Court judge denied the motion.

The case then went to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where one of the issues was whether the federal government could contradict itself: Should the government be allowed to defend Paylor’s conviction after having presented him, to a grand jury, as a victim of a corrupt police officer?

At the 2021 oral argument, conducted by video conference because of the pandemic, Paylor’s lawyer was Debra Loevy, executive director of the Exoneration Project, a free legal clinic whose staff represents people they believe were wrongfully convicted. Loevy told the court that the government vouched for Paylor while going after the police, “and then they threw him under the bus.”

The lawyer representing the federal government was Martinez, the same prosecutor who had helped secure Paylor’s conviction.

“Let me ask you this,” Judge Thacker, who had previously been a federal prosecutor herself, said to Martinez. “In the government’s view, was Mr. Paylor’s testimony at his plea hearing the truth, or was his testimony at the grand jury, that the government put on, the truth?”

“Very much the former, your Honor,” Martinez said.

“So the government put on testimony in the grand jury that was not truthful?” Thacker said.

Martinez wouldn’t give a yes or no. He said prosecutors put Paylor before the grand jury immediately after investigators interviewed him.

The judge pressed. “They can’t both be true,” she said of the two accounts.

“His sworn admission of guilt is the truth. His grand jury testimony is false,” Martinez said.

“All right, all right, so then the government did suborn perjury in the grand jury?” the judge said.

Again, Martinez avoided a yes or no. Instead, he said that while prosecutors can’t knowingly present perjured testimony, the grand jury “is an investigative tool,” and prosecutors often put witnesses in the grand jury while still vetting their reliability.

But Paylor had pleaded guilty, the judge said. And the government knew that. “So the government had to think that what he was saying in the grand jury was true, and what he said at the plea hearing was not true,” Thacker said.

“I’m not going to speak to the mental state of the prosecutor who put Paylor in the grand jury,” Martinez said.

The judge asked Martinez, “The government didn’t feel an obligation to get to the truth before it put somebody in the grand jury, under oath, to say something completely opposed to what he had pled guilty to?”

In the back-and-forth, Martinez said that after Paylor’s grand jury testimony, the government further investigated Paylor’s claim of being framed and concluded it was false. And ultimately, Martinez said, Paylor’s claim wasn’t used in any charge against Hersl or mentioned in Hersl’s trial or sentencing. (Loevy, Paylor’s attorney, disputed that the government’s subsequent investigation undermined Paylor’s claim of innocence.)

Thacker had few kind words for the government, saying it “hasn’t been the best judge of who’s telling the truth in this case.”

Loevy, in a recent interview, said, “I don’t recall ever having an argument like that — where the court was that vocally angry at one side’s position.”

Two months ago, the three-judge panel issued a unanimous opinion, written by Thacker.

The court didn’t vacate Paylor’s conviction, but for Paylor’s lawyers, it did the next best thing. The court’s ruling returned the case to a lower court for a hearing at which Paylor’s attorneys will have the chance to present evidence of the breadth of Hersl’s misconduct, particularly any instances that preceded Paylor’s guilty plea. The ruling authorized Paylor’s attorneys to conduct discovery, meaning they can now have access to records they were previously denied; plus, they can depose Hersl, asking him questions under oath.

“This case presents the extraordinary circumstance in which the Government has taken antithetical stances supporting two completely different versions of the truth relative to Appellant’s offense of conviction,” Thacker wrote. “But, there cannot be two sides to the truth. The truth is the truth.”

The judge wrote: “The Government’s two-faced positions and contrary statements before the court are clearly at odds with the notion of justice.”

“Thanks!”

I wanted to ask the various prosecutors in this matter about the 4th Circuit’s opinion lambasting the government.

I emailed Martinez, who left the Department of Justice and now works for a large law firm. He emailed back, saying: “As I understand the relevant DOJ regulations, I am prohibited from speaking with you, absent authorization, regarding the work I did in the United States Attorney’s Office.”

The Justice Department separately sent me an email, saying, “We are not commenting on this case, nor are we authorizing Mr. Martinez to comment.” Can I speak with Derek Hines and Leo Wise? I wrote back. “Department guidelines generally prohibit commenting on pending cases, therefore Wise and Hines are not authorized to sit for an interview. Thanks!” the Justice Department responded.

Wise and Hines are both now working on the DOJ team prosecuting Hunter Biden, the president’s son, on gun and tax charges.

Hersl asked last fall to be released early from prison on grounds of compassion. An emergency motion said Hersl has been diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer; a doctor, in September, wrote that Hersl’s life expectancy is less than 18 months. The DOJ opposed the motion — noting, among other things, that Hersl has shown no remorse, continuing to maintain his innocence — and a judge denied Hersl’s request.

Hersl was represented at his trial by William Purpura. Purpura, in an interview with ProPublica, said he once asked Hersl if he ever planted a gun on anyone. Hersl laughed, according to Purpura, and said no, that in Baltimore there’s no need to put a gun on someone.

In 2021, while this appeal was pending, Paylor pleaded guilty to a state robbery charge and was returned to prison. He got back out in December.

Paylor was released from prison last month, after serving time in a robbery case. Before that, he had already served his sentence on the gun charge involving Hersl. I asked Gayle Horn, another of Paylor’s lawyers, why they keep fighting that 2015 conviction, and she said, “We’d like to see justice be done.”

Paylor, asked the same question, said: “Because from day one, I’ve been telling people I was innocent.

“Now I’m just trying to clear my name.”

This post was originally published on Articles and Investigations – ProPublica.

by Jeremy Kohler

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Robert Tracy’s appointment as St. Louis’ police chief came with a sweetener: In addition to a $175,000 annual salary from the city, a nonprofit organization made up of local business leaders pays him $100,000 a year more.

The arrangement raised some questions at the time about whether the St. Louis Police Foundation’s money would influence Tracy’s approach to policing in a city with one of the nation’s highest rates of violent crime.

Thirteen months after Tracy took charge, those questions remain largely unanswered.

Megan Green, president of the board of aldermen and the city’s second-highest ranking official, said that while Tracy is generally responsive to the board, aldermen need more information about the financial relationship between the foundation and the Police Department and will now ask for it.

“I think we don’t know the exact extent to which he collaborates with the foundation or they have his ears,” Green said. “The public deserves to understand exactly, even beyond salary, how much money the police foundation is investing in the Police Department.”

Sharon Tyus, a longtime alderwoman who represents some north side neighborhoods most affected by crime, questioned whether Tracy’s arrangement with the foundation is legal.

“Who else can pay the chief?” she asked. “Can the criminals get together and pay the chief?”

Since it was founded in 2007, the foundation has given the Police Department at least $20 million in support, including both cash donations and in-kind gifts of training, weapons, protective gear and technology.

But until Tracy’s hiring, it had never paid a public official; the deal with Tracy, policing experts say, is unheard of for a U.S. police chief. (It’s far more common for coaches at elite college athletic programs.)

Tracy, who previously was the chief of police in Wilmington, Delaware, was the first chief in the St. Louis department’s 214-year history to be selected from outside the department. Mayor Tishaura O. Jones announced his appointment after a nationwide search with help from a firm whose work was paid for by another St. Louis-area business group, the Regional Business Council. Jones has praised Tracy for the city’s reduction in reports of violent crime in his first year on the job, while Tracy has credited the work of the department’s officers, community support and his own crime reduction strategies.

Tracy and Jones did not respond to questions from ProPublica or requests for interviews. Nick Dunne, a spokesperson for Jones, said in an email that the mayor has been “continuously transparent” about the selection process and Tracy’s salary.

“It remains clear that Chief Tracy is a worthwhile investment in the safety of St. Louis residents,” Dunne said.

Tracy assumed his role just a few months after ProPublica published stories focusing on the growth of private police forces in St. Louis. Those stories revealed that wealthier neighborhoods paid private companies for additional police services provided by moonlighting city officers and high-ranking leaders.

After the stories’ publication, Jones said in a radio interview that she intended to make changes to the private policing system to eliminate the disparities. But Tracy’s appointment has only cemented the city’s pay-to-play policing environment; the promised overhaul has not taken place. In a recent interview with KSDK-TV, Tracy said he didn’t want to prevent his officers from earning additional money in second jobs.

Experts in policing and public administration criticized private funding of Tracy’s salary. They said the foundation’s money threatens to divide Tracy’s civic loyalties or at least create the impression that he’s beholden to wealthy donors.

“When you have what could be perceived as a very high-level pay-to-play scheme, where certain businesses and entities have not just the chief’s phone number but literally sign more than a third of his paycheck, that’s just a bad look,” said Seth Stoughton, a professor at the University of South Carolina’s law school who has studied private policing.

Money from police foundations is used in a number of cities and in a variety of ways, from funding officer appreciation days to providing helicopters. They bridge budget gaps and provide resources that might otherwise be unavailable because of public funding limitations. Their supporters say they enhance what police can do and can foster partnerships between the community and the police.

But, Stoughton said, that kind of spending is “significantly different from giving a police chief a private stipend, particularly one that constitutes a substantial portion of his public salary. That’s weird.”

Justin Marlowe, a research professor at University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and the director for the school’s Center for Municipal Finance, said it was clear “something is wrong with the way St. Louis is budgeting for policing.” If it was important to pay the chief $100,000 more, he said, “then you find a way to do that through the budget process. And then that way it’s very clear where the accountability is and clear what the performance expectations are.”

Marlowe noted that public officials are expected to recuse themselves from votes or actions in which they have a financial interest to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest. While taxpayers and the foundation might share objectives, “What we’re worried about is, What if there’s not alignment?”

In public statements to the media, Tracy has said he is not beholden to the foundation. The foundation’s chairman, Doug Albrecht, has told reporters that the foundation’s only condition for Tracy was that he remain engaged with the community and with officers.

But in his first year on the job, the foundation played a role in financing Tracy’s downtown crime strategy, contributing $860,000 for additional patrols in the business district, an area that had seen spikes in crime and raucous parties that turned violent. The foundation said this funding was at Tracy’s request. And Tracy told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch he chose downtown for foundation-funded patrols because it’s a popular gathering place. The program has been renewed this year.

In the email to ProPublica, Dunne, the mayor’s spokesperson, said the downtown patrols were “designed to incentivize officers to work secondary under the department itself, rather than private companies.”

Joe Vaccaro, the longtime chairman of the Board of Aldermen’s Public Safety Committee until he lost reelection last year, said that, if he were still on the board, he would ask why Tracy chose downtown for the foundation-funded patrols.

“Why are you picking downtown over my neighborhood?” he asked. “There are more killings in areas of north St. Louis. Why is downtown more important? Oh, wait a minute, the money comes from the group that’s paying you.”

Vaccaro’s successor as public safety chair, Bret Narayan, said the financial relationship between the foundation and Tracy “is something we should be taking a hard look at.” He said that though the board has not typically received line-item detail on foundation gifts to the department, some aldermen have been discussing legislation that would require the department to provide that.

In an interview, the foundation’s president and executive director, Michelle Craig, said that its relationship with Tracy is substantially the same as with his two predecessors — though neither of them received foundation money. She said board members “do not have any more access than anyone else who would call the chief’s office and make an appointment.”

Tracy’s predecessor, John Hayden, who served as police chief for 4 1/2 years until his retirement in June 2022, said the foundation did not try to influence his decisions. He said the department would sometimes ask the foundation to buy equipment instead of waiting for the next year’s city budget allocation. He said that when the department said it needed bulletproof helmets, the foundation bought them, citing an incident where an officer had been shot.

Hayden said he wished that he’d had the opportunity to try to negotiate a higher salary than the $153,000 he made in his last full year. But he said he would have preferred to be paid by the city.

“I think then the citizens would be more comfortable that I wasn’t beholden to somebody,” he said.

Lt. Col. Michael Sack, who served as interim chief for about six months in 2022 and was one of four finalists for the chief’s job, said in a federal lawsuit against the city that he would have turned down the extra pay from the foundation so St. Louis would not have a chief “who has conflicts of interest.” (Sack says he was wrongly rejected for the job; the city says that the lawsuit has no merit and has asked a federal judge to dismiss it.)

St. Louis does not appear to have a clear need for private funding of its chief. The department’s budget this year is $189 million and, because it is about 300 officers short of its authorized strength of 1,215, it has not spent all the money the city has made available. Last year, the department was more than $12 million under budget.

The private pay for Tracy is part of a broader pattern where St. Louis-area business leaders, many of whom live and work outside the city, have quietly tried to influence police operations because of concerns about crime’s impact on the regional economy.

Albrecht, the foundation chairman lives in Ladue, an affluent suburb 12 miles west of St. Louis known for sprawling estates and private golf clubs. That’s also where his venture capital and private equity firm, Bodley Group, is based. The foundation’s mailing address is his office. Albrecht didn’t respond to requests for comment.

At the time of Tracy’s hiring, Albrecht said the group learned during the search that the process was limited by the low pay for the position. The city charter requires that the police and fire chief be paid equally. Fire Chief Dennis Jenkerson made $157,423 in 2022. He was paid $175,000 in 2023 after Tracy was hired.

Jenkerson said in a brief interview that he was “in the process of working on that issue” and that “parity is parity.” He said he did not want to comment on what he thought about Tracy’s foundation pay.

St. Louis ranks at the lower end for how it pays its chief — at least before Tracy. A survey by the Police Executive Research Forum found that, in 2021, the average salary for chiefs in the 38 largest U.S. police departments was $232,380.

The additional pay for the chief’s job was never part of publicly available information about it. And it’s not clear if the city considered paying the chief a higher salary, even if it meant paying the fire chief more. Green said she didn’t know if such a proposal was taken to the Board of Aldermen before she was elected its president in November 2022.

Her predecessor, Lewis Reed, resigned and is in federal prison on a bribery conviction.

Records the foundation provided to John Chasnoff, a local activist who has pressed for transparency over the city’s policing, show that its board members were discussing a plan to contribute to the next chief’s salary at least three months before Tracy’s selection. An email to board members from Albrecht said the city’s maximum salary of $175,000 “will not allow us to acquire the highest level of talent for this position.”

Albrecht wrote that to secure the contract of up to $100,000 with the new chief, the foundation would work directly with the search firm the city used and, ultimately, with the candidate. “The city would not be involved,” he wrote.

In an email to St. Louis Police Foundation members, its chairman, Doug Albrecht, discusses a pay package for the new city police chief. (Obtained by ProPublica)

Minutes from a foundation board retreat in September 2022 indicate members agreed that this financial support was crucial to attract the most qualified candidate, even if they had no control over the process or the eventual appointee.

Minutes from a St. Louis Police Foundation retreat (Obtained by ProPublica)

Tracy insisted in a KMOV-TV interview that he was not beholden to the foundation and that his integrity was intact because “that was a deal with the city, and not a deal to me personally.”

But that appears to not be true. A contract released by the foundation — after pressure from Chasnoff — shows that it was signed by Tracy and Albrecht.

Besides salary, the contract requires Tracy to conduct a series of outreach efforts, including town hall meetings with department staff, regular communications and updates to the community by a blog or other means, and annual meetings with leaders in each of the city’s 14 wards.

The agreement runs for three years or unless Tracy is fired by the city or the foundation has probable cause that he has committed misconduct or failed to uphold the agreement.

Craig said the foundation was pleased with Tracy’s performance.

“I’m not in the media, so I don’t know the struggles of getting his attention,” she said, “but to us it appears he’s in a lot of places in the community, and that’s what he’s supposed to be doing.”

This post was originally published on Articles and Investigations – ProPublica.

by Lexi Churchill and Lomi Kriel

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

This article is produced in collaboration with The Texas Tribune and the PBS series FRONTLINE. Sign up for newsletters from The Texas Tribune and from FRONTLINE.

After a teenage gunman killed 10 people at Santa Fe High School in 2018, Texas lawmakers mandated that all school police officers receive training to better prepare them for the possibility of confronting a mass shooter. The law, which required that such training occur only once, didn’t apply to thousands of state and local law enforcement officers who did not work in schools.

Four years later, officers who descended on Uvalde’s Robb Elementary School, a vast majority of whom were not school police, repeatedly acted in ways that ran contrary to what active shooter training teaches, waiting 77 minutes to engage the gunman. An investigation published in December by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and FRONTLINE revealed that about 30% of the 116 state and local officers who responded in May 2022 did not get active shooter training after graduating from police academies. Of those who had, many received such instruction only once in their careers, which at least eight police training experts say is not enough.

As part of the investigation, the news organizations conducted a nationwide analysis to examine active shooter training requirements and found critical gaps in preparedness between children and law enforcement. While at least 37 states require active shooter-related drills in schools, typically on a yearly basis, no states mandate such training for officers annually.

Instead, decisions about active shooter training are often left to individual school districts and law enforcement departments, creating a patchwork approach in which some proactively provide such instruction and others do not.

The month after the news organizations’ investigation was published, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland’s office released a scathing report that detailed a slew of failures during the Robb Elementary response. While visiting Uvalde, he told reporters that law enforcement agencies should immediately prioritize active shooter training.

The federal report recommended that officers receive eight hours of such instruction annually. Only Texas, however, comes close to meeting the Department of Justice’s suggested standards, according to the newsrooms’ nationwide analysis. Last year, the state mandated that all officers, not just school police, take 16 hours of active shooter training every two years.

About a dozen states also increased training requirements after the Uvalde shooting, but many continue to fall short of what police training experts say is needed.

The gaps in training requirements begin before officers’ first day on the job.

While police academies in nearly every state require some form of active shooter training, five states — California, Georgia, Ohio, Washington and Vermont — do not require it for all recruits. A spokesperson for the police standards agency in Washington did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for the Vermont police standards agency said the police academy curriculum is being reviewed but she could not comment on whether it will expand active shooter training to all officers. Officials with police standards agencies in the other three states said they are considering adding active shooter training to their police academy curriculum.

Once officers graduate from police academies, the lack of training requirements becomes more pronounced.

Only two states — Texas and Michigan — have laws that require active shooter training for all officers once on the job. While Texas requires recurring instruction, training in Michigan is given once after officers graduate from police academies. Some states mandate active shooter training one time in a particular year, leaving out officers who were not employed at the time. Other states require training only for school police, as Texas did before the Uvalde shooting, and only two of them — Illinois and Mississippi — require it more than once.

Source: State laws and regulations compiled by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and FRONTLINE.

While a majority of states require frequent active shooter-related drills in schools, 13 don’t require such instruction. They include Colorado and Connecticut, which had two of the worst mass shootings in history: the 1999 Columbine school massacre and the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary. Spokespeople for the school safety departments in both states said districts are conducting drills despite the absence of a state mandate but did not provide records that confirm their assertions.

Active shooter training can be expensive, but state lawmakers should commit to providing the necessary instruction if they want law enforcement to be better prepared for a mass shooting, police training experts said. John Curnutt, assistant director at Texas State University’s Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center, said Uvalde is a “horrible example” of when training was needed but hadn’t been practiced enough.

“There’s a higher price that’s paid than the one that we probably could have paid upfront to get ready for it,” Curnutt said.

The table of information below is best viewed on our website.

View the rest of this table on our website. Source: State laws and regulations compiled by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and FRONTLINE. Information is current as of December 2023.

About this Research

To confirm the most up-to-date active shooter training requirements for law enforcement and schools across the country as of 2023, we contacted education departments and law enforcement standards agencies in every state. We examined both state laws and regulations.

In our analysis of schools, we included all mandated lockdown and active shooter drills, though some education departments said other types of drills can help prepare students and staff as well. In addition to the 37 states that explicitly require active shooter-related drills, we noted several others that have laws mandating safety drills but allow districts to decide which types of drills to conduct. We did not include those in our total count because the options could range from active shooter drills to earthquake drills.

For law enforcement, we collected information about how many hours of active shooter training are required for recruits going through police academies and for officers once they are on the job. We also asked for statewide data showing how many officers had taken such courses, but few states could provide that information. While we included only states’ current training mandates, four states — Alabama, North Carolina, Maine and Pennsylvania — required officers to train in a particular year but then not again, meaning that only those who were employed at that time received the one-time instruction.

This post was originally published on Articles and Investigations – ProPublica.

by Eric Umansky

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

A decade ago, the Chicago Police Department drew national outrage after an officer shot and killed 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. Officials had refused to disclose footage of the murder while officers worked to cover it up. But the fallout from the case has also led to a lesser-known and surprising outcome: The city is now a leader in using body-camera footage to deliver transparency.

Notably, an independent accountability office — not the police department — decides what footage from police shootings and other serious incidents is released to the public. That seemingly straightforward setup, the product of the city’s policing reforms, appears to put Chicago in a league of its own.

“I’m not aware of any other civilian agency that does what Chicago does on releasing video,” said Florence Finkle, vice president of the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement. “Transparency is key to accountability.”

As ProPublica reported last month, police departments across the country have been left in sole control of the video from body-worn cameras, a power that has enabled them to undermine the promise of the technology to bring transparency and accountability. The departments have frequently kept footage from public view — and even from civilian investigators, who can find themselves hamstrung without key evidence in a case. In New York, for example, a disciplinary case against officers involved in the killing of a man in crisis recently collapsed after the NYPD withheld footage of the incident for more than a year.

Chicago, of course, has a long history of brutal, violent policing — abuse that’s often been accompanied by a code of silence.

After the McDonald shooting in October 2014, the police initially reported that he had lunged at officers with a knife. But then a whistleblower reached out to a local law professor. “They told me there’s video and it’s being covered up,” recalled University of Chicago’s Craig Futterman, who pushed for the release of the dashcam footage. The city, under then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel, refused. A year after the shooting, a judge finally forced the city’s hand, and Chicagoans saw for themselves that McDonald had been walking away from officers when he was shot 16 times. As he lay on the road bleeding, a knife lay beside him, folded.

The footage triggered sweeping change. The officer who killed McDonald was convicted of murder. The police chief resigned. The federal government investigated, and police oversight in Chicago was reimagined. The city created the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, and tasked it with not only investigating misconduct but also disclosing footage from shootings and other serious incidents.

Chicago committed to releasing footage within 60 days of an incident. “The people of the City have an undeniable, and in some cases paramount, interest in being informed, in a timely fashion and based on the most accurate information possible, about how their police force conducts its business,” the new policy stated. It also committed the city to giving family members of those shot an opportunity to see footage first.

Jamie Kalven, a Chicago journalist and advocate who helped reveal what had happened to McDonald, said, “That case changed public expectations and norms in Chicago. Releasing the video became the new expectation.”

In most other cities, civilian oversight agencies have to ask police departments for footage, which often isn’t shared. Chicago initially had that kind of cumbersome setup too. “We used to have to file paper forms for a video,” said Shannon Hayes, COPA chief of investigations. But a year after the agency began, and in line with the demands for change, it got the ability to log into the system that stores footage. Allowing investigators to search for footage themselves “was huge,” said Hayes. “It’s night and day.”

In New York, home of the nation’s largest police force, local lawmakers have been seeking the same kind of access for the Civilian Complaint Review Board, the city’s equivalent of COPA. “Transparency is essential to improve public safety and community trust,” City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams said on X, citing ProPublica’s reporting. The legislation, however, has stalled amid opposition from the NYPD. A department official told lawmakers last year that the department “does not fear transparency,” but argued that it would be an “insurmountable obstacle” to give the review board direct access while following state confidentiality laws.

In Chicago, the civilian agency has used its access to do thorough investigations. “They’re the highest quality I’ve ever seen in Chicago,” said University of Chicago’s Futterman, who has long been critical of the city’s policing oversight. Those investigations have, on occasion, resulted in officers being fired.

COPA’s release of footage has also undermined the Police Department’s attempts to spin narratives around shootings.

In early 2021, a Chicago officer responding to a report of gunfire shot and killed 13-year-old Adam Toledo. The police initially referred to it as an “armed encounter.” An adult suspect had allegedly handed a gun to Toledo as police arrived. Two weeks after the shooting, the police released edited footage from the officer’s body-worn camera. The video included an added arrow, pointing to Toledo’s hand, saying, “Firearm.”

Two weeks after a Chicago police officer shot and killed 13-year-old Adam Toledo, the department released edited and annotated footage from the officer’s body camera. (Chicago Police Department)

But that same day, COPA released the full, unembellished footage, along with other records from the case. The video appears to show that Toledo dropped the gun and raised his empty hands in the air moments before Officer Eric Stillman shot him.

The full, unedited body-camera footage, released the same day by the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, shows Toledo raised his empty hands moments before the officer shot him. (Chicago Police Department)

A local prosecutor declined to press charges against Stillman, saying that he had responded to a “perceived threat.” (Neither a lawyer for Stillman nor the Police Department responded to requests for comment.)

COPA did its own investigation and found that the officer should not have shot Toledo and should be fired.

But the case also highlights the limits of the changes in Chicago. While COPA can recommend discipline, it can’t impose it. Instead, discipline is decided by a separate civilian board. Cases often take years to wind through the system. Nearly three years after the shooting, Stillman’s recommended firing is still pending a decision from the board. (The board declined a request to comment.)

There are other ways in which Chicago’s setup is far from perfect, said Kalven, the local journalist. He has been pushing for Chicago to commit to releasing footage more quickly than the 60 days the city committed to long ago — and he says it should be “all body-camera footage of all officers at the scene,” as opposed to all “relevant” footage, a determination made by COPA. The changes, said Kalven, should be enshrined in law.

Chicago’s main police union, however, has pushed for less transparency. The Fraternal Order of Police’s new contract negotiated last year includes a variety of restrictions on the use of the cameras. “Post-incident conversations” captured by cameras cannot be used in discipline cases, nor can videos captured by “inadvertent camera activation.” (Officers in Chicago have a history of failing to turn on their cameras.) The union did not respond to a request for comment.

Still, policing does seem to be changing in Chicago. Shootings by officers are down in recent years, as are incidents of officer use of force.

“I think Chicago may have more civilian oversight than other police forces in the country right now,” said Arewa Winters, a Chicago community organizer. “But there is a lot of resistance. There is still a lot of work to do.”

Winters’ 16-year-old nephew was killed by officers in 2016, a trauma that “catapulted” her into activism. There was footage of what happened, but the police and city didn’t release it, claiming confidentiality because he was a minor. “Now, because of oversight, they don’t have a choice,” she said.

This post was originally published on Articles and Investigations – ProPublica.

by Molly Parker, Capitol News Illinois

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Capitol News Illinois. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

The judge responsible for the administration of a troubled juvenile detention center in rural southern Illinois abruptly moved to close it as of Dec. 31, citing staffing shortages that made it difficult to meet new state standards governing the treatment of youth in custody.

The Franklin County Juvenile Detention Center had been featured in a November report by Capitol News Illinois and ProPublica that exposed the state’s lax enforcement of its own standards, despite audits that repeatedly found poor conditions at the facility.

Those standards were updated by the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice in 2021; the changes aimed to improve education and mental health services for detained youths, and to limit the use of restraints and seclusion, or locking kids alone in their cells for hours. But in an inspection the following year, the state agency described the Franklin County Juvenile Detention Center as a “facility in crisis”: It did not provide the required mental health care, schooling and recreation for the children in custody, and staff locked youth in their rooms for up to 24 hours for behavioral infractions or because of short staffing. Facilities are only allowed to use seclusion to prevent someone from harming themselves or others.

That same year, the Illinois Supreme Court, which shares oversight of the state’s juvenile detention centers, also found that the Franklin County center did not meet its standards. In the summer of 2023, the facility was sued by the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, alleging it had violated youths’ constitutional rights by subjecting them to excessive forms of restraint and seclusion while denying them adequate education and mental health services. The facility had still not come into compliance as of the end of 2023.

In the face of these reports, in the late summer and fall of last year, the Franklin county board publicly debated the fate of the building, which is owned by the county. In hopes of keeping the juvenile detention center open, the board approved about $200,000 for upgrades. Earlier, workers’ salaries had also increased from $28,000 to $43,000 annually, according to the juvenile justice department’s January 2023 audit.

The November article by Capitol News Illinois and ProPublica found that some of the conditions noted by state auditors more than a year prior had continued at the facility in Benton, as well as in some of the other 15 juvenile detention centers where problems had been identified.

The news organizations’ reporting also revealed that the center’s staff often relied on backup from the local sheriff’s office, which sometimes used restraints in ways that are not typical or not allowed in juvenile detention centers, as law enforcement records obtained by Capitol News Illinois showed. Franklin County Sheriff Kyle Bacon defended the actions of his deputies and said that he did not believe his office was bound by the state standards for juvenile detention centers as his office was not involved in the center’s administration.

Despite these mounting concerns, the closure of the Benton detention center took some county officials, state lawmakers and employees by surprise. One longtime employee told county officials during a Tuesday night board meeting that staff were “blindsided” by the announcement four days before Christmas.

Two state lawmakers who represent the region, Rep. Dave Severin, R-Benton, and Sen. Terri Bryant, R-Murphysboro, expressed frustration that they had not been made aware of closure plans in advance and had learned of them from an employee after the decision was made.

Melissa Morgan, chief judge of the 2nd Judicial Circuit Court of Illinois, who made the closure decision, declined an interview through her administrative assistant.

Her court issued a statement about the closure late last week. It did not mention the critical audits, but it did say “workforce shortages” made it difficult to comply with the new standards and laws.

Youth detention facilities in Illinois operate like adult jails and hold youth in custody while their cases are pending in court. When the 32-bed facility closed last month, it housed only a handful of youth, though it was designated as a holding place for 26 southern Illinois counties — the lower quarter of the state. Most youth from those counties will now be sent to facilities in metro-east Illinois, bordering St. Louis, or out of state, potentially moving them further from their support systems.

The news organizations’ November reporting highlighted the fact that Illinois officials charged with inspecting the detention centers have little authority to enforce compliance. State Sen. Rachel Ventura, D-Joliet, said that she is in talks with state and court officials about how to strengthen that oversight. She said the many layers of government involved complicates the process, but she plans to propose legislation in the spring session of the Illinois General Assembly that would streamline the process for closing facilities.

Kevin Fee, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Illinois, said that his organization sued the facility in June when it found that the troubling state audits had not led to improvements.

Lawyers for the court and the county denied the allegations in court filings in November. The case is pending, though it may be rendered moot because it sought to improve conditions for youth into the future, not to win remedies for those it alleged had been previously harmed.

“I think that the closure of the facility is a good outcome, and we read it as an acknowledgement that the facility really has not been serving the youth that it houses adequately for some time, as we alleged in our lawsuit,” Fee said. “We hope that other facilities in the state that house youth will use this to measure their own conditions, and we’ll continue to monitor them.”

This post was originally published on Articles and Investigations – ProPublica.

by Anna Clark, photography by Sarahbeth Maney, Diamonstein-Spielvogel Visual Journalism Fellow

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

After his murder conviction was overturned in 2020, Marvin Cotton Jr. checked into a Comfort Inn outside Detroit, ready to begin a new life after nearly two decades in prison.

Freedom, however, was frightening. Night after night, he awoke every 15 minutes or so, wrestling with the covers, wondering if he’d hallucinated it all. He kept the television on to remind himself he wasn’t in prison anymore. Its noise broke the first complete silence he’d experienced in half a lifetime, he said, which “scared the hell out of me.”

More than a month living at the hotel ate up his modest savings, Cotton said. His conviction still showed up in background searches, he said, so when he found a landlord willing to rent to him, he had to pay extra. Finding a job seemed impossible. To keep up with expenses, he took out high-interest loans.

But there was hope: Michigan offers $50,000 for each year a person is wrongfully imprisoned, thanks to the Wrongful Imprisonment Compensation Act, which took effect in 2017. For Cotton, it seemed to promise nearly a million dollars.

The conviction integrity unit in a prosecutor’s office had recommended Cotton’s release after finding that his trial was fundamentally unfair, marred by police misconduct that resulted in key evidence being withheld. His case represented a clear injustice, Cotton believed, and he quickly filed a claim in civil court, the first step in the WICA process.

That first year of freedom saw him celebrated in some quarters: The Detroit City Council gave him the Spirit of Detroit award, calling him a “wrongfully convicted hero,” and a state legislator issued a special tribute for his perseverance and dignity in the face of injustice.

But in court, rather than agreeing to Cotton’s compensation claim, the Michigan attorney general’s office exercised its right to challenge it. It urged the court to reject the claim because it did not fit neatly into the parameters set out by WICA.

“You fight for years to prove your wrongful conviction was actually wrong,” Cotton said. “And then immediately, when you step out, you pick up this new war, and you’re constantly trying to prove yourself again.”

As Cotton learned, WICA’s benefits are aimed at a narrow set of circumstances. Wrongfully convicted people qualify only if their cases are overturned based on “new evidence” showing that the person was not the perpetrator or an accomplice. And this new evidence must be “clear and convincing” — a higher standard of proof than for other civil claims. In practice, that can mean excluding cases undermined by suppressed or insufficient evidence, inadequate legal counsel, official misconduct, shifting science or other reasons why someone can be convicted of a crime they didn’t commit.

The first photograph taken of Cotton after being released from prison was of him and his daughter Jhai-Yon Jones, now 25.

Michigan has the fifth-most exonerations in the country, according to the National Registry of Exonerations: 169 wrongful convictions in state courts since 1989, with an average of nearly 11 years of incarceration. Passed with bipartisan support, WICA was intended as a lifeline for former prisoners who were wrongfully convicted and to account, in part, for the harm done to them.

Of the 103 people who filed claims between 2017 and late 2023, about 68% received compensation, according to Jeffrey S. Gutman, a clinical law professor at George Washington University who researches compensation statutes across the country.

Advocates and people who were wrongfully imprisoned have said that the money often makes a huge difference at an impossibly vulnerable time. Many are rebuilding with no family, no home, no job prospects, no driver’s license, no resources to navigate trauma.

But in many ways, WICA has fallen short of early expectations, causing conflict in the courts while creating further uncertainty for people in the aftermath of a grave injustice.

“I did not imagine how actually harmful this law was going to be,” said Marla Mitchell-Cichon, counsel to the Innocence Project at Thomas M. Cooley Law School, who was part of the long campaign to pass WICA.

Advocates have urged the Legislature to update and clarify the law. And when disputes over compensation have come before the state Supreme Court, two justices, in sometimes pointed language, have expressed frustration with WICA.

“I don’t like administering legal rules that I can’t explain to the people they impact,” wrote one of the justices in a concurring statement in a 2022 case in which a wrongfully imprisoned man was shut out entirely. “Please fix it, legislators.”

Citing another case in which compensation was denied, a state commission has also flagged the law for review.

But, under the leadership of both parties, the Legislature has yet to do so.

Rep. Bryan Posthumus, the Republican floor leader, said in a statement emailed to ProPublica that he believes the state should compensate wrongfully imprisoned people for their lost freedom. “While the legislature has not taken up a formal review of WICA,” he said, “it is important that continuing reviews take place to ensure that the program works as intended. Ultimately, a review of WICA will be up to the Speaker of the House.”

Speaker Joe Tate and Senate Majority Leader Winnie Brinks, both Democrats, did not respond to requests for comment. Sen. Stephanie Chang, a Democrat who worked to pass WICA and sits on the commission that recommended its review two years ago, told ProPublica in an email that she and Democratic Rep. Joey Andrews are going to partner on legislation to address gaps in WICA.

The Michigan attorney general’s office said it evaluates claims and challenges them when it doesn’t believe they meet the law’s criteria. At any point, the attorney general’s office can offer a settlement as a compromise: a portion of what the law seemed to promise.

The Legislature drew lines based on “clear and convincing new evidence of innocence,” said Robyn Frankel, an assistant attorney general who directs the office’s conviction integrity unit and head of the section responding to WICA claims.

“Sometimes, personally, we may not agree with it or like it,” she said. “But that’s our job: to just apply the statute.”

Cotton, left, and his childhood friend Myron “Scooby” Agee look toward the house where Cotton grew up. “I just want to make my life worth it. When I first got out, I felt behind. I felt like I was running from something and I really had to change my perspective,” said Cotton, who said he is working with a program to lower crime in the neighborhood. “I wanted to run for something positive.”

Dennis Tomasik knows there’s no getting back the lost years of his life.

In 2007, at age 43, he was sent to prison for sexual abuse of a minor. Tomasik had worked as a tool and die engineer at an automotive equipment supplier outside Grand Rapids, the sole breadwinner for his wife and two children. Without his wages, the family barely skirted financial disaster.

His wife, Kim, went to work, first stocking shelves and then running machinery for a company that builds buses. Neighbors pitched in, she said, quietly passing along enough cash to make a mortgage payment. Dennis’ old co-workers slipped gift cards in her hands. When the family could no longer afford the legal costs, his appellate lawyers, believing in Tomasik’s innocence, continued on pro bono, winning a reversal from the state Supreme Court. To pay the bond before the second trial, Kim Tomasik said, the family and two relatives leveraged their houses.

At Tomasik’s retrial, his new trial lawyers focused on unraveling the story told by his accuser, who made the allegations after being arrested for larceny and acknowledged that he hoped his claims would help him avoid jail. New testimony, counseling records, work schedules and receipts upended the prosecution’s case. The second jury acquitted Tomasik in less than 30 minutes.

Dennis Tomasik outside of his home near Grand Rapids

Tomasik had been incarcerated for about nine years — nearly a decade of lost wages and retirement savings, as well as missed opportunities to keep pace with advancing technology in his field. In 2017, he filed a WICA claim.

But state officials contested it, and the courts backed them up. That included the state Supreme Court, which, in reversing his conviction earlier, had cited evidentiary errors at trial rather than the newly uncovered evidence.

Chief Justice Bridget McCormack, in a concurring statement on the compensation case denial in 2020, noted, “Had he brought only the new-evidence questions to this Court, and not the other trial errors, he’d likely be eligible for WICA compensation.”

McCormack previously served as co-director of the Michigan Innocence Clinic at the University of Michigan. Her statement, joined by Justice Megan Cavanagh, questioned “whether this result is consistent with the Legislature’s intent” and urged lawmakers to consider whether it intended the statute to exclude people like Tomasik.

Now 60, Tomasik said he has nothing saved for retirement. He and his wife are on Medicaid, and he earns money by doing repair jobs on snowmobiles and dirt bikes. “I live at the lowest means I can possibly live on and survive,” he said.

Compensation wouldn’t make up for the terror he experienced in prison, Tomasik said, or for missing his children’s graduations, his son’s wedding and his mother’s deathbed. But, he said, “I’d love to get compensated at least something so I don’t got to worry about what I have to sell to pay my property taxes every year.”

Tomasik moves a lawn roller outside of his home. “I could be retired right now and not have to worry about anything,” said Tomasik, who worked at an automotive equipment supplier before being wrongfully convicted. “At my age, no one is going to hire me. I’ve tried. It just isn’t really promising anymore for the work I did.” First image: Tomasik’s cracked fingertips are damaged from the odd jobs he does at his home. Second image: Pencil-drawn height measurements are seen on a wall inside the Tomasik family’s kitchen. “The worst part is I didn’t get to see my kids grow up,” Tomasik said.

Across the country, despite broad acknowledgement that wrongfully convicted people are entitled to some financial help, there is no uniform standard for how governments should compensate them.

Thirty-eight states and the District of Columbia have compensation statutes for people who were wrongfully imprisoned, offering varying amounts of money with a range of qualifying criteria.

Wisconsin passed one of the earliest statutes, in 1913, but it has one of the stingiest policies, typically allowing claims of no more than $5,000 per year and no more than $25,000 in total, regardless of the number of years served. Conversely, Texas offers $80,000 for each year of wrongful imprisonment, plus additional compensation for any years spent on parole or registered as a sex offender. But the law also sets up impediments to filing federal lawsuits — legal efforts that can result in large judgments. (Other states have similar provisions that limit the ability to receive both statutory compensation and money from civil suits.)

Some states have severe restrictions, excluding people who pleaded guilty, for example, or those with previous felony convictions. In Missouri, only DNA-based exonerations are eligible.

In Michigan, Steven Bieda, WICA’s lead sponsor, hoped the Legislature could create one of the nation’s more supportive statutes.

But it was narrower than originally envisioned, with the strict “new evidence” requirement and a high standard of proof. Bieda, now a district judge, said WICA was a compromise with lawmakers who were concerned that claims would relitigate cases based on facts and evidence that had already been assessed by courts. Many worried that someone who was actually guilty would benefit from it. The requirements were meant to tailor the law to people with clearly exculpatory cases, he said.

The law, which took more than a decade to pass, was a “decent start,” but it’s “poorly written,” said Wolf Mueller, an attorney who said he’s represented at least 20 WICA claims.

“It’s leaving a lot of folks out who are wrongfully convicted, and they are not going to get compensation under the statute the way it’s written,” Mueller said.

A few years ago, the Michigan Legislature passed bills that extended WICA’s filing window for people exonerated before the law passed and exempted WICA claims from the standard notification deadlines and statute of limitations.

But it has never reviewed the substance of the law’s eligibility requirements. That leaves the courts to wrestle with how to apply them.

Tomasik, left, and his wife, Kim Tomasik

Two years ago, the Michigan Law Revision Commission, which advises the Legislature on potential defects and anachronisms in state law, called attention to the lack of clarity in WICA. Quoting from McCormack’s statement in Tomasik’s case in its annual report, it encouraged the Legislature to review WICA but didn’t recommend specific changes.

In 2022, Charles Perry, who’d been exonerated for sexual assault, was shut out entirely after he filed for compensation. Judges acknowledged that there was in fact new evidence of innocence: testimony from witnesses Perry’s lawyer never called in his criminal trial. But because the official basis of his overturned conviction was prosecutorial misconduct and ineffective counsel, not the new evidence, an appeals court said its hands were tied. The state Supreme Court declined to take his case. Perry got nothing.

In one of her last acts before retiring from the court, McCormack again exhorted the Legislature to take action.

In Tomasik’s case, ”I asked the Legislature to ‘consider whether it intended to exclude individuals such as the plaintiff—call them ‘new evidence plus-ers,’—from the WICA,” McCormack wrote in a concurring statement, again joined by Cavanagh. “Had it done so, Mr. Perry wouldn’t be here.”

The fact that Perry doesn’t qualify “because he suffered legal error in addition to the undiscovered evidence of his innocence is a rule of decision I would be hard pressed to justify,” she wrote.

Her words meant something to Perry. “She literally put it on the record,” he said from his home in Florida. “She agreed with our case, but because of the way the law was structured, she had no alternative other than to rule against me, even though she felt in her heart that I was wronged.”

Had his claim gone through, Perry said, he would’ve saved the money for his two daughters. “They’re the ones that lost,” he said.

At the start of 2024, the Legislature still hasn’t acted, and yet another case is before Michigan’s Supreme Court — the fifth in six years. Besides Tomasik’s and Perry’s claims, there was a case that established that WICA won’t cover time spent in pretrial detention. Another found that “new evidence” need not be “newly discovered.” And in the pending case, lawyers are again arguing about what kind of evidence the law requires.

A recent analysis by Gutman found that 71 compensation claims in Michigan have been granted, 24 have been denied and eight are pending. Three people who were wrongfully imprisoned haven’t yet filed claims but are within the three-year window to do so. According to a recent report from the attorney general’s office, the state has paid out about $50 million through WICA as of late 2023.

For Gilbert Poole, money from the compensation fund was life-changing. In 2021, at age 56, he was freed from prison after serving nearly 32 years of a life sentence for murder. His conviction was overturned after his case was investigated by the Cooley Innocence Project and the attorney general’s conviction integrity unit.

Poole’s claim was approved within weeks of his filing, and he said he received the money — nearly $1.6 million — within six months. “Without anybody opposing me, it went through pretty quick,” he said.

That mattered because Poole was starting from scratch. He’d spent most of his life behind bars. He’d never used a cellphone. His parents had died. The only people he knew outside prison were lawyers and clergy who supported his case. But, Poole said, “you can’t really call them at 3 a.m. and say, ‘Hey, I can’t sleep,’ or ‘I’m having a panic attack,’ you know?”

Gilbert Poole in his home in Holt, Michigan. “I was in there longer than I was out here. A couple years of adulthood and then the rest in prison,” said Poole, who spent nearly 32 years wrongfully imprisoned. “When I came out, I had to learn everything.” Poole shares a self-portrait from his time in prison. He often used painting to imagine himself outside prison walls. “The best I can do is paint myself in there,” he said. “I couldn’t go there because I was in prison.”

Poole bought a house outside Lansing that he’s renovating himself. He built a pole barn for tinkering, maybe even a place to start his own business. He bought a GMC Acadia. He meets with a therapist. And he’s saving and investing as best he can, he said, in hopes of making up for decades of lost wages, retirement savings and Social Security.

Poole’s case moved unusually quickly. The time between the filing of a claim and the conclusion of their case ranges between one month and 52 months, according to a 2023 study by Gutman. The average is 16.7 months.

For people trying to rebuild their lives, every day counts.

“It’s just heartbreaking to know that it can be so difficult to get even the most basic necessities when you come home from a wrongful conviction,” said Kenneth Nixon, who spent nearly 16 years in prison for murder before his conviction was overturned in 2021. Less than a year after he filed his WICA claim, the court of claims ordered the state to pay him about $515,000 in compensation, less than he had sought.

Kenneth Nixon, who was wrongfully imprisoned for nearly 16 years, is renovating property he purchased in Detroit into an adult foster care home. First image: Nixon and his girlfriend, Chastity Youngblood, laugh while gathering signatures for Youngblood’s campaign for third circuit court judge. Second image: Nixon plays with his dog Karlie and her puppies that Nixon breeds at his home. “The space itself is very comfortable,” said Nixon, who purchased his home after being compensated for his wrongful imprisonment. “It’s peaceful.”

Today, Nixon is the president of the Organization of Exonerees, a nonprofit that helps fill the gaps for other wrongfully convicted people by providing everyday essentials like transportation, T-shirts and toothpaste.

Cotton’s compensation case, filed while he was still at the hotel, took three years.

In seeking to block his claim, the attorney general’s office argued that Cotton could not show that clear and convincing new evidence established his innocence of the crime, and that he wasn’t an accomplice or an accessory. It noted that he was at the scene, a house where drug dealing took place.

Last July, a court of claims judge sided with Cotton in rejecting the state’s argument. No physical evidence tied Cotton to the crime, the judge wrote, and witnesses had changed or disavowed their earlier testimony.

“The WICA does not require that a plaintiff show that he was innocent of all crimes; he only must show that he was innocent of the crimes actually charged or for which he was convicted,” wrote Judge Douglas Shapiro.

Before long, the state offered Cotton a settlement: about $630,000, Frankel said.

Addressing the state’s approach to settlements, Frankel said, “We’re trying to follow the statute, but we’re also trying to do the right thing.”

While Cotton felt he had a good case for the full amount, he said, more years fighting could “rip my life apart.” He agreed to the settlement.

Cotton, left, and his wife, Saquanda, discuss Christmas decorations inside their new home. “Even through all the chaos, it was peaceful and harmonious because we were together,” Saquanda Cotton said. “I just feel better knowing there’s a home.”

He puts a premium on stability. He has a home now in suburban Oakland County. He got married. His wife works as a banker, and he gets paid for speaking events about his experience. To bring in another stream of income, he published a book, “Better, Not Broken.”

Much of the compensation money, he said, will go toward the high-interest debt he racked up over the last three years. And all the money in the world won’t take away the fear that still wakes him up at night. He wonders, could it happen again? Will someone try to set him up?

Just in case, he said, he keeps “bags of receipts” that document his whereabouts. It might seem paranoid, he knows. But if he ever faces another accusation, one of those little pieces of paper just might prove his innocence.

From left: Anthony Legion, Eric Anderson, Marvin Cotton Jr., Ronnell Johnson and Alexandre Ansari listen as Organization of Exonerees President Kenneth Nixon introduces them during the group’s gala and fundraiser.

This post was originally published on Articles and Investigations – ProPublica.

by Umar Farooq

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

It was early morning on July 8, 2018, when Joseph Pettaway’s family was told by a neighbor that he had been badly injured by a police dog overnight and taken to the hospital.

He’d been rehabbing a home a block away from where he lived with his mother. His sister, Nancy, set off to see what had happened at the blighted house on the outskirts of Montgomery, Alabama.

She came upon a grisly scene. Blood was pooled on the pavement, and police officers were hosing it down. The front door was open, and Nancy Pettaway peeked at the hallway inside. “I seen blood, like they had dragged him,” she said. “One of the police told me to get back, and I said I ain’t going nowhere, cause that’s my brother, that’s my brother’s blood, and you gotta tell me what’s going on.”

But the Montgomery police refused to give her any information and later that day confirmed to the news media only that a suspected burglar had died on the scene.

A relative who worked as a paramedic told the family he had been called to the scene that night and found officers standing over Pettaway’s body, hands cuffed behind his back. Four days after the killing, staff from the medical examiner finally confirmed it was Pettaway who was killed, listing the cause as “accidental.” They told the family someone from the police department would come by soon to talk to them. No one ever did.

“We tried to get more detail and kept asking why the dog had to kill him,” said Walter Pettaway, Joseph’s brother. “And they wasn’t giving us no information. They wasn’t talking to us.”

It was a telling sign of the wall of silence the Pettaway family says they faced in the coming years.

Five months after the killing, the officers involved were cleared of any criminal wrongdoing. But it would take two years for the family to see for themselves the horror of what had really happened that night, and come to a starkly different conclusion about the officers’ culpability. The police who were there when Pettaway was killed wore body cameras that recorded what happened, but Montgomery’s department repeatedly refused to show the footage to the Pettaways, saying the video was “confidential,” and under Alabama law, the family had no right to access the video.

“They weren’t giving us nothing, cause they didn’t care,” Nancy Pettaway told ProPublica.

Over at the state capital, Juandalynn Givan, a Birmingham attorney and lawmaker in the Alabama House of Representatives, was as frustrated as Nancy Pettaway because the body-camera footage from a recent police shooting in her area was also being withheld.

“Why should any family have to wait two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, five weeks, a month, a year to know why someone was shot or killed?” she said in an interview.

Alabama state Rep. Juandalynn Givan has proposed legislation to provide for the release of police bodycam video. “If you didn’t do anything, if you didn’t make a misstep, there shouldn’t be an issue. Don’t make it an issue,” she said. (Alyssa Pointer for ProPublica)

The killings at the hands of Alabama police set off parallel yearslong efforts by Givan and the Pettaway family to pry loose body-camera video of fatal police encounters. Five years later, those efforts have had little success. The state has created a process for families to file official requests to see the footage, but there is no guarantee they, or the public, will ever get to view it.

Showing the public what happens in police encounters was the original purpose of body cameras, introduced in the wake of the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old Black man, in Ferguson, Missouri. They were the centerpiece of reforms pushed by then-President Barack Obama at the national level, as well as by elected leaders and law enforcement across the country, including in Alabama. Video from the perspective of police, it was hoped, would expose bad officers, inspire reforms in police practices and serve as a restraint against inappropriate escalations to deadly violence.

But as a series of ProPublica stories this year has shown, nearly a decade after Brown’s death, the cameras have failed to live up to that promise. More often than not, police are able to keep footage of the most violent police encounters out of public view.

In places like Alabama, that secrecy runs deepest. Alabama is among a handful of states where decisions by policymakers and judges have reduced access to body-camera footage so much that even families of the deceased are regularly barred from seeing what happened to their loved ones. To access the video, families must first navigate a maze of bureaucracy, often by petitioning a court or filing a lawsuit. And when they are successful, they often cannot share the footage with the public.

A week after Pettaway’s death, his family finally got to see his body, as they prepared for his funeral. They took pictures of the gruesome wounds the dog had left on his groin and thigh. They still had no satisfactory explanation from police about why the 53-year-old Black man was killed, and they decided it was time to find a lawyer to get answers.

His death was being investigated by both the Montgomery Police Department and the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency, which often assists local police in examining officer-involved deaths. They interviewed witnesses and officers and reviewed the body-camera footage and other evidence. But by the end of 2018, even after a grand jury decided not to indict the officers, neither agency would share any evidence, including the body-camera footage, with the Pettaways.

The Pettaways filed a lawsuit a month later accusing the city of Montgomery, the chief of police and 15 unnamed officers of violating Pettaway’s constitutional rights. The city and the state law enforcement agency continued to refuse to share their investigative files with his family.

Four months after Pettaway’s death, police in the town of Hoover, just outside Birmingham, shot and killed Emantic “EJ” Bradford Jr., a 21-year-old Black man, at a crowded shopping mall.

Someone had opened fire and injured two people in the rush of holiday shopping. Officers saw Bradford with a gun, shot him in the back and killed him. Police officials initially said Bradford was the shooter but later changed their story. It turned out Bradford, on leave from military duty, had pulled out his licensed gun and was trying to stop what he probably thought was a mass shooting.

As police had in Montgomery, department officials in Hoover refused to allow anyone to see the footage from the officers’ body-worn cameras.

Bradford’s killing drew national attention and ignited weeks of protests calling for the release of the video. “We will have the tape made public,” the Rev. Jesse Jackson said at Bradford’s funeral. “We want transparency, not cover-up. Tell the whole story; tell it now.”

April Pipkins shows a photograph of her son, Emantic “EJ” Bradford Jr., who was killed by police in Hoover, Alabama, near Birmingham. (AP Photo/Jay Reeves, File)

Givan, the state lawmaker, was herself a frequent shopper at that mall and imagined what it was like for Bradford’s family to be kept in the dark.

As in the Pettaway case, police involved in the Bradford shooting were also cleared of criminal wrongdoing without any public viewing of the crucial body-camera video. The Bradford family, the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union jointly called for the footage to be released. Authorities refused, claiming it was a confidential investigative record, and said releasing it could jeopardize the safety of the officers involved and was not in the public’s interest.

To Givan, Birmingham authorities were inviting needless criticism by not sharing the video with the public, just as police in Montgomery had done after the Pettaway killing. If the police officers who killed Bradford really made an honest mistake, a heat-of-the-moment decision, the video would show that to the public.

“There was just a lot of speculation as to what happened, and I was like, why don’t they just release the freaking bodycam?” she told ProPublica. “If you didn’t do anything, if you didn’t make a misstep, there shouldn’t be an issue. Don’t make it an issue.”

In the state House, Givan, a Democrat, introduced a bill that would, for the first time, codify the right of families to see the video even before an investigation is concluded and allow police departments to release footage to the public.

The Alabama Legislature was controlled by Republicans, so Givan needed the support of a powerful Republican, Allen Treadaway, chair of the Committee on Public Safety and Homeland Security and a former police officer. Givan and Treadaway were longtime friends: While he had served as assistant police chief in Birmingham, Givan had also worked for the city. But Treadaway soon got calls from police chiefs, sheriffs and district attorneys across the state asking him to stop the legislation.

“The major concern was not to jeopardize ongoing investigations,” Treadaway said. “The bill was really too loosely written in the early stages. … Law enforcement didn’t really want to touch it.” Amid the barrage of criticism from police lobbyists, Treadaway didn’t even bring Givan’s bill up for discussion.

The city of Montgomery and the Montgomery Police Department declined to comment for this story, saying they could not speak because of ongoing litigation.

By the fall of 2020, nearly two years had passed since authorities ended their investigation of the Pettaway case. Yet the family — a tight-knit group that included Pettaway’s mother, Lizzie, and his 11 siblings — still had not seen any of the body-camera footage. Then, in late August, the state law enforcement agency agreed to hand it over, under the condition that the family not show it to others.

The Pettaway family gathered at their attorney’s office to see what police had fought so long to hide. Some, like Joseph’s mother and his brother Walter, decided they could not handle the trauma and waited outside. Others, including sisters Nancy and Yvonne, sat in the office and made themselves watch, stomachs churning at what they saw as the officers’ callous disregard for their younger brother’s life.

“I see it in my head every night. I hear him begging for his life,” Nancy Pettaway told ProPublica.

From left, Walter Pettaway, Yvonne Frazier, Annie Pettaway, James Pettaway, Jacqueline Pettaway and Nancy Pettaway, family members of Joseph Pettaway, gather for a portrait. (Alyssa Pointer for ProPublica)

The family says the video, along with depositions from police officers and witnesses, buttresses a case that the department’s canine handler not only used unnecessary force that caused grave injury, but also that the officers, with appalling casualness, did nothing to help save Pettaway’s life in the aftermath of the attack.

According to the video and witness statements gathered by the family as part of their civil suit against the police, early on the morning of July 8, 2018, police had received a 911 call from Gary Dickson, one of the men hired along with Pettaway to work on the dilapidated house. The day before, Dickson, Pettaway and their boss, James Jones, had fitted a new window in the back bedroom. They had a barbeque in the backyard that evening, and by 11 p.m. everyone had left. The men planned to put in hardwood flooring the next day.

Dickson returned later that night to sleep in the house, as the workers sometimes did. Dickson did not know that Pettaway was also planning to return, he said in a deposition. Pettaway knocked on the front door and didn’t get an answer, so he climbed into the house from the back window he had helped install earlier in the day. In the darkened home, Dickson saw someone in the back bedroom he could not identify and left to call police.

At least half a dozen officers showed up around 3 a.m. Dickson called Jones, who told police when he arrived that there was not much valuable in the house. But police decided to summon the department’s K-9 handler Nicholas Barber to deploy a dog to search the house. Until then, police had made no effort to communicate with whoever was inside the house, according to officers’ depositions.

Barber, a white man and a former soldier who had joined the police department five years earlier, had deployed the dog nearly 10 times in the seven months he had been working as its handler. In a deposition, Barber said his dog had never bitten a person under his supervision before and acknowledged that having a dog get its first bite was a rite of passage for the animal and its handler.

Department policy required the consent of the homeowner for police to send a dog into a residence, and for officers to give three loud warnings to anyone inside before doing so. According to a transcript of the body-camera video entered into the court record, Barber stood in front of the door and said something in quick, slurred words that was unintelligible to those around him. Less than one second later, he unleashed the dog into the house.

Pettaway’s family says he had a deep fear of dogs and insists that if he had been given proper warning, he would have come out. “He wouldn’t have stayed in that house and let that dog bite him like that,” Yvonne Pettaway said. But Barber, according to the transcript, followed the dog into the home as it searched for Pettaway, shouting “

voran,” a German-language command telling a dog to apprehend a suspect. In seconds, the dog found Pettaway cowering under a bed.

“It was like he [Barber] was determined to find him in that house,” Yvonne Pettaway recalled from the body-camera video she watched. “The dog started chewing him, and I heard him holler, ‘Please get the dog out my stomach.’” Barber, she said, “just let him continue to bite him, didn’t try to pull him off or nothing.”

“The dog was just moving its head and he was just standing there, eating my brother up,” Nancy Pettaway said. “I don’t like to talk about it cause it make me wanna cry. And he said, ‘Please, please get the dog off me.’ He was still standing there, letting that dog kill my brother.”

For two minutes, according to the transcript, the police dog was allowed to tear into Pettaway under the bed. Barber repeatedly shouted “yaya” and “good boy,” praising the dog. To end the frenzied attack, he was forced to choke the dog until it passed out. With Pettaway still on the floor, Barber took the dog back to his police car outside. A minute later, he told another officer in front of the house that Pettaway “is not very happy right now.”

Six minutes after the dog attack began, police decided they should bring Pettaway outside. The transcript of the tape shows that Barber asked the other officers to wait so he could go and take a photo of the scene first. Inside, according to the transcript, Barber snapped a photo of an unconscious Pettaway with his cellphone and said “awesome” to himself.

Outside, according to the court record, another officer asked Barber about what happened:

“Policeman: ‘Did ya’ get a bite?’

“Barber: ‘Sure did, heh, heh (chuckling).’

“Policeman: ‘Are you serious?’

“Barber: ‘Fuck yeah.’”

According to court documents, police officers then went inside and dragged Pettaway through the home to lay him face down on the sidewalk outside. They turned him over and handcuffed him, and then five officers stood over his body, their flashlights illuminating the blood pouring out of the wounds on his upper legs, soaking his clothes and pooling onto the ground.

“Policeman: ‘He’s good.’

“Barber: ‘Well I mean “good” is a relative term. Let’s get that clear. He’s breathing.’”

Under department policy, officers were not allowed to render first aid, even though it was clear Pettaway’s bleeding needed to be stopped. “They didn’t care,” Nancy Pettaway said. “They were standing around and joking the whole time my brother laid there dying.”

Nearly five minutes later, a paramedic arrived and made the first attempt by anyone on the scene to offer medical aid. But it was too late.

The home in Montgomery, Alabama, where Joseph Pettaway was killed has since been damaged in a fire and torn down. (Umar Farooq/ProPublica)

For many of Pettaway’s siblings, the police officers’ behavior captured on the video is reminiscent of how authorities in Alabama and other states used police dogs to attack Black civil rights activists. “What they did to him put me in the mind of the stuff they did back in the day when they put them dogs on people,” Yvonne Pettaway said. “They still do the same thing to black people they did back in the day, the system hasn’t changed.”

The Pettaway family says if police had been called out to a white neighborhood, they doubt a dog would have been used to search a home in the first place. “They would have gone in there and walked him out,” Walter said.

Montgomery police never took disciplinary action against Barber or the other officers involved. In July 2020, he resigned from the department and joined the department in nearby Tallassee, Alabama. According to Barber’s deposition, his resignation stemmed from an unrelated disciplinary issue: The department accused him of improperly using police databases to stalk the boyfriend of an ex-girlfriend, then arresting the boyfriend during a trumped-up traffic stop.

Barber did not respond to messages left at two publicly listed phone numbers, and his attorneys did not respond to questions sent via email.

The Montgomery Police Department headquarters (Alyssa Pointer for ProPublica)

That summer, Givan watched as enraged people took to the streets across the country over the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, which was captured on video by an onlooker. In Birmingham, protesters marched through the city center and tried to pull down a Confederate monument. The city declared a state of emergency and put a curfew in place.

It was clear to Givan that police in Alabama needed to be more transparent. In Madison, a suburb of Huntsville, residents protested when police blocked the release of video that showed officers shooting and killing Dana Fletcher, a Black man who was also attacked by a police dog in a Planet Fitness parking lot. In Huntsville, an officer was on trial for the murder of Jeff Parker, a suicidal white man killed in his home after a 911 call, sparking demonstrations. Neither the public nor the City Council — which was paying the officer’s legal bills — was allowed to see video. The officer was convicted of murder, but an appeals court ordered a retrial, and in October the officer pleaded guilty to manslaughter.

If authorities showed the public what had happened, Givan remembered thinking, cities might avoid the unrest that followed. “This is not rocket science,” Givan said. “I’m sitting there saying, ‘All y’all had to do was release the footage. Then the city now doesn’t have to pay $10 million to restore downtown. All y’all had to do was be transparent.’”

In Birmingham, Givan organized workshops to teach young people and police how to keep routine interactions like traffic stops from escalating.

And in the state House, she approached Treadaway again to see how her bill on body-camera video transparency could be made more agreeable to critics. They consulted with the attorney general, the Alabama Sheriffs Association, the Alabama State Fraternal Order of Police and the Alabama District Attorneys Association. But there was still no support for the bill as long as it offered a path for media and the public to obtain footage.

Many state lawmakers were also opposed to allowing the public to see video. Alabama’s Legislature included serving police officers on crucial committees like Judiciary and Public Safety. Among these lawmakers was Shane Stringer, who had killed a person while on duty just outside Mobile in 2018, according to the Mobile County Sheriff’s Office. Stringer, who didn’t respond to interview requests from ProPublica, pushed for a series of pro-police bills, including one that made it easier to redact the names of officers involved in controversial incidents from public records. He was also the lead sponsor of a law that this year made Alabama one of the only states where anyone over the age of 19 can carry a gun without a license.

“You actually had a bill passed that opens up the wild wild west, that puts guns in the hands of people,” Givan said. “But yet you don’t want to pass legislation that allows for transparency.”

Givan’s bill failed in committee in 2021.

The debate however, hit a turning point in January 2023. The brutal killing of Tyre Nichols by Memphis police in neighboring Tennessee finally ignited support in Alabama for allowing some access to police body-camera footage. Authorities in Memphis showed the family the video of his beating by officers, and the district attorney quickly took action to charge the officers with a crime.

National news media positioned reporters to cover what many thought would be violent protests once the body-camera video was released. There were protests in Memphis and other cities, but they were largely peaceful, something Givan and Treadaway credit to the transparency Memphis showed in the weeks after Nichols was killed.

Even Treadaway, despite his previous reluctance, saw the need for it in cases like that of Nichols. “It was shocking,” Treadaway said in an interview, “to see that type of treatment of a citizen. … It was very disturbing and shocking that that would happen. I’ve never seen that in my career in the city of Birmingham.” The way authorities handled the release of the video, Treadaway told ProPublica, was a model for what could happen in Alabama the next time such an incident occurred.

But when Alabama lawmakers finally approved a watered-down version of Givan’s bill this June, it left the police in control of body-camera footage. Families of victims can make a formal request to see video of an incident, but they can be denied without any detailed explanation. There was no provision to allow the news media or the public to see the footage.

The shortcomings of the new law have been showcased in a number of recent cases since its passage.

In July, for example, Jawan Dallas, a 36-year-old Black man, was stopped by officers in Mobile, Alabama, who were seeking a burglary suspect. Police said Dallas was shocked with a stun gun when he resisted and died from a “medical emergency.” His family, which was allowed to see the video only after a grand jury cleared the officers of criminal wrongdoing, said in a press conference this November that Dallas was cooperative in the video. The officers pinned him to the ground, they said, and shocked him more than a dozen times. As he struggled for his life, Dallas can be heard saying, “I cannot breathe, help me,” and “I don’t want to be George Floyd.”

Like the Pettaways, Dallas’ family, which has sued the Mobile Police Department, is barred from showing the video of his death to the public. The case has prompted one lawmaker, state Sen. Merika Coleman, to introduce a new bill that would make video from body cameras or dashboard cameras a public record and lay out a procedure for the media and the public to request access to it — the same kind of reforms that Givan’s bills failed to make. The Mobile Police Department did not respond to a request for comment.

The changes to state law have done little for Pettaway’s family members, who have been fighting since 2020 to make the footage of his death public. They have pictures of Joseph and his mother adorning everything from T-shirts to coffee mugs. “Gone but not forgotten,” one T-shirt says, with a photo of Pettaway taken at a Christmas barbecue their mother hosted in happier times.

“The defendants and the city would prefer that their blatantly egregious, inhumane violation of Mr. Pettaway’s rights remain unseen and unknown and unexposed to public scrutiny,” the family’s attorney said in a petition to the court as part of their lawsuit against Barber and the city.

The city of Montgomery, which continues to provide Barber’s legal defense, has argued successfully that releasing the video would prejudice any future jury. And if released, the city told the court, the “the graphic images presented in the recording could lead to civil unrest.”

ProPublica’s request for the body-camera footage of the events surrounding Pettaway’s death was rejected in September by the city of Montgomery, which said the video is not a public record under Alabama law and therefore “not subject to disclosure under the Alabama Open Records Act.”

Givan said authorities in Alabama have failed to understand that withholding the footage fomented the public outrage they are trying to prevent. “The unrest comes because you deny, you deny, you deny, and then the general public begins to suspect you,” she said. “The longer you wait, the more the public distrusts you.”

Givan at her office in Birmingham, Alabama

In December 2022, a judge refused a request from a coalition of news outlets to release the video of Pettaway’s killing. The trial against Barber and the city was supposed to begin within months, the court said, and the public could see the footage of Pettaway’s death then. A year later, though, that trial has yet to begin, and the Pettaways must wait for a higher court to rule on whether Barber can be tried at all.

While he understands the court’s concern about the potential for public unrest, Pettaway’s brother Walter says it cannot outweigh the need to show what happened, and the small measure of justice making the video public might bring to the family. Pettaway’s mother, Lizzie, died earlier this year, and the family says the grief of knowing what happened to her son was a heavy burden on her last years.

Walter Pettaway is one of Joseph Pettaway’s 11 siblings. (Alyssa Pointer for ProPublica)

“I can understand what the judge is saying, but at the same time, it happened, and there ain’t no police officer or nothin’ came by and said nothing to mom before she left,” Walter Pettaway said. “That’s the hurting part, too. It hurts.”

This post was originally published on Articles and Investigations – ProPublica.

by Eric Umansky

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

The New York Police Department has agreed to end its practice of withholding body-camera footage of police shootings from civilian investigators, a practice that sometimes derailed independent inquiries into deaths at the hands of police.

The change came weeks after ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine asked the NYPD about the practice as part of their investigation into the use of body cameras.

For years, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, which is charged with investigating police misconduct in New York City, has often been hamstrung in its ability to move ahead on the most serious cases because the NYPD refused to share footage of shootings and other serious incidents while the department did its own, often lengthy, internal investigation.

“We are pleased to have come to this agreement with NYPD and hope it will ensure officers who commit misconduct cannot avoid discipline due to a technicality,” said CCRB Chair Arva Rice in a statement.

Our investigation published last week detailed how the NYPD’s refusal to share footage had short-circuited the civilian agency’s efforts to punish an officer who had killed a young man named Kawaski Trawick.

NYPD did not give the civilian agency any footage of the April 2019 incident until more than a year and a half later. When the department finally handed it over, the footage showed one officer shot and killed Trawick, despite the officer’s more experienced partner repeatedly telling him not to use force. “No, no, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t,” the more senior officer said.

The CCRB filed disciplinary charges against the officer, triggering an NYPD trial earlier this year. But the police judge in the case decided there should be no discipline — because the CCRB had failed to file charges within an 18-month statute of limitations. The reason the CCRB hadn’t done so? The agency didn’t have the footage it needed to move ahead.

NYPD countered in a statement to ProPublica that “The CCRB could have brought charges prior to the expiration of the statute of limitations, but did not do so.”

The new agreement between the NYPD and CCRB, which was signed Dec. 5, stipulates that the Police Department will hand over footage and other records within 90 days of a request. The deal is essentially a good faith agreement between the two agencies. It does not have the force of law or lay out penalties.

A few other cities have taken a different approach. The civilian police oversight bodies in Chicago; Washington, D.C.; and New Orleans all have direct access to footage, mandated by law. Rather than relying on the police to send them the video, they have their own logins to the systems where videos are stored.

The deal also does not apply to the public disclosure of footage, an area in which the NYPD has lagged. Three years ago, the NYPD announced it would disclose footage from police shootings and other serious incidents within 30 days. Our investigation found that of 380 such serious incidents since then, the police have released video within a month just twice. (In response to our questions about that, the NYPD pointed to several exceptions in the department’s policy.)

The CCRB will have no shortage of footage to review. Through the first week of December, there were 28 shootings of civilians this year by New York City officers. The CCRB will now be able to get footage from all of them 90 days after the agreement was signed.

This post was originally published on Articles and Investigations – ProPublica.

by Umar Farooq

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

In the last 10 years, taxpayers have spent millions to outfit police officers across the country with body-worn cameras in what was sold as a new era of transparency and accountability. But a survey by ProPublica shows that when civilians die at the hands of police, the public usually never sees the footage.

At least 1,201 people were killed in 2022 by law enforcement officers, about 100 deaths a month, according to Mapping Police Violence, a nonprofit research group that tracks police killings. ProPublica examined the 101 deaths that occurred in June 2022, a time frame chosen because enough time had elapsed that investigations could reasonably be expected to have concluded. The cases involved 131 law enforcement agencies in 34 states.

In 79 of those deaths, ProPublica confirmed that body-worn camera video exists. But more than a year later, authorities or victims’ families had released the footage of only 33 incidents.

In 101 police killings in June 2022, body-camera footage … Jason Kao/ProPublica

Philadelphia signed a $12.5 million contract in 2017 to equip its entire police force with cameras. Since then, at least 27 people have been killed by Philadelphia police, according to Mapping Police Violence, but in only two cases has body-camera video been released to the public.

ProPublica’s review shows that withholding body-worn camera footage from the public has become so entrenched in some cities that even pleas from victims’ families don’t serve to shake the video loose.

In Savannah, Georgia, for instance, neither Saudi Arai Lee’s family nor the public has been allowed to see the footage of the fatal shooting of the 31-year-old Black man.

Savannah police and Georgia state investigators say Lee was walking down a street June 24, 2022, when an officer stopped to question him. Lee told the officer he had a permit to carry a gun and pulled out his wallet. He lifted his shirt to show the gun. Then, for an undisclosed reason, the officer began chasing Lee, and shot and killed him. It was the fifth killing by Savannah police in a year. The agencies won’t release the footage, they said, because the killing is still under investigation.

Lee’s uncle, Timothy Lee, arrived on the scene minutes after the shooting and spoke to witnesses. “He was reaching for his wallet and that’s when the man shot him,” Timothy Lee said people told him. “We want justice. We think he should go to jail for the rest of his life for what he did.”

On the same day, halfway across the country, Christopher D. Kelley was killed by police in Topeka, Kansas. His family also wants the footage of his killing to be made public, according to their attorney, LaRonna Lassiter Saunders. The family and lawyer have seen the video and believe that if it were made public it could serve to prevent similar tragedies in the future.

Kelley, a 38-year-old Black Marine veteran, was in the midst of a mental health crisis, Saunders said, when police found him behind an Amtrak station, standing on a pile of rocks and holding a knife. More than a dozen officers surrounded him with guns drawn and spent almost an hour trying to convince Kelley to drop the knife, even firing nonlethal bean bags at him, according to a report by state investigators. Then, according to the district attorney, who cleared police of wrongdoing, Kelley “raised the knife and charged” toward police, prompting three officers to open fire. If the public saw exactly what happened, Kelley’s family has said, maybe the next time Topeka police are called to help someone in a mental health crisis, they won’t end up killing them.

“If you want to create transparency and accountability and to restore the trust that this community has lost … release the doggone tapes,” Kelley’s sister Christian said at a press conference in February.

The Promise of Body-Worn Cameras

After Brown’s killing, the Department of Justice stepped up funding for police to buy body-worn cameras, providing more than $184 million over the next decade. By 2016, nearly half of 15,328 law enforcement agencies across the country, and 80% of police departments with more than 500 officers, had begun using the cameras, according to the Department of Justice. For many police officers in America today, body cameras are standard-issue equipment that they are supposed to turn on during most law enforcement activities.

The videos, advocates say, can help civilians fact-check the official account of what happened in a contentious incident, such as when police use force or take someone’s life.

“Law enforcement has the power of credibility on their side,” said Dawn Blagrove, an attorney with Emancipate North Carolina, a group that helps families get access to body-worn camera video. “Even though time and time again they are proved to be uncredible or unreliable, people still are disposed to believing whatever narrative law enforcement puts out.”

Sometimes the release of those videos can spur change. In the last two years, Raleigh, North Carolina, police banned no-knock warrants and adopted a deescalation policy for encounters with people in a mental health crisis. The reforms were made, Blagrove said, because body-camera video helped document what police were doing wrong in such encounters so they could try to fix it.

Varying Disclosure Policies

Police departments involved in 14 of the June 2022 deaths that ProPublica reviewed released the body-camera footage because a department policy or a state or local law demanded it. The requirements vary. Seattle, for example, has a department policy calling for video to be released within 72 hours of a “critical incident,” while in California, a state law requires all departments make the footage public within 45 days.

The videos often begin with a brief introduction by an officer, followed by edited and redacted footage. Sometimes, they are accompanied by 911 recordings and video from dash cameras or drones. Other times they include stills of a weapon the victim allegedly carried. When Akron, Ohio, city leaders held a news conference to release video from the June 27 shooting of Jayland Walker, they included footage from eight officers,

in accordance with a city law mandating such disclosure within a week of an incident.

“It is clear what our community wants is to be able to review the information for themselves,” said Mayor Dan Horrigan at the news conference. “It is our commitment to be as open and transparent as we can be.”

The videos showed that officers shot 25-year-old Walker 46 times in under 10 seconds, sparking protests. In April, a grand jury decided the officers should not be indicted on criminal charges. Walker’s family has filed a civil suit against the city.

But Akron isn’t the norm.

We filed public records requests for the video in the remaining 46 cases and in 26 were told it could not be publicly released or did not receive any response. In 14 cases, law enforcement agencies offered the video for a fee, ranging from $19 in Lowndes County, Georgia, to nearly $16,000 in Hillsborough County, Florida. Six departments eventually gave ProPublica the footage for free.

The lack of disclosure undermines the promise that equipping police with body cameras would increase transparency around fatal police encounters and hold officers to account for bad or criminal behavior.

President Barack Obama made body-worn cameras a centerpiece of his police reform efforts after Michael Brown, an 18-year-old Black man, was shot and killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. Police claimed they were acting in self-defense, while witnesses said that was not true. Weeks of protests ensued. It was one in a series of police killings in which the officers’ stories differed from witness accounts or videos taken by civilians nearby. Brown’s family, advocates and even some law enforcement leaders called for the widespread use of body-worn cameras in hopes they would help restore trust between police and a public that had lost faith.

The Justice Department allocated millions to help departments across the country outfit officers with the technology.

“They were wholly sold as an accountability tool to reassure people that police would be held accountable for their actions or for what they are doing while operating under the powers of the state,” said Hans Menos, who advises police departments with the Center for Policing Equity and formerly headed the Police Advisory Commission in Philadelphia, an early adopter of body cameras. “If we don’t provide that level of transparency, what we’ve really done is made people pay for something that they don’t get any tangible benefit out of.”

Do You Have a Tip for ProPublica? Help Us Do Journalism.

Some departments that have disclosure policies don’t always follow them. The New York Police Department, the largest in the country, is supposed to release video within 30 days of a critical incident. But a ProPublica review of the department’s data found that of 380 such incidents since the policy was enacted, the department released videos only 64 times, and only twice within its own 30-day time frame. A spokesperson for the NYPD said that privacy concerns, local laws or unspecified department policies kept it from releasing more of the videos. “The NYPD remains wholly committed to its policy of releasing such recordings as quickly and responsibly as circumstances and the law dictate,” the spokesperson wrote.

Many other departments — including 11 from ProPublica’s June 2022 review — said they cannot disclose body-camera footage while incidents are under investigation.

That’s the reason Savannah police cited when they denied requests from ProPublica to see the video of Lee’s killing.

Advocates for more transparency, though, say making video available to the family and the public should happen regardless of how an investigation is proceeding.

“The point of the tape being released is expediency in getting it to the public,” said Juandalynn Givan, a state lawmaker in Alabama who has pushed for more transparency there. “You might not have convened a grand jury for six or eight months.”

State Law Blocks the Way

In many states, the roadblocks to disclosure are encoded into the law.

In Pennsylvania, for example, a law passed in 2017 — after the state supreme court ruled body-worn camera footage is a public record — requires requests for video to be made in person or via certified mail within 60 days of an incident. And police and prosecutors are given broad discretion to withhold video if they see it as evidence in an investigation. “It actually serves more as a block to accountability and transparency than it does to foster release of information,” said Terry Mutchler, an attorney who has helped clients obtain video through court orders.

That’s what allows Philadelphia, one of the largest departments in the country, to routinely withhold video.

A spokesperson said the department is “committed to transparency and accountability” and added that “the legal framework governing the release of BWC footage is designed to balance the public’s right to information with the need to protect ongoing investigations and sensitive details.”

In Alabama, Kansas and South Carolina, the law makes footage confidential by default, often classifying it as an investigative record akin to a police interrogation, which can be released at the discretion of police or a judge.

Alabama’s Law Enforcement Agency cited state law when it refused ProPublica’s request for video of the June 9, 2022, fatal shooting of Robert Tyler White by an off-duty Rainbow City police officer. Police say White tried to enter the officer’s vehicle and an elementary school. White’s family has said he suffered from depression and may have been suicidal but does not think he was trying to harm others.

Kansas law allows families of victims to view footage within 20 days of a request, but there is no requirement for police to release it to the public.

ProPublica’s request for footage of Kelley’s killing was denied under that law. Releasing the video, the city of Topeka said, “is not in the public’s interest.”

But Kelley’s family members, who have seen the video, want it to be made public because they say it highlights how police mishandled a mental health emergency. Saunders, the family’s attorney, says the video shows police surrounded Kelley and unnecessarily escalated a situation. “After 50-plus minutes of him asking them to leave him alone, him trying to run away … you can see he just got to a point where he was already broke,” Saunders said.

She said he did not charge at police with a knife, as the department has claimed. “He tried to make a run for this little path that they had made, but as soon as he headed down that path they shot him several times,” she said

State investigators and Topeka police declined to comment on what the video showed and directed questions to the district attorney’s office, which did not respond to interview requests. In September 2022, the district attorney cleared the officers of wrongdoing.

Four months after Kelley’s death, Topeka police killed another man whose family had called 911 because he was having a mental breakdown. Saunders, who has seen body camera video from that incident as well, said it showed police chased Taylor Lowery and surrounded him as he held a wrench and stood next to a knife. Five officers then shot and killed him. The district attorney found the killing was justified, saying Lowery had tried to carjack someone and was a threat to police officers. Lowery’s family disagrees and wants video of that killing to be released to the public.

Having the public see what transpired, Saunders said, could spark reforms like redirecting 911 calls to mental health crisis teams rather than police. But, she said, that first requires the public to see the video that contradicts the official narrative. “They’re making it look like these two men were violent or attacking, and that was not the case,” Saunders said. “If anything, they were under attack, they were retreating, they were running, they were trying to get away. And so they [the families] just want the public to see the real truth.”

North Carolina law requires a court order for footage to be released to the public. ProPublica found three killings in June 2022 for which video exists but has not been released, and in each case police denied our request, citing that law.

Even families must petition a judge to get a copy of video. Without a court order, they have to ask police to let them view the footage at police stations. Police chiefs, district attorneys and a host of other law enforcement personnel, possibly even the same officers involved in the killing, can legally be in the room and have the power to choose which parts of a video a relative can see based on their interpretation of the statute.

“There is no way for you to watch the video without essentially going into the belly of the beast,” said Dawn Blagrove, who crisscrosses the state to accompany relatives to police stations to view footage. Their goal, she said, is “making sure that when people are having to relive, or see for the first time, a loved one taking their last breath, that they don’t do that without some support, that they don’t do that alone.”

In the wake of the May 2020 murder of George Floyd, advocates in North Carolina attempted to reform its body-camera law as part of a broad criminal justice reform bill that included provisions for releasing video to the public, said Blagrove, who served on the governor’s Task Force on Racial Equity in Criminal Justice, which drafted the bill. “Once they got it into the General Assembly, the real substantive parts of those recommendations that would have created real change were gutted,” said Blagrove.

Instead, changes to the law made accessing video even more difficult, requiring a court order. The fallout from the law, Blagrove said, has been devastating. “It is just a system that is designed around protecting law enforcement and, simultaneously, creating a chilling effect on friends and family who want to get some answers as to how and why their loved one has died.”

In many of these states, lobbying groups representing law enforcement officers and prosecutors have played a decisive role in keeping video out of public reach. The North Carolina Sheriffs’ Association, for instance, the reforms Blagrove and other advocates were hoping to enact into law after 2020. In Alabama, lobbying on behalf of police chiefs, sheriffs and district attorneys helped block two proposed laws that would have allowed the public to request video. Law enforcement lobbying groups have also thwarted efforts at reforms in Kansas since 2015.

Selective Release

Without uniform state policies in place for when video must be released to the public, Blagrove and other advocates say police departments have been able to selectively release footage to support their narrative, while often hiding images that might be embarrassing or worse.

This January, police in Raleigh said they killed Daniel Turcios, a Hispanic man they encountered on the interstate after a traffic accident, because he was high on drugs and threatening them with a knife. Police released an edited video supporting that narrative. But after public pressure, they released the full video along with a toxicology report, which showed something very different, Blagrove said. “They chased him and they shot him and killed him in front of his family,” Blagrove said. “They had him written off as this knife-wielding, drug-induced man, and by the time we were finished with it, it was like a family man was shot in front of his children.”

Alabama lawmakers adopted North Carolina’s law, almost word for word, this June.

Graphics and production by Jason Kao.

Body camera stills obtained from KION, Seattle Police Department, WEWS, Los Angeles Police Department, New Jersey Attorney General, Bexar County District Attorney, Naperville Police Department, Baltimore County Police Department, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, WPLG, Scott County District Attorney, Glass family, Austin Police Department, Coos County District Attorney, Ada County Sheriff’s Office, family of Derrick Clark, Fresno Police Department, New Hampshire Office of the Attorney General, Solano County Sheriff’s Office, KRQE News 13, Los Angeles Police Department, Norfolk Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office, Fontana Police Department, Houston Police Department, San Jose Police Department, Indian River County Sheriff’s Office, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department, Akron Police Department, Phoenix Police Department, New York State Attorney General, Fort Worth Police Department, Fairfax County Police Department, Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office

This post was originally published on Articles and Investigations – ProPublica.

by Eric Umansky, with additional reporting by Umar Farooq

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

When Barbara and Belvett Richards learned that the police had killed their son, they couldn’t understand it. How, on that September day in 2017, did their youngest child come to be shot in his own apartment by officers from the New York Police Department?

Miguel Richards, who was 31, grew up in Jamaica and had moved to New York about a year earlier after coming to the United States through a work-study program. His father’s friend gave him a job doing office work, and he rented a room in the Bronx. But he started to struggle, becoming reclusive and skipping days of work. His mother, with whom he was particularly close, pleaded with him to return to Jamaica. “It’s as if I sensed something was going to happen,” she says. “I was calling him, calling him, calling him: ‘Miguel, come home. Come home.’”

His parents knew he had never been violent, had never been arrested and had never had any issues with the police. What details they managed to gather came from the Bronx district attorney: Richards’ landlord, who hadn’t seen him for weeks, asked the police to check on him. The officers who responded found Richards standing still in his own bedroom, holding a small folding knife. And 15 minutes later, they shot him.

Richards’ death marked a historic turning point. It was the first time a killing by officers was recorded by a body camera in New York. The new program was announced just months before as heralding a new era of accountability. Now, a week after the shooting, the department posted on its website a compilation of footage from four of the responding officers. The video, the department said in an introduction to the presentation, was produced “for clear viewing of the event as a totality.” And as far as the department was concerned, the narrative was clear. Sometimes “the use of deadly force is unavoidable,” the police commissioner at the time, James O’Neill, wrote in an internal message. The level of restraint shown by all officers, he said, is “nothing short of exceptional.” And, he added, “releasing footage from critical incidents like this will help firmly establish your restraint in the use of force.”

Richards’ parents were not convinced. Belvett watched footage at the district attorney’s office. What he saw, and what was released, did not, in fact, show that the use of deadly force was unavoidable. He later learned that the department had not released all the footage. What else didn’t they know about their son’s death?

Belvett and Barbara Richards’ 31-year-old son, Miguel, was killed by New York City police officers in 2017. (Naila Reuchel for The New York Times)

When body-worn cameras were introduced a decade ago, they seemed to hold the promise of a revolution. Once police officers knew they were being filmed, surely they would think twice about engaging in misconduct. And if they crossed the line, they would be held accountable: The public, no longer having to rely on official accounts, would know about wrongdoing. Police and civilian oversight agencies would be able to use footage to punish officers and improve training. In an outlay that would ultimately cost hundreds of millions of dollars, the technology represented the largest new investment in policing in a generation.

Yet without deeper changes, it was a fix bound to fall far short of those hopes. In every city, the police ostensibly report to mayors and other elected officials. But in practice, they have been given wide latitude to run their departments as they wish and to police — and protect — themselves. And so as policymakers rushed to equip the police with cameras, they often failed to grapple with a fundamental question: Who would control the footage? Instead, they defaulted to leaving police departments, including New York’s, with the power to decide what is recorded, who can see it and when. In turn, departments across the country have routinely delayed releasing footage, released only partial or redacted video or refused to release it at all. They have frequently failed to discipline or fire officers when body cameras document abuse and have kept footage from the agencies charged with investigating police misconduct.

Even when departments have stated policies of transparency, they don’t always follow them. Three years ago, after George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police officers and amid a wave of protests against police violence, the New York Police Department said it would publish footage of so-called critical incidents “within 30 days.” There have been 380 such incidents since then. The department has released footage within a month just twice.

And the department often does not release video at all. There have been 28 shootings of civilians this year by New York officers (through the first week of December). The department has released footage in just seven of these cases (also through the first week of December) and has not done so in any of the last 16.

Asked about the department’s limited release of footage, a spokesperson pointed to a caveat, contained in an internal order, that footage can be withheld because of laws or department policy. “The NYPD remains wholly committed to its policy of releasing such recordings as quickly and responsibly as circumstances and the law dictate,” the spokesperson wrote. “Though transparency is of the utmost importance, so too is the Police Department’s commitment to preserving privacy rights.” The department did not say which policies require the withholding of footage and did not address other questions about its record on the cameras. (Mayor Eric Adams’ spokesperson did not make him available for comment.)

For a snapshot of disclosure practices across the country, we conducted a review of civilians killed by police officers in June 2022, roughly a decade after the first body cameras were rolled out. We counted 79 killings in which there was body-worn-camera footage. A year and a half later, the police have released footage in just 33 cases — or about 42%.

This article is the product of more than six months spent investigating how the police have undermined the promise of transparency and accountability that accompanied the body-camera movement. We interviewed dozens of department insiders, government lawyers, policing experts and advocates and reviewed hundreds of pages of internal reports, obtained through Freedom of Information requests, and dozens of hours of surveillance-camera and body-camera footage, including some that the New York Police Department fought against disclosing. The reporting reveals that without further intervention from city, state and federal officials and lawmakers, body cameras may do more to serve police interests than those of the public they are sworn to protect.

To Seth Stoughton, a former police officer who is now a professor at the Joseph F. Rice School of Law at the University of South Carolina, body cameras represent the latest chapter in America’s quest for a technological fix to the deeply rooted problem of unchecked state power. “Dash cams were supposed to solve racial profiling,” he says. “Tasers and pepper spray were supposed to solve undue force. We have this real, almost pathological draw to ‘silver bullet’ syndrome. And I say that as a supporter of body-worn cameras.” He later added, “We just said to police departments: ‘Here’s this tool. Figure out how you would like to use it.’ It shouldn’t be a surprise that they’re going to use it in a way that most benefits them.”

Jeff Schlanger, a former New York deputy commissioner who had an oversight role during the implementation of body-worn cameras and left the department in 2021, believes that the police have often failed to use the cameras for accountability and that political leaders need to do more. “Mayors, City Council members, all locally elected officials,” he says, “should be losing sleep over the lack of meaningful independent oversight of the police.”

Jeff Schlanger is a former deputy commissioner who left the New York Police Department in 2021. “Mayors, City Council members, all locally elected officials,” he says, “should be losing sleep over the lack of meaningful independent oversight of the police.” (Naila Reuchel for The New York Times)

When full footage has been released, often by prosecutors or after public pressure, it often contradicts initial police accounts. In 2015, a white officer in Cincinnati killed a Black man during a traffic stop. The officer said his life was in danger. But his body-camera video showed that was a lie, and he was prosecuted for murder. (Charges were dropped after two mistrials.) And in Philadelphia this August, an officer shot and killed a man after, the police said, he lunged at officers with “a weapon.” In fact, footage released by the district attorney — who charged the officer with murder — shows that the man was sitting in his own car.

In New York, Miguel Richards’ parents weren’t the only ones who had doubts about the department’s claims that the shooting was unavoidable. The footage the department released stopped right when the officers fired at Richards. It didn’t include the minutes after the shooting, and it didn’t include footage from other police units that responded.

Ruth Lowenkron, a disability rights lawyer who specializes in mental health issues, wanted to see it all. Working for New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, a legal-advocacy nonprofit, she and her colleagues, along with activists, had begun pushing the city to find an alternative to using the police as first responders to people in crisis. On her second day on the job, a sergeant shot and killed a 66-year-old woman who had schizophrenia and was holding a baseball bat in her Bronx apartment. The department’s own investigators concluded that the sergeant escalated the situation and caused the shooting.

Now, watching the video the department released of Richards’ shooting, Lowenkron feared that the same thing happened to him. The department’s edited footage showed the officers making a few attempts to connect with Richards early in the encounter. “What’s your name, man?” one officer asked. But they were also barking increasingly terse commands. “You are seconds away from getting shot,” one officer said. “Do you want to die?” A few minutes later, as one of them warned that Richards might have a gun, the officers fired.

Lowenkron filed a records request, certain that there was more to the story. In releasing the partial footage, the police commissioner had vowed that the “NYPD is committed to being as transparent as possible.” But nearly three weeks after her request, Lowenkron received a different message from one of the department’s records officers: “I must deny access to these records.”

Ruth Lowenkron has fought the New York Police Department for years for access to body-camera footage in various cases. Of one video she received, she says, “It was a horror movie.” (Naila Reuchel for The New York Times)

Body-worn cameras were adopted by police departments across the country in the wake of widespread Black Lives Matter protests in 2014, sparked when Michael Brown was killed by the police in Ferguson, Missouri. The officer who shot Brown was not equipped with a camera, and there was a dispute about what happened in the last moments of Brown’s life. Amid deep schisms over race, justice and policing, there was at least agreement that police interactions should be recorded. Brown’s mother pressed for the technology to become standard equipment. “Please,” she begged Missouri legislators, “let police-worn body cameras be a voice of truth and transparency.”

President Barack Obama put the cameras at the center of his plans to restore trust in policing. Cities quickly began spending millions on the devices, expenditures that continue today for storage and software. Los Angeles has spent nearly $60 million since getting cameras in 2016. In Philadelphia, where footage is rarely released, the cameras have cost taxpayers about $20 million. New York City has spent more than $50 million. But whether citizens benefit from the cameras they’re paying for is often up to the police, who have often been able to keep footage hidden from the public in even the most extreme cases. In 2018 in Montgomery, Alabama, an officer unleashed his police dog on a burglary suspect without warning, severing the Black man’s femoral artery and killing him. The police and the city have refused to release footage for five years, arguing that it could cause “civil unrest” and that the officers could face “embarrassment.” But a lawyer for the man’s family, which is suing the city, got a copy of the transcript in the discovery process and entered it into the court record. “Did you get a bite?” an officer asked the one who had the dog, according to the document. “Sure did, heh, heh,” the K-9 officer responded.

The secrecy undercuts the deterrent effect on officer behavior that many had presumed body cameras would produce. Three years before the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd by kneeling on his neck, body-camera video caught him kneeling on the necks of others. In 2017, Chauvin dragged a handcuffed Black woman out of her house, slammed her to the ground and then pressed his knee into her neck for nearly five minutes. Three months later, Chauvin hit a 14-year-old Black boy at least twice in the head with a heavy flashlight, choked him and pushed him against a wall. The boy cried out in pain and passed out. Chauvin pushed a knee into his neck for 15 minutes as the boy’s mother, reaching to help him, begged, “Please, please do not kill my son!”

The footage was left in the control of a department where impunity reigned. Supervisors had access to the recordings yet cleared Chauvin’s conduct in both cases. Minneapolis fought against releasing the videos, even after Chauvin pleaded guilty in December 2021 to federal civil rights violations in one of the cases. A judge finally ordered the city and the police to release the tapes this April, six years after Chauvin abused the boy. “Chauvin should have been fired in 2017,” says Robert Bennett, a lawyer who represented both of the victims. If the police had done that, “the city never burns. We’d have a downtown still. It’s a parade of horribles. All to keep something secret.”

A Department of Justice report from this summer found that the secrecy and impunity was all part of a larger pattern in the Minneapolis Police Department. Shootings, beatings and other abuse had routinely been captured on video. But the department didn’t make the footage public or mete out punishment.

There was a similar dynamic in Memphis, Tennessee, where officers in a street-crimes unit regularly abused residents. They wore body cameras but faced no consequences until the case of Tyre Nichols, who was beaten to death this January by officers in the unit, attracted national attention. The footage showed that some of the officers took their cameras off. Others knew they were being recorded and pummeled Nichols anyway. It was only after public outcry that the department took the rare step of releasing footage, which contradicted initial police accounts and led to state and federal charges for five officers.

Some politicians have often quietly enabled obstacles to this kind of accountability. When South Carolina became the first state in the nation to require the use of cameras in 2015, Nikki Haley, the governor at the time, made the announcement with the family of Walter Scott standing behind her. Scott was a Black man who, two months earlier, was stopped by the police for a broken taillight and was shot in the back and killed when he tried to run away. A witness filmed the shooting, and that video contradicted official police accounts.

The way to true reform is through using body cams as an early-warning system, as a way to correct small mistakes before they become big mistakes.

—Jeff Schlanger, former New York deputy commissioner

“This is going to make sure Walter Scott did not die without us realizing that we have a problem,” Haley said as she signed the legislation. What the governor didn’t say was that the same law stipulated that footage from cameras is “not a public record subject to disclosure,” thus relieving police departments from any obligation to release it. And indeed, little footage has ever become public in South Carolina.

In 2021, York County sheriff’s deputies responding to a call for a wellness check found a young man sitting in his pickup truck with his mother standing next to him. They fired at him nearly 50 times. The sheriff, who refused to release body-camera footage, said the man pointed a shotgun at deputies. When the man, who survived, obtained the footage after suing, it showed no such thing. So far this year, the police in South Carolina have killed at least 19 people. The police have released footage in only three of those cases. When we asked one department, the Spartanburg County Sheriff’s Office, why it had not, a spokesperson pointed to the law, writing, “We never release that footage.”

The pattern has become so common across the country — public talk of transparency followed by a deliberate undermining of the stated goal — that the policing-oversight expert Hans Menos, who led Philadelphia’s civilian police-oversight board until 2020, coined a term for it: the “body-cam head fake.” And there is no place that illustrates this as well as New York City, the home of the world’s largest municipal police force, some 36,000 officers strong.

New York’s adoption of body-worn cameras started with a moment of unintentional inspiration. In 2013, Judge Shira Scheindlin was hearing testimony in a federal lawsuit in which multiple advocacy groups claimed that the Police Department’s aggressive “stop and frisk” policy was racially biased and unconstitutional. One day during the trial, an expert witness for the city mentioned a new tool for accountability — body-worn cameras — in passing.

“My head snapped when I heard the words,” Scheindlin recalled this year. “I thought, ‘That could be a useful remedy!’”

Two months later, Scheindlin issued a historic ruling that New York’s stop-and-frisk practices were unconstitutional. She ordered the Police Department to begin piloting body-worn cameras, writing that they were “uniquely suited to addressing the constitutional harms at issue in this case.” Scheindlin laid out three ways the cameras would help: “First, they will provide a contemporaneous, objective record of stops and frisks.” She continued, “Second, the knowledge that an exchange is being recorded will encourage lawful and respectful interactions on the part of both parties. Third, the recordings will diminish the sense on the part of those who file complaints that it is their word against the police.”

But in a preview of obstacles that would follow, the department was slow to roll out the devices, even as they were becoming common in other cities. More than two years after Scheindlin’s ruling, the department hired researchers at New York University to conduct a survey about what residents wanted from a body-camera project. The community’s answers were overwhelming and clear: transparency and disclosure.

Officers, however, wanted the opposite. They were concerned that the recordings would “show a different side of the story than what would otherwise be told,” according to a separate NYU survey. To Scheindlin and the plaintiffs in the stop-and-frisk case, that was exactly the point.

When the department released its policy in April 2017, it was clear whose opinions held more sway. No video would automatically become public. Anyone that requested it would have to go through an opaque, often slow-moving Freedom of Information process — in which the department itself would be the arbiter of what would be released (though the courts could review that decision).

The policy blunted the technology’s potential for accountability in other ways. Officers could decide when to start filming, instead of at the beginning of all interactions as the public wanted. And while the public had little access to footage, the police had privileged access: Officers who were the subjects of complaints would be allowed to watch the footage before having to give any statements — something that could allow them to tailor their accounts to the video.

The policy was “so flawed that the pilot program may do little to protect New Yorkers’ civil rights,” Ian Head and Darius Charney of the Center for Constitutional Rights wrote in a guest essay in The New York Times. “Instead, it might shield police officers from accountability when they engage in misconduct.”

Still, on April 27, 2017, Commissioner James O’Neill and Mayor Bill de Blasio held a news conference at a precinct in Washington Heights to celebrate the rollout of body-worn cameras. Stepping up to the lectern, O’Neill said he was initially skeptical of the cameras but had become a believer. “I’m totally convinced now that this is the way forward,” he said. “These cameras have a great potential to de-escalate.”

Then the mayor went to the lectern. Officers had long felt that de Blasio, a self-proclaimed progressive, was too supportive of Black Lives Matter protests and not sufficiently supportive of the police. That sentiment turned into rage when a man espousing hatred of the police murdered two officers in late 2014. Hundreds of police officers turned their backs on the mayor at the funerals. Ever since, de Blasio had been working to repair the relationship.

“This is an historic day for New York City,” de Blasio said, with O’Neill by his side. “This is the first day of the era of body-worn cameras, and that means we are going on a pathway of transparency and accountability that will benefit everyone.”

Five months later, officers killed Miguel Richards, making his case the first in which the potential of body-camera video would be tested. But Ruth Lowenkron, the public-interest attorney who filed a request for the footage, was getting little from the Police Department. After it rejected her initial request, she appealed the decision. The department sent her some redacted footage but again rejected her request for all of it.

Disclosing the full footage would be an “unwarranted invasion of personal privacy,” the department wrote. Whose privacy — the dead man’s or the officers’ — was not explained. Releasing the full footage, the department insisted, could “endanger the life or safety of any person.”

The letter came from the department’s legal unit, led by its deputy commissioner, Larry Byrne, who was known for his fierce advocacy for the department. From the outset of the body-worn-camera program, Byrne made it clear that he was resistant to widespread release of footage. “They are not public records in the sense that, because the officer turns the camera on, they are now in the public domain,” Byrne told NY1 in 2015. In fact, he insisted, “most of this footage” would never be made public.

Lowenkron kept requesting the Richards footage and kept getting rejected or sent redacted video. In July 2018, she and her colleagues decided to file a lawsuit in state court demanding the full footage. They even got a former Police Department lawyer, Stuart Parker, to help litigate the suit pro bono. The department’s various explanations for its denials “pissed me off,” Parker recalls. He retired from the department as an assistant commissioner in 2016, the year before cameras were widely rolled out. But he had been excited by their potential and was frustrated by the department’s kneejerk secrecy. “There’s a good side to the department,” he says, “but there’s always been a self-serving dark side to it too.”

In response to the suit, the department argued in legal filings that it had blurred the footage “in order to protect the privacy of both Richards and his family.” But Lowenkron and her team had obtained affidavits from Richards’ parents saying that the department never asked them whether they wanted the footage released or redacted. And what the Richardses wanted, they said, was for the full footage to be released to the public.

Public disclosure of footage isn’t the only path to hold officers in New York accountable for misconduct. For 70 years, the city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board had been vested with the responsibility to investigate New Yorkers’ allegations against the police. From the start, though, its powers were weak. The agency was actually part of the Police Department, and its board consisted of three deputy police commissioners. The department fought efforts over the years to make the agency independent. In the face of a plan in the mid-1960s to include civilians on the Civilian Complaint Review Board, the head of the largest police union, then called the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, said, “I’m sick and tired of giving in to minority groups with their whims and their gripes and shouting.”

The agency eventually became independent in 1993 after stiff opposition months before from off-duty officers. Thousands of them — along with Rudy Giuliani, then a mayoral aspirant after losing the previous election — staged a huge protest outside City Hall, with many of them going on to block the Brooklyn Bridge. After the changes, the review board still relied on an often noncooperative Police Department for records, and its investigations frequently petered out amid competing accounts. And like many civilian oversight boards across the country, in the rare cases when it substantiated misconduct, it could only recommend discipline to the police commissioner, who could and often did ignore it.

Many civilians, whom the board relied on to initiate complaints, had long grown skeptical of the agency’s ability to ensure that officer misconduct had consequences. But the advent of body-camera video promised to fundamentally change how the agency worked. For the first time, staff members would have an objective record of the incidents they investigated. That was Nicole Napolitano’s hope when she joined the review board as its new director of policy and advocacy in September 2017 — the same year body cameras were rolled out in New York and one week after officers killed Richards. “We talked about it in detail” at the agency, she says of the initial footage of the Richards shooting. “We thought, ‘Look at what body-worn cameras can show us.’”

Napolitano, who is married to a retired detective, knew it would be a challenge. As a senior policy manager in the Office of the Inspector General for the New York Police Department, she had seen how the department could simply ignore the recommendations in her reports. Napolitano hoped she would have more direct impact in her new, more senior position at the review board. But what she hadn’t appreciated was how much the police controlled the literal tools of their own oversight.

Nicole Napolitano, as director of policy and advocacy at the Civilian Complaint Review Board, argued for a law that would take away the New York Police Department’s sole control over camera footage. She was let go in November 2020. (Naila Reuchel for The New York Times)

As with most civilian boards across the country, the agency did not have its own access to footage. Like the public, it, too, had to rely on the cooperation of the department. To try to obtain footage, the board had to navigate a baroque multistep process. Written requests were submitted to a department “liaison” unit, which in turn forwarded them to the legal unit for review. Then the department had to locate the footage, which was a significant undertaking because it wasn’t cataloging the footage in any systematic way. Unlike in many other cities, the department’s cameras had no GPS location data. If a civilian making a complaint didn’t know an officer’s name or badge number, investigators and even the department could have a hard time finding footage.

Perhaps most problematic for Napolitano, though, was the fact that the review board’s investigators had to agree to a strict set of conditions before watching videos of incidents. If they spotted other, unrelated misconduct, they were not allowed to investigate it. “If you were setting up a system to be shitty,” one agency insider says, “this is the system you’d create.”

At times, the department’s animosity toward the board was palpable. Napolitano remembers one meeting in 2017 between board officials and Kerry Sweet, then a top official at the department’s legal bureau who helped oversee the body-camera rollout. As other police brass shuffled in, Sweet said they had missed a chance to “bomb the room” when only board officials were there, which would have “solved everything.” (Sweet, who has since retired, says he doesn’t recall saying that, but added, “On reflection, it should have been an airstrike.”)

Napolitano and her colleagues noticed an even more troubling trend: The department would often tell the review board that the footage it requested didn’t exist — only for the civilian agency to later discover that wasn’t true. According to an analysis the agency put out in early 2020, this happened in nearly 1 of every 5 cases.

Napolitano thought there was a straightforward solution to the department’s stonewalling: The review board should be able to directly log in to the department’s system where footage is stored. That’s how it worked with civilian oversight boards in a few other major American cities, including Chicago, which revamped civilian oversight after Laquan McDonald was killed in 2014 and the city tried to withhold footage that contradicted officers’ accounts. Chicago’s oversight board now not only has direct access to videos but also regularly releases footage publicly, and its investigators have used it to successfully push for officers to be fired for misconduct. Napolitano didn’t see a reason for it to be otherwise in New York. So in her first semiannual report, at the end of 2017, she noted the challenges of getting footage — and called on the city to give the review board direct access. Both the department and City Hall, Napolitano says, “freaked” out.

“It was a rough time for de Blasio when it came to public safety,” Napolitano added, referring to the mayor’s tenuous relationship with the police. “In a dispute between CCRB and NYPD, City Hall always chose the NYPD. Always.”

“I don’t agree,” de Blasio says. “The tension between the CCRB and the NYPD is natural and built-in. I decided each issue on the merits and according to my values.” He went on, “The blunter truth is when a progressive challenges the police culture and the police unions and the status quo of American policing, the left is not going to have their back. You’re not getting that thank-you card. And the right will viciously attack.”

While the department fought Lowenkron and Napolitano on the release of body-camera footage, there was one group that had access to all of it and could use it to check for misconduct: the department’s own investigators. After every police shooting, detectives with the Force Investigation Division review the incident to see whether officers complied with department policy. The Richards case was the first time body-worn-camera footage could let them see what actually happened in a killing by officers. As investigators dug through the video and interviewed officers in the weeks and months after the shooting, they saw a far more complicated picture than the one the police commissioner painted.

As the tape began, one officer, Mark Fleming, beamed his flashlight into the far side of Richards’ nearly bare, unlit bedroom. Richards was standing perfectly still in the dark, seemingly catatonic, wearing a blue polo shirt and sunglasses and holding a knife in his left hand.

Department guidelines for dealing with people in crisis who do not pose an immediate threat say officers should try to “isolate and contain” the person. “The primary duty of all members of the service is to preserve human life,” department policy states. Officers are also instructed to wait for a supervisor’s permission before trying to subdue someone in crisis.

At first, it appeared that the officers who encountered Richards were following their training. “Look, we could shut the door,” Officer Redmond Murphy suggested to his partner. But Fleming, who had served more years in the department, quickly rejected the idea. He kept telling Richards to drop the knife, and he radioed for an officer with a Taser.

Two officers from the specially trained Emergency Services Unit, which deals with people experiencing mental health crises, arrived. Then Murphy said he thought he saw something, perhaps a gun, in Richards’ right hand, which was obscured behind a backpack on the bed. “Hold up,” one of the ESU officers told Fleming and Murphy before heading back downstairs to grab protective gear. “I don’t know if it’s a toy or a gun,” Murphy quickly added.

As the specialists went downstairs, the officer with the Taser, Jesus Ramos, went upstairs and joined Fleming and Murphy outside Richards’ room. “Do you want to take him down now?” Ramos asked them. “Yeah,” they both answered.

At nearly the same moment, a radio command came from headquarters, emphasizing department guidelines. “Isolate and contain,” the dispatcher told the officers. “Use nonlethal force whenever possible.” As Ramos lifted his Taser and stepped into the room, Fleming — who later said Richards was raising his arm — fired his gun. Murphy fired, too. It’s impossible to see that moment in the grainy, shaky footage. The clearest angle would most likely have been Fleming’s camera, but it was covered by his arm as he held his flashlight.

The shooting of Miguel Richards was the first to be recorded by NYPD body cameras. Police Commissioner James O’Neill wrote in an internal message that releasing footage would show officers’ “restraint in the use of force.” Below are clips from the videos the police initially released. They contain graphic content.

Officers answered a call for a wellness check and found Richards standing still in the far corner of his bedroom, holding a small folding knife. “Look, we could shut the door,” Officer Redmond Murphy said at one point. Instead, police shouted at Richards for the next 15 minutes.

Watch video ➜

Murphy says he thinks he sees something in Richards’ hand: “I don’t know if it’s a toy or a gun.” Officer Mark Fleming says: “I don’t want to shoot you if you’ve got a fake gun in your hand. You hear me? But I will shoot you if that’s a real gun.”

Watch video ➜

A radio command from headquarters reminded the officers of NYPD guidelines to “isolate and contain” a person in a mental health crisis and to “use nonlethal force whenever possible.” Fifteen minutes after arriving, they opened fire. An internal investigation later found that Richards “was contained and posed no immediate threat of danger.”

Watch video ➜

Fleming and Murphy fired 16 times, hitting Richards seven times, including twice in the chest, rupturing his aorta. As gunshots rang out, the supervisor they were supposed to wait for arrived. (None of the officers responded to requests for comment.)

The internal investigators asked the officers to explain. “We kind of handle everything on our own,” Murphy offered. An internal investigator pressed Fleming about what had “situationally changed” and prompted the decision to “take him at that point.” Fleming said everything changed once his partner said Richards might have a gun. “I perceived that his intentions were lethal,” Fleming said. But his answers suggested that he hadn’t fully grasped Richards’ mental state. “Why would any sane person hide a fake gun?” Fleming asked.

When the investigators asked why the two officers did not broadcast that Richards was an “EDP” — or an emotionally disturbed person — with a knife, as protocol dictates, Murphy told them he and Fleming had handled people in crisis before. Asked why they made the decision to use force, Murphy simply said, “We wanted to, like, end it.”

While the Force Investigation Division ultimately concluded that the officers had been “justified” in shooting — because they were facing an “individual armed with a knife and an imitation firearm” — the investigators also said that Fleming and Murphy should still be punished. Richards, their September 2018 internal report noted, “was contained and posed no immediate threat of danger.” And the officers violated policy by not asking permission from their supervisor before they acted. The department’s full investigative record was first reported by the independent journalist Michael Hayes in his 2023 book, “The Secret Files.” The review recommended that the officers face disciplinary charges that could ultimately result in their firing.

But in New York, as in almost all cities in the United States, the police commissioner has absolute power over punishment. In March 2019, O’Neill, who had extolled the promise of body cameras just two years earlier, overruled his own investigators. He decided that neither Fleming nor Murphy would be punished for killing Richards. Instead, the commissioner docked them three vacation days for something else they did: stopping for pizza before responding to the call for the wellness check. (O’Neill did not respond to questions or requests for comment.)

It would be another three months before anyone outside the department would see the full footage. That June, a New York judge ruled that the “public is vested with an inherent right to know” and ordered the department to turn over the recordings to Lowenkron’s organization.

She received a package with a DVD a month later from the department. Bracing herself, she sat down to view it on her computer. The footage that the department publicly released cut off when the officers fired. Lowenkron now saw the aftermath: Richards collapsed to the floor, crumpled and bleeding in the same spot where he had been standing rigidly seconds before.

“He’s still alive,” Fleming said.

“Holy shit,” Murphy replied. “Just fucking cuff him.”

The officers then flipped over Richards, severely injured, so roughly that his head could be heard bouncing off the floor.

They searched around the room for the firearm they thought Richards had. Eventually, Fleming found a palm-size, silver-colored plastic toy gun. “It’s some fucking little thing,” he said. (The video does not show Richards holding the toy gun.) More than three minutes passed before anyone administered any type of aid to the dying man. It was an Emergency Services Unit specialist who retrieved medical equipment after hearing the shots.

Outside the apartment building, more video recorded other officers milling about. One told a colleague, “They were just hurling fucking shots.”

The NYPD initially withheld the footage of the aftermath of the Richards shooting. Below are clips from the videos that a state judge later ordered released. They contain graphic content.

As the officers move into Richards’ room moments after shooting him, Fleming observes, “He’s still alive.” Murphy is breathing heavily. “Holy shit,” he says.

Watch video ➜

The officers ask one another if they are all right as they mill around Richards’ injured body. He is handcuffed and flipped over so roughly his head can be heard bouncing heavily on the floor.

Watch video ➜

As more officers arrive outside Richards’ apartment building, one tells a colleague, “They were just hurling fucking shots.”

Watch video ➜

Lowenkron was shocked. Officers had shot a young man and roughly handled him as he bled to death. “The utter disrespect,” Lowenkron says. “It was a horror movie.”

New York Lawyers for the Public Interest would go on to share the footage with journalists. It would also use the footage in a webinar for mental health advocates in November 2020. “The point,” Lowenkron told me, “was to get more people engaged on this issue: transforming New York and this country’s response to people in crisis.”

But by then, for another man in distress, it was too late.

In April 2019, one month after O’Neill decided against punishing the officers for the Richards shooting, another officer shot and killed a man named Kawaski Trawick.

The circumstances were remarkably similar to those in the Richards case. Trawick was also a young Black man who lived in the Bronx and was experiencing a mental health crisis in his own apartment. He was also holding a knife when the police arrived. And he was also shot soon afterward. At the Civilian Complaint Review Board, Napolitano was immediately struck by the parallels: “I remember reading the headline on Trawick and thinking, ‘Didn’t I read this already?’”

This time, though, the victim’s family filed a complaint with the review board, providing an opening for civilian investigators to use body-worn-camera footage to make a case that the department and others couldn’t ignore.

But despite repeated requests over many months, the department wouldn’t share the footage — or any other records — with the review board, leaving the oversight agency effectively unable to begin its own investigation of the case. The refusal was in line with the department’s longstanding practice to withhold footage from the board until the department’s internal investigation was over, a process that often takes more than a year. Such delays can effectively torpedo the review board’s investigations: Under New York civil-service law, any disciplinary cases against police officers must be brought within 18 months of the incident.

In the Trawick case, the review board obtained the full body-camera video in January 2021 — more than a year and a half after the killing — and only after a state judge ordered the department to hand it over to Lowenkron’s organization, New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, which had sued for it. The judge determined that the department had been withholding the footage “in bad faith.”

What it showed was even more damning than what was captured in the Richards shooting. As the police entered his apartment, Trawick demanded to know, “Why are you in my home?” One officer, Herbert Davis, who was Black and more experienced, then tried to stop his white junior counterpart, Brendan Thompson, from using force. “We ain’t gonna tase him,” Davis said in the video.

Thompson didn’t listen. Instead, he fired his Taser at Trawick, sending roughly 50,000 volts pulsing through him. As Trawick started rushing toward the officers, Thompson lifted his gun and prepared to fire. “No, no — don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t,” Davis said, pushing his partner’s arm down. But Thompson fired four shots, hitting Trawick twice and killing him almost instantly, 112 seconds after they arrived at the apartment. (Davis and Thompson did not reply to requests for comment.)

There was also troubling footage of the aftermath of the shooting. Officers swarmed outside Trawick’s apartment. “Who’s injured?” a sergeant asked. Two officers replied in near unison: “Nobody. Just a perp.”

With all that in hand, the review board completed its investigation in June 2021. The agency, through one of the few powers it had gained over the years, can file and prosecute disciplinary cases against officers — which triggers a Police Department trial, after which a departmental judge sends a provisional decision to the police commissioner, who makes the final call.

This September, the police judge overseeing the Trawick case recommended that there should be no discipline. Her reason had nothing to do with the shooting itself; in fact, the judge wrote that she had “serious doubts” about the decisions of the officer who killed Trawick. But the review board, she said, had failed to file charges within the 18-month statute of limitations, as outlined under state law. In the end, the department’s refusal to give the footage to the review board had effectively run out the clock on any chance the officers would be punished.

“That should not be tolerated,” says Jeff Schlanger, the former deputy commissioner. “Both CCRB and NYPD are city agencies. This is something the mayor needs to resolve.”

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, huge demonstrations for racial justice and against police brutality rolled across the country and the world. It was a global reckoning brought on by footage — the video, recorded by a teenager on her smartphone for more than eight minutes, showing Derek Chauvin ending Floyd’s life.

Napolitano and her team at the review board had collected data showing how footage could make a difference in New York too. Access to body-camera footage roughly doubled the likelihood that agency investigators would be able to decide a case on its merits rather than dismiss it as inconclusive. But the backlog was growing. That May, the board filed 212 requests with the Police Department for body-worn-camera footage — and the department sent only 33 responses. (While the pandemic slowed the work of all city agencies, the backlog predated it.)

“The withholding of footage stops investigations and prevents the CCRB from providing adequate and meaningful oversight of the NYPD,” an internal agency memo warned. “The situation for New York City oversight of the police has steadily grown worse during the duration of a BWC program intended primarily to aid oversight.”

We just said to police departments: ‘Here’s this tool. Figure out how you would like to use it’ It shouldn’t be a surprise that they’re going to use it in a way that most benefits them.

—Seth Stoughton, a former police officer who is now a law professor at the University of South Carolina

Napolitano campaigned internally for a law that would take away the department’s absolute control over footage and give the review board its own access. That November, she was let go, along with three other staff members who had sent pointed emails and memos about the department’s withholding of footage. The four filed a lawsuit claiming that their firing violated their First Amendment rights and received an undisclosed settlement. A review-board spokesperson wrote in an email that the agency has “publicly and repeatedly called on legislators to support the fight for direct access. No employee has ever been fired for supporting direct access to BWC footage.”

This spring, the City Council speaker, Adrienne Adams, and the New York City public advocate, Jumaane Williams, sponsored a bill that would give the review board direct access to footage so that it wouldn’t be beholden to the department for cooperation during investigations. “There are difficult split-second decisions that have to happen” in policing, Williams told me. “But if we’re not able to look at the same thing, if we have to take the word of the NYPD, that doesn’t make this conversation any easier.”

The Police Department has opposed the bill. A department official insisted at a City Council hearing in March that the department “does not fear transparency.” But the official argued that it would be an “insurmountable obstacle” to give the review board direct access while following state confidentiality laws. The bill has been stalled for months.

The city, meanwhile, paid out at least $121 million in settlements last year for lawsuits alleging misconduct by police officers — the highest total in five years.

With footage remaining in the control of the Police Department, body-worn cameras have made little difference to the public. This year, a federal court monitor wrote a scathing report about persistent problems with stop-and-frisk, the unconstitutional policing tactic that prompted Scheindlin to order the department to adopt body cameras a decade ago. The monitor found that contrary to Scheindlin’s expectations, police supervisors weren’t using footage to flag misconduct. In a sample of cases the monitor looked at, supervisors reviewing footage of stop-and-frisk encounters concluded that 100% of the cases they looked at were proper stops. The court monitor reviewed the same footage and found that 37% of the stops were unconstitutional.

“It was an experiment,” Scheindlin says, one that didn’t anticipate issues like control over footage. Scheindlin, who stepped down from the bench in 2016, says she now believes that the Police Department should no longer be the sole custodian of its own video. “That troubles me,” she says. “It should always be somebody independent.”

In interviews with a half-dozen former commanders and high-level officials, most of whom were involved in the body-camera program itself, they said that despite its public pronouncements, the department hasn’t committed to using footage for accountability. “Body cams are essential, if done right,” says a high-ranking commander who just retired and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he still works in law enforcement. “They are a game changer.” He added, “If there’s a problem, you flag — and potentially there’s discipline. But that’s not happening in most cases.” Instead, he says, body cameras have become “an exercise in just work they have to do. It’s a culture thing.”

Rudy Hall has a particularly useful vantage point. He was part of the team that rolled out the body cameras, visiting police departments around the country to see how they were using the technology, and has gone on to work for the federal monitor overseeing the department’s compliance with Scheindlin’s now-decade-old order on stop-and-frisk. “I watch a lot of body-cam videos,” Hall told me. “I have absolutely seen supervisors approve problematic conduct.”

“Body-worn cameras have not been exploited the way they should be,” says Jeff Schlanger, the former deputy commissioner. “The way to true reform is through using body cams as an early-warning system, as a way to correct small mistakes before they become big mistakes. But there weren’t a lot of discussions about it. The NYPD needs to do a lot better.”

One of the most comprehensive studies of the use of body cameras, a 2019 meta-analysis led by researchers at George Mason University, recommended that police departments consider using footage the way sports teams use game tape, to regularly review and improve performance. That’s essentially what the New Orleans Police Department did after the U.S. Department of Justice put it under federal oversight about a decade ago in response to the police killings of several Black men and persistent police violence. Body cameras were a “critical engine for us to continuously evaluate performance,” says Danny Murphy, who ran a unit at the department overseeing compliance with the federal mandate.

Four auditors were hired to join the police force and comb through footage. They looked to make sure that officers were using their cameras and that supervisors were flagging any problematic behavior. “If officers know they’re being viewed, if supervisors know they’re being reviewed, it creates a pressure for accountability,” says Murphy, who left the department four years ago. A 2020 report from the city’s civilian oversight agency — which has direct access to footage — noted a reduction in both the use of force and citizen complaints, which the department attributed to “the use of the body-worn cameras and the increased scrutiny and oversight these cameras provide leadership.” The police in New Orleans also regularly and quickly release video from shootings and other major incidents. But in the end, it’s the police chief who has the final say on discipline.

During his tenure at the New York Police Department, Schlanger had, in fact, started a kind of internal oversight system similar to the one in New Orleans. Schlanger and other senior officials would meet with each of the department’s 77 precincts every six months and look at body-camera footage to identify problematic trends and officers. “It was CompStat for constitutional policing,” Schlanger says, referring to the department’s data-heavy program for tracking crime. “If we saw a precinct doing poorly, we’d work to help them. It made a difference.”

The department quietly ended the review program last year.

A civil suit on behalf of Miguel Richards’ estate was filed against the city in 2018. New York is seeking the dismissal of the case. A judge has been considering the request for two and a half years. “I want answers,” his mother told me, “and haven’t been able to get them.”

The three officers involved in the Richards shooting were honored in 2018 by the largest New York police union, the Police Benevolent Association, which gave them its Finest of the Finest award for “extremely brave and tactically sound action” in the Richards shooting, noting that “the officers had no choice but to open fire.”

The officers were later deposed in the lawsuit. One of them, Mark Fleming, said in his testimony in September 2020 that he had learned a lesson: that the Emergency Services Unit — whose help he told department investigators he didn’t need — is in fact better equipped and trained to deal with situations that involve people having a mental health crisis.

It’s not clear what, if any, lessons the department itself has taken in. Since Richards’ death in 2017, when cameras were widely rolled out, officers have killed at least 11 people in crisis. There is no evidence that officers have been punished in any of the cases.

Photographs of Miguel at the Richards home in Jamaica. “I want answers,” his mother says, “and haven’t been able to get them.” (Naila Reuchel for The New York Times)

On a Sunday morning in the Bronx this spring, there was another shooting. Santo de la Cruz called a city emergency line. His son, 42-year-old Raul de la Cruz, was in the middle of a schizophrenic episode and had posted a disturbing video on Facebook that morning. Wearing camouflage clothing and a hat with a patch of an Israeli flag, Raul complained about racist police officers. His father called 311, avoiding 911 because he was afraid of what would happen if the police showed up. “I thought they would send someone capable of dealing with a situation like that,” he says in Spanish. “Because I was calling for a sick person, not to send the police to shoot him up.” But it was the police who arrived, with body cameras rolling. And Raul was holding a knife.

The officers shot him 28 seconds after arriving. He was hospitalized for more than a month before being released, having lost a kidney and part of his liver. A department commander cited the body-camera footage when he gave a brief news conference the day of the shooting to describe what happened. “This situation was fast, volatile and dangerous,” he said. The officers’ “quick response saved at least one civilian and protected themselves.”

But the department has not released the footage or commented in the eight months since.

Lowenkron’s colleagues at New York Lawyers for the Public Interest have once again requested the video, so far to no avail. The department has also withheld the footage from the Civilian Complaint Review Board, per the practice of sharing records with the agency only after its own investigation is done.

On Dec. 5, weeks after we sent questions to the department about that practice, the department signed a memorandum of understanding with the board to send footage to it within 90 days of a request.

But for now, nobody outside the department knows exactly what happened in the de la Cruz shooting, including the family. They have not heard anything from the department. They want to see the footage.

Do you have a tip about policing or another subject? Eric Umansky can be reached by email at eric.umansky@propublica.org and on Signal and WhatsApp at 917-687-8406.

This post was originally published on Articles and Investigations – ProPublica.

by Jeremy Kohler, ProPublica, and Ryan Krull, Riverfront Times

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Prosecutors routinely find ways to get key detectives to testify in criminal trials, even when they are retired, sick or otherwise reluctant. Some fly retirees in from Florida or other retirement locales when necessary. Others have said they use subpoenas to force detectives to take the witness stand.

But prosecutors in the St. Louis circuit attorney’s office have been unable to get retired homicide detective Thomas W. Mayer Sr. into a courtroom, even though some of the cases Mayer investigated involved the murders of children — the sort of high-profile cases cops say they especially want to win.

Over the past two years, Mayer has told prosecutors he is unable to testify against two men he arrested after the fatal shooting of an unarmed teenager; those cases crumbled. Prosecutors said he told them he’s not available to testify in the case against a teen accused of driving a car from which at least one passenger allegedly shot another teen who was in his own vehicle. And court records say Mayer has been unavailable to testify against a teen charged with the murder of a 9-year-old boy shot while riding in his family’s SUV while they were delivering food to his grandmother.

Mayer, who served as the Missouri president of the Fraternal Order of Police from 1998 to 2006, contends retired police officers should not be expected to testify, because “retirement is meant to be retirement.” And he said his doctor told him he’s too sick to testify, though it’s not the first time Mayer has claimed illness has prevented him from carrying out his duties — and not the first time those claims have been questioned.

“If I were to be dragged back to court, with the stress level and heartbeat level — blump,” Mayer, 66, told a reporter during an interview at his home in rural southeastern Missouri, mimicking a collapse. “I don’t want that.”

Mayer’s position is in some ways similar to that of another retired St. Louis homicide detective, Roger Murphey. ProPublica and Riverfront Times reported last month how Murphey has refused to testify in at least nine murder cases because he was angry over policies of former Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner. Unlike Murphey, Mayer said he was not holding out for political reasons. Still, prosecutors are facing the same challenges to keep his cases viable as they did with Murphey’s.

In a city struggling to solve murders in the first place, the refusal of police to take part in routine court proceedings compounds St. Louis’ criminal justice challenges, and leaves victims shortchanged.

Mayer and Murphey also expose a vulnerability in how St. Louis police approach homicide investigations: They frequently rely on a single detective. But former prosecutors and homicide investigators in other jurisdictions said most police departments use multiple officers at every critical juncture of a case to reduce such vulnerabilities.

“When a homicide case is properly investigated, ideally there should be redundancies built into the investigation so you shouldn’t be reliant on a single police officer for any fact,” said Matt Murphy, who was a prosecutor in Orange County, California, for more than two decades and now works as a defense lawyer and legal commentator.

Mayer said departments should be prepared for retired detectives to be unavailable. “I regret that cases fell by the wayside, but there should be some kind of safety net,” he said in one of a pair of lengthy interviews. He said he believed prosecutors understood his health issues and said they have assured him that “they’re going to go on with other witnesses.”

How Mayer and Murphey have responded to their old murder cases raises questions about why city prosecutors have not dealt with the problem head on, using their subpoena power to force them to court.

Doing so might result in messy trials, with Mayer or Murphey potentially becoming hostile witnesses. But forcing their hands would send a message to the police department that “there are police policy issues that have to get fixed,” said Brendan Roediger, a professor at Saint Louis University School of Law and director of its civil advocacy clinic.

The St. Louis police department did not respond to questions about Mayer and his cases. Marvin Teer, Circuit Attorney Gabriel Gore’s chief trial assistant and the prosecutor who has handled three of those cases, said he had to take Mayer at his word and didn’t have the authority to force him to reveal his medical records. He said Mayer’s health information was protected by privacy laws.

“Our biggest fear,” Teer said, “is he’s already indicated he doesn’t remember the cases because his medicine interferes with his ability to recall accurately. Why do I want to put a guy like that on?”

Teer acknowledged that “in hindsight, I might have done things differently.”

St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department headquarters (Paul Sableman/Wikipedia Commons)

St. Louis has one of the highest homicide rates in the country, with about 1,000 murders since the beginning of 2019. And some families of those who were killed say the refusal of two detectives to testify has compounded their pain.

After Jonathan Cruz, 19, was shot to death in 2021 by passengers in two separate cars, police arrested the alleged driver of one of those cars, Neptali Mejia. Court records show that Mejia provided a videotaped confession to Mayer and that prosecutors charged him with first-degree murder. Mejia has pleaded not guilty and is currently under house arrest.

Cruz’s brother Ivan said he hoped Mejia’s arrest would lead the police to others involved in the crime. Mayer, he said in an interview, “gave me hope there was going to be justice and everyone responsible was going to be behind bars.”

Now the case is in trouble. Because prosecutors have said Mayer won’t testify, Mejia’s lawyer said he plans to ask the judge in the case to block the video recording of Mejia’s statements to Mayer from being admitted at trial.

Ivan Cruz, who said he has moved to another state out of fear of the people who shot his brother, said he was aware that prosecutors were having trouble reaching Mayer. Mayer, he said, “can bring a lot of peace and closure to the families that are suffering from all of this violence.”

The notion that officers would not follow their cases to trial is anathema to many homicide detectives and prosecutors. They said retired police officers, despite generally not being paid for testifying in their old cases, hold a legal and ethical duty to participate at trial, the same as anyone with knowledge pertinent to a court case.

Retired Seattle homicide detective Cloyd Steiger said he belongs to a Facebook group of retired police officers. “I get messages from them sometimes saying, ‘Hey, I got a subpoena for this murder trial. Do I have to go?’” he said. “And my answer is, ‘Yes, it’s unambiguous. Sorry, yeah, you gotta put your big boy pants on and go down there and do it.’”

John Skaggs, a retired Los Angeles homicide detective who trains homicide squads around the country, said the thought that a homicide detective would refuse to testify for any reason “is foreign to me.”

He said he has brought witnesses into court in wheelchairs and even hospital beds because their testimony was so important. He said he would do the same if he was ill and his testimony was needed. “I’d come in with a medical doctor and a paramedic team, and they can revive me if I go out,” he said. “If I’m needed, I’m coming.”

Brian Seaman, the district attorney in Niagara County, New York, said he had to track down seven retired police officers — including two who had moved out of state — to testify in a 2021 trial over the strangling murder of a 17-year-old girl nearly three decades earlier. He won a conviction.

Seaman said that bringing back the retirees was a “logistics puzzle” but that they “took great pride in their work and wanted to see the case through” to a trial. He said if a retired officer is the only witness who can provide testimony about evidence, “it’s just expected that they be available.”

Officers do sometimes have legitimate medical reasons for missing court, experts noted. Or, particularly in cold cases, they may even be dead by the time a case comes to trial. That’s why it’s important that departments have multiple police witnesses for each piece of evidence collected in the investigation.

But in St. Louis, perhaps because the two detectives are alive and their absences cannot easily be explained to jurors, local prosecutors have tried to salvage what they can from them.

Some legal experts took issue with the circuit attorney’s office’s decision not to compel Mayer to court. Murphy, the former Orange County prosecutor, said it would be a “cop-out” for a prosecutor to say they couldn’t proceed with a case because a witness said they were sick. He said prosecutors can subpoena a witness to determine whether they have a valid medical reason not to testify.

In the early morning hours of a Sunday in August 2019, Sentonio Cox became the 12th child that year in St. Louis to be killed by gunfire — and the third that weekend. The 15-year-old had been roaming around a south side neighborhood with a cousin, who was about the same age. The cousin told police later that someone had come out of a house and yelled at them to get off their property. He fled when he heard a gunshot.

The cousin guided the family to the last place he saw Sentonio. Just after sunrise, they found Sentonio’s body in a vacant lot across the street with a gunshot wound to his head.

Mayer led the investigation, which culminated with the arrest of Brian Potter, who lived in a house across from the vacant lot, and Joseph Renick, who had been staying with him. Police and prosecutors alleged the men had confronted the teens after using a surveillance camera to spot them trying to break into a vehicle parked in front of the house.

According to police and court records in the murder cases, Mayer alleged that Renick pointed a revolver at Sentonio as the teen was backing away with his hands up. Potter ordered Renick to “shoot this piece of shit,” and Renick fired one shot into Sentonio’s head. Renick and Potter pleaded not guilty.

Emails obtained through a public record request showed that prosecutors contacted Mayer several times to update him on the case as they prepared for the Renick and Potter trials. Mayer acknowledged in October 2021 that he had received a subpoena, according to the emails.

In January 2022, prosecutor Srikant Chigurupati emailed Mayer to say the trials were coming up and “we’ll obviously need you as a witness.”

Weeks later, prosecutors requested new trial dates, telling Judge Christopher McGraugh that Mayer was on leave from the department and they were unable to get him to testify. The judge denied the requests.

To buy more time to try to get Mayer to court, the circuit attorney’s office in March 2022 dropped the cases and refiled them. Potter’s attorney said the move violated his client’s right to a speedy trial; Renick’s said it was an abuse of the criminal justice system.

By then, Mayer was approaching retirement and using his accumulated sick time. Mayer said he called in sick for several months in 2022, a common practice among St. Louis officers to maximize their payout for unused sick days, and left the department in September of that year, when he reached the mandatory retirement age of 65.

The trial of Potter began in August 2022. Without Mayer, the case against Potter rested on a single eyewitness who had told Mayer she heard Potter give the order to shoot. Potter had told Mayer he didn’t know Renick had a gun, and that the shooting had surprised him, according to testimony at the trial.

Potter’s attorney, Travis Noble, sought to undermine the credibility of that witness, according to the transcript. Noble’s questions during cross-examination revealed that the eyewitness had lied under oath in a previous case and suggested a possible hidden agenda for her implication of Potter: that Mayer had showered her with compliments, called her a hero and promised to intercede with her parole officer. She was on parole for drug trafficking.

Noble also challenged parts of the investigation as unethical and incomplete. In his opening statement, he noted that Mayer, the detective who wrote all the reports, wasn’t there in court but that jurors would instead hear testimony from another detective, Benjamin Lacy, who hadn’t written the reports.

Marvin Teer, chief trial assistant for the St. Louis circuit attorney’s office (Robert Cohen/Pool Photo)

In an exchange with Teer in court, Noble said he would reveal the reason for Mayer’s absence to the jury, insinuating there was more to the story. Out of earshot of the jury, Noble told the judge that he’d heard rumors that Mayer simply “doesn’t want to come back” to testify and said he wanted to ask Lacy about it on the stand, according to the trial transcript.

“He said, ‘F the city of St. Louis,’” Noble told the judge. “He’s riding out, burning his sick time until he can retire.”

The judge said he was wary of derailing the trial by allowing the jury to hear questions about Mayer’s absence. He pointed out that another prosecutor had vouched for Mayer’s medical condition, and he had to accept it as fact. The judge told both sides to say Mayer was “not available.”

In cross-examination, Noble pressed Lacy for details that Mayer had not recorded in his report.

“I know this is not your investigation,” Noble said. “I’m not saying you were derelict the way you did it. This ain’t you. This is Mayer’s investigation, right?”

Lacy answered: “It is.”

The jury acquitted Potter after less than a day of deliberation.

“There was no evidence presented that seemed credible,” the jury foreman, Adam Houston, said in an interview. “Maybe the detective could have made the difference if he had been a credible witness, but it was just some really crappy pictures, a lot of hearsay and random people who are not trustworthy saying things you don’t feel were unmotivated by the things they might be getting out of testifying.”

A week before Renick’s murder trial was set to begin in June, Teer struck a deal for him to plead to involuntary manslaughter; under what’s known as an Alford plea, Renick maintained his innocence even as he conceded prosecutors had enough evidence to convict him. Renick was sentenced to 10 years in prison; under parole guidelines, he is scheduled to be released in August 2025.

While the judge said he didn’t typically discuss plea deals, he described Renick’s sentence as “extremely favorable.” If the case had gone to trial, he said, Renick could have faced life in prison.

Teer said he was “incensed” over how Mayer affected his cases.

Mayer lives far from where he once tried to solve some of the city’s most brutal crimes, in a home set in woods off a dirt road about 100 miles south of St. Louis. Reporters from ProPublica and the Riverfront Times interviewed him in front of his home in June and again in October, each time for about 90 minutes.

Mayer has told prosecutors that he suffers from a heart condition, according to Teer. During the interviews, he said his physical decline should be plainly visible, and he repeatedly apologized for seeming groggy or forgetting key details, which he blamed on the medications he takes. He declined to share his medical records.

This is not the first time Mayer has claimed to be sick for extended periods, but he said that allegations he has abused sick time are false. Before joining the St. Louis police force in 2005, Mayer worked for 24 years in the police department in St. Charles, a major St. Louis suburb. He also took on leadership roles with the FOP, and eventually became its statewide president, representing some 5,000 officers.

In 1995, the St. Charles chief, David King, wrote in an internal memo that Mayer had developed an attitude that “may be counterproductive to police efforts” after his work shift was changed, according to court records.

Mayer then called in sick for 4 1/2 months, producing doctor’s notes that said he had shortness of breath and vocal cord spasms, according to court records. In a memo in January 1996, King noted that Mayer had been seen at an FOP dinner dance and was attending union-related meetings.

In 2003, some St. Charles City Council members wanted to trim Mayer’s benefits, including the 200 hours a year of paid leave he received to do union work. He filed a workers compensation claim for stress-related illness from the “constant and pervasive harassment” of the city council members, then called in sick for five months. His doctor noted that while Mayer was too sick to work, he was able to carry out his FOP duties, which carried “minimal stress,” according to medical records in court papers.

In May 2004, Mayer sued the city, the city administrator and all 10 council members, alleging they were harassing him and causing him health problems. The city countersued with a host of charges against Mayer, including repeated sick time abuse. It pointed to his work for the FOP and claimed that he was physically active.

Mayer was fired in April 2005, according to court records, then months later hired by the St. Louis police department. Mayer and the city of St. Charles agreed to drop their lawsuits, with the city agreeing to pay Mayer $57,000 and describe his departure in personnel records as a retirement, according to news reports.

Fourteen months into his retirement, Mayer recalled how he used to relish testifying in court, a task he called the “crowning jewel” of police work. He said he particularly enjoyed the results of his testimony: helping to send a defendant to prison.

But Mayer said he doesn’t want to think about the horrors of his old job. “That city was just a toilet, and the violence put on other people is just horrendous,” he said. “I don’t really want any involvement anymore,” he added. “I’m retired, you know — aging — and I have my kids and my grandkids.”

That attitude comes with a cost. In the case against Neptali Mejia for the murder of Jonathan Cruz, Mayer’s reluctance to testify casts doubt on the prosecution’s ability to get a murder conviction.

Ivan Cruz said he fears the people involved in his brother’s death will become emboldened if Mejia is not convicted of murder. He said he believes that potential co-defendants have seen Mejia on house arrest and “laugh about it and say the system is not going to do anything.”

In February, Judge Katherine Fowler granted a motion by Mejia’s lawyer, Mark Byrne, to exclude Mayer from testifying because prosecutors had not made him available for a pretrial deposition. Byrne noted in the motion that the prosecutor had told him and the judge months before that Mayer “has not been cooperative with prosecutions of cases in the City of St. Louis.”

Mayer was the only detective present when Mejia allegedly made statements that prosecutors say implicated him, and prosecutors have not disclosed any witness who could provide evidence against his client, Byrne wrote. It’s not clear if a prosecutor would be able to use the recording of Mejia’s statements at trial without Mayer appearing in court to testify about it.

Byrne said if the case were to go to trial, he would ask the judge to bar the recording because he would not have a chance to cross-examine Mayer about it.

“Any evidence they would try to put on and not have the lead detective is problematic,” he said. “The lead detective has his hands on everything and directs people to do things as part of their investigation.”

Two weeks before publication of this story, Teer said he’d been “troubled for quite some time” about Mayer’s absence from the Mejia case. “You can expect that he’ll receive a subpoena from us,” Teer said.

“And if I have to arrest Tommy Mayer to bring him in,” he added, “then I will.”

Do You Have a Tip for ProPublica? Help Us Do Journalism.

This post was originally published on Articles and Investigations – ProPublica.

by Bianca Fortis

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Columbia University has been rocked by revelations about the university’s handling of the case of Robert Hadden, a former obstetrician-gynecologist who sexually abused patients for decades while working at the school.

A ProPublica investigation, published last month in collaboration with New York Magazine, detailed how Columbia failed to stop Hadden and then sought to deflect blame and distance the university from the scandal once his misconduct became public. Columbia has also refused to notify Hadden’s thousands of former patients that he’s been convicted of sexual misconduct.

Last week, more than 100 medical students wearing white coats were joined by some of the survivors in a protest at the inauguration of Columbia’s new president, Minouche Shafik. Throughout the event, they chanted, “Notify the patients.” The students have also called on Columbia to commission an independent investigation and to share the systemic changes the university has made as a result of the scandal. The students said administrators have not announced any actions in response to the students’ demands.

Also last week, an additional 301 former Hadden patients filed civil suits against the university, bringing the total to 538. Columbia has already settled with more than two hundred patients for $236.5 million.

Columbia did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment about the students’ demands or the new suits.

Hadden was arrested in 2012 after a patient called the police to report that Hadden had sexually assaulted her. Administrators at Columbia and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital then allowed Hadden to return to work, where he continued to abuse patients for five weeks before being suspended.

In 2016, Hadden agreed to a plea deal with the Manhattan district attorney’s office in which he received no jail time. The Department of Justice later charged Hadden, and he was convicted in federal court this January of abusing patients and is currently serving a 20-year sentence.

Following publication of our investigation, Columbia issued an apology for the first time. The statement was signed by Shafik and by Katrina Armstrong, the CEO of the Columbia University Irving Medical Center, where Hadden delivered babies. The letter says that the university “continues to grapple with the magnitude of harm done” to Hadden’s patients. “We are heartbroken for those who have suffered and continue to suffer from these terrible actions. Hadden will spend the rest of his life in prison thanks to these courageous women. We commend them for coming forward. We offer our deepest apologies to all his victims and their loved ones.” The letter did not lay out any specific shortcomings on Columbia’s part. Through a university spokesperson, Shafik declined to give further comment.

Two survivors, Marissa Hoechstetter and Evelyn Yang, along with their attorney, Anthony DiPietro, condemned the statement, calling it “self-serving propaganda.” They also said that the university continues to “keep thousands of patients in the dark.”

One reason that survivors are calling on the university to notify patients is so that if Hadden had other victims, they can seek justice through the courts. The Adult Survivors Act, a law passed in New York state last year, opened up a temporary one-year window in which survivors of sexual abuse can file cases against their abusers — or the institutions that protected them — even if the statute of limitations has expired.

On Sept. 28, during the annual State of the School address given at Columbia’s medical school, Armstrong gave a brief statement about Hadden, saying that she shared attendees’ distress and concern for the victims and their loved ones. “I also want you to know that we will be working as a community with everyone over the next weeks and days to make sure that we provide all the information about where we’ve come and all that’s been done to make sure that this will never happen again, to offer opportunities for support and engagement to everybody in our community for what you all need and deserve.”

Armstrong did not respond to a request for further comment.

This post was originally published on Articles and Investigations – ProPublica.

by Jeremy Kohler

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

After the 2014 fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the months of protests that followed, the city of St. Louis was forced to reckon with its Black residents’ longstanding distrust of its police and courts.

Kim Gardner emerged as a voice for change. A lifelong resident of St. Louis, she had diverse professional experiences, having worked as a funeral director, a nurse, a lawyer and a state legislator. When campaigning for circuit attorney, the city’s top prosecutor, she focused on the disproportionate frequency of arrests and police officers using force against St. Louis’ Black community.

“We need to change decades of old practices that left many in our community distrustful of the criminal justice system as a whole,” she told The St. Louis American, the city’s Black newspaper, just days before her decisive primary victory in August 2016 that all but sealed her general election win.

In the last decade, prosecutors in other major American cities also campaigned on promises of systemic reform: Kim Foxx in Chicago, Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, Chesa Boudin in San Francisco.

Yet, much like Gardner, these prosecutors have faced resistance from the police and the unions that represent rank-and-file officers. They’ve been accused of being soft on crime and have even been met with political maneuvers aimed at derailing their initiatives. Several have been targeted by efforts to remove them from office or pare away their powers.

Boudin lost a recall vote and was removed in June 2022. And Krasner, criticized for his reduced emphasis on prosecuting minor crimes, was impeached by the state legislature in November, although a state court threw out the result.

In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis has removed elected prosecutors in Tampa and Orlando. He suspended Hillsborough County State Attorney Andrew Warren over Warren’s refusal to prosecute offenses related to abortion and gender-related health care. He suspended the state attorney for Orange and Osceola counties, Monique Worrell, because he said she wasn’t tough enough on some serious offenses.

Georgia recently became the first state to establish a commission with the authority to discipline and even remove local elected prosecutors. Republican Gov. Brian Kemp framed the law as a way to check “far-left prosecutors.”

Gardner, who was reelected in 2020, stepped down in May of 2023 while facing both a lawsuit from the state attorney general that sought her removal and a separate attempt by the Republican-led legislature to curtail her authority. Gardner’s mismanagement of her office played a significant role in her downfall. Reform-minded lawyers who she personally hired had departed. And while judges fumed about prosecutors failing to show up for court, Gardner was moonlighting as a nursing student.

Kim Gardner in 2022, when she was the St. Louis circuit attorney (AP Photo/T.L. Witt, Pool via Missouri Lawyers Media, File)

Though other prosecutors faced various challenges, there are no widely known instances like that of retired detective Roger Murphey in St. Louis, who has refused to testify in at least nine murder cases and hasn’t received any departmental discipline.

“For every progressive prosecutor who’s managed to stick it out, there’s one who’s either been recalled or driven out,” said Lara Bazelon, a University of San Francisco law school professor who volunteered on Boudin’s campaign and serves as chair of the commission he created to review inmates’ claims of innocence. “So it’s a real mix of success and cautionary tales.”

She added: “If the police are against you, or literally out to get you, you’re probably not going to be able to last in that job.”

Foxx, elected in 2016 and reelected in 2020, announced in April that she will not seek a third term next year, though she said it was not because of resistance from the police. In an interview, Foxx said that even before she took office, the Chicago police union felt threatened by her assertion that Black lives matter and that the criminal justice system could be more fair, particularly to communities of color.

It was a signal, she said, “that I was not one of them.”

“The reality is we were offering something very different to what was traditionally viewed as the law-and-order approach to prosecution,” Foxx said. “I think it was surprising to folks that prosecutors could be elected addressing these issues.”

Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx announces that she will not seek reelection. (Ashlee Rezin/Chicago Sun-Times via AP)

R. Michael Cassidy, a law professor at Boston College and an expert in prosecutorial ethics, said the Ferguson unrest emphasized the need for change in how police and prosecutors work. He said some prosecutors have failed to manage their relationships with police; prosecutors depend on the officers to bring them cases and to testify in court, but they must conduct oversight of the police as well.

Foxx pushed back against any assertion that she didn’t manage her relationship with police. She pointed to a popular Chicago police blog that often refers to her as “Crimesha” — “a play on the word ‘crime’ and what I believe to be a racist insinuation about me being Black with the name ‘-esha.’” The blog has also sexualized her last name by adding a third X and has insinuated that members of her family are connected to gangs.

“From the moment we came into office, we reached out to our partners in law enforcement, and what we saw was there was a segment of them who were never going to be satisfied with me in this role because I said ‘Black lives matter,’ because I said ‘We need police accountability,’ because I said that we had a criminal justice system that overly relied on incarceration that targeted Black and brown communities,” she said.

She said that she, Gardner and other prosecutors “have been faced with an unprecedented level of hate and vitriol” from the police.

“That,” she said, “is the story.”

The local police union organized a protest calling for the removal of Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx in Chicago in 2019. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Chicago Fraternal Order of Police President John Catanzara and other union officials did not respond to requests for comment. But Catanzara told the Chicago Sun-Times in 2020 that the union’s complaints about Foxx were based on her job performance. He said she was a “social activist in an elected law enforcement position” who was unwilling to “faithfully do her job.”

Boudin was elected in 2019 on a reform platform. Soon after taking office, he eliminated cash bail for most misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies. He also brought criminal charges against nine city officers for misconduct and announced a plan to compensate victims of police violence.

But as property crime rates climbed in San Francisco, Boudin came under increased scrutiny. Then, in 2021, his office declined to bring charges in a rape case in Golden Gate Park in spite of DNA evidence that appeared to implicate a suspect. Boudin cited concerns about the victim’s identification of the suspect and the absence of other physical evidence, and said he was concerned about the risks of a wrongful conviction.

Critics seized on the case to argue that he was soft on crime and made it a central point in the push for his recall.

Cassidy said Boudin and other like-minded prosecutors have been scapegoated for isolated incidents or temporary spikes in crime statistics, as if they alone are responsible. In some cities, that has swung public opinion against them.

Boudin said the claims were unfair and largely the product of police resistance to his reforms.

“We’ve seen, on body-worn camera footage, police officers telling victims there’s nothing they can do and, ‘Don’t forget to vote in the upcoming recall election,’” Boudin said in an interview.

Boudin said he and other local prosecutors have found “there is absolutely zero accountability for these officers who engage in explicitly political acts of sabotage or dereliction of duty.”

A spokesperson for the San Francisco police union declined to comment.

Chesa Boudin, during his time as San Francisco’s district attorney (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Some prosecutors have held onto their positions despite challenges to their power. In November, veteran public defender Mary Moriarty was elected county attorney for the jurisdiction that includes Minneapolis in the first election since the death there of George Floyd. The same night, Dallas District Attorney John Creuzot was reelected by a nearly 20-point margin in spite of calls by a police union for his ouster over his plan not to prosecute certain low-level offenses.

In August 2022, Sarah George, the incumbent state’s attorney in Vermont’s Chittenden County, which includes Burlington, secured her seat with a 20-point victory in the Democratic primary over Ted Kenney, a challenger backed by the police.

George had introduced a variety of reforms, including eliminating cash bail and declining to prosecute cases where evidence was obtained during noncriminal traffic stops, like those for broken taillights. The Burlington police union called her actions “disastrous” and Kenney argued that the approach made streets less safe.

George, too, has seen police body camera video of officers blaming her for crime. In one video, which she provided to ProPublica, the Riverfront Times and NPR, an officer from a suburban police department tells a couple that officers can’t do anything about a crack house in their neighborhood. He then implores them to vote for Kenney because of George’s “super-progressive, soft-on-crime approach where we arrest the same people daily and they get out the same day.”

George said that, with some crime investigations, the police are “not really doing the work that we need to do on the case, and then blaming us for the case not being filed.”

The Burlington police union declined to comment. The chiefs of police in Burlington and Winooski, the suburb where the video was taken, did not respond to messages seeking comment.

Gardner, too, often faced criticism from police for her reluctance to prosecute cases based on arrests alone. In one notable instance in 2019, she dropped child-endangerment charges against two day care workers who were captured on video as they appeared to encourage toddlers to box using toy Incredible Hulk fists.

The police union called for her ouster, writing on Facebook: “The first rule of toddler fight club is … that you prosecute the sadistic promoters of toddler fight club.”

In comments made before her resignation, Gardner noted that she had been careful not to file criminal charges in cases where she did not feel there was enough evidence. “What they want me to do is make it look like this job is easy,” she said. “We can’t make things fit and people don’t like that. That’s not what justice is about.”

Richard Rosenfeld, a professor emeritus of criminology at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, was one of several researchers who pooled data from 65 major cities and found “no evidence to support the claim that progressive prosecutors were responsible for the increase in homicide during the pandemic or before it.”

Indeed, Chicago’s murder rate fell during Foxx’s first years in office, rose during the first years of the pandemic and has been falling this year, city crime statistics show. Philadelphia’s murder rate was in steep decline this year after a precipitous rise that started in 2020. And most categories of crime were in retreat in St. Louis at the time Gardner resigned, while violent crime was up in San Francisco a year after Boudin’s exit, according to statistics.

Acknowledging that the St. Louis police commonly blamed Gardner for crime trends, Rosenfeld, a veteran observer of policing in St. Louis, said, “Case not proved, is what I would argue there.”

This post was originally published on Articles and Investigations – ProPublica.

by Jeremy Kohler, ProPublica, and Ryan Krull, Riverfront Times

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

The voicemail left on St. Louis police detective Roger Murphey’s cellphone carried a clear sense of urgency.

A prosecutor in the St. Louis circuit attorney’s office was pleading with Murphey to testify in a murder trial, the sort of thing the lead detective on a case would routinely do to see an arrest through to conviction. The prosecutor told Murphey that, without his testimony, the suspect could walk free.

“I wanted to reach out to you one more time,” Assistant Circuit Attorney Srikant Chigurupati said in a message one afternoon in June 2021. “I do think we need you on this case.”

Murphey didn’t respond.

Prosecutor Reaches Out

This is a portion of the first voicemail that prosecutor Srikant Chigurupati left for Roger Murphey asking the police detective to testify in a murder trial.

(Obtained by ProPublica)

That evening, Chigurupati left Murphey another voicemail. “If it makes any difference, this guy’s a really bad guy,” Chigurupati said, according to the message, which Murphey provided for this story. “What he did was pretty ridiculous. So, I mean, can you put your differences aside and focus on getting this guy?”

Again, Murphey didn’t respond.

Weeks later, a jury found Brian Vincent not guilty, and he went free. Murphey said he believes his refusal to testify helped scuttle the case — a claim corroborated by at least one juror from the trial.

A number of American cities have elected prosecutors who promised progressive law enforcement, focusing as much on police accountability as being tough on crime. In St. Louis, that prosecutor was Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner, who was elected in 2016 following the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in the suburb of Ferguson. Gardner came into office pledging to reduce mass incarceration and promote rehabilitation over punishment.

But from San Francisco to Philadelphia, prosecutors like Gardner have faced pushback from the police and, in several cities, from their own courtroom assistants. Politicians and voters have tried to remove some of these prosecutors from office — and, in a number of cities, they have been successful.

Murphey’s resistance to Gardner — Chigurupati’s boss when Vincent’s case went to trial — was unusual and, perhaps, extreme. By his own account, he was willing to help murder suspects walk free to make a point, even if he arrested them and believed that they should be behind bars.

In 2019, Gardner added Murphey to a list of police officers who would not be allowed to apply for criminal charges because of questions about their credibility, and she said her office would evaluate whether those officers could testify in court. Although the identities of those officers were not made public, one of Murphey’s supervisors notified him that his name was on Gardner’s list.

Sign up for Dispatches, a ProPublica newsletter about wrongdoing in America.

Weeks later, a prosecutor in Gardner’s office notified Murphey that the office not only would actually let him testify in the cases he had led that were heading to trial — it expected him to.

Murphey, who retired in September 2021, said he felt stuck in a Catch-22. If Gardner was going to impugn his character and question his credibility, he decided, he wouldn’t cooperate with her prosecutors. He believed that if he went to court, defense lawyers would use his inclusion on Gardner’s list to attack him on cross-examination, making the trials more about him than the defendants.

Since that time, he has refused to testify in at least nine murder cases in which he served as lead detective. He said he told prosecutors that, if they subpoenaed him to testify, “I’m going to sit on the stand and I’m not going to answer any questions.”

His refusal, according to prosecutors, contributed to their decisions to offer defendants in at least four of the murder cases plea deals with reduced charges and lighter sentences. Prosecutors were still able to get murder convictions in three cases.

In one case, prosecutors dropped the charges altogether, saying the office “did not have witness participation.” Though it wasn’t clear if Murphey’s refusal contributed to the decision, he said the prosecution would have been hamstrung without him because he had collected evidence and conducted interviews in the case.

Vincent’s case was the only acquittal at trial.

Former Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner (Christian Gooden/St. Louis Post-Dispatch/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)

Murphey never faced discipline from the police department for refusing to testify, a fact that criminal justice experts find astonishing. They said his refusal undermined not just the integrity of the cases but also the police department’s commitment to justice.

Gardner battled the police and their union over her platform throughout her nearly six and a half years in office. But she also struggled with a host of internal issues, from the departure of dissatisfied prosecutors to a growing backlog of cases that the office could not manage. Those issues contributed to stinging criticism of her leadership — initially from law enforcement but then from even her own prosecutors.

It wasn’t until this May that staff departures became so numerous and pressure on her to resign so fierce that she stepped down. In exchange for her resignation, Republican lawmakers agreed to drop a bill that would have allowed the state to take over the circuit attorney’s office. The Republican attorney general also dropped a lawsuit seeking to force her out.

Robert Tracy, the St. Louis police chief, did not respond to an interview request. Gardner did not respond to requests for comment, and she has retreated from public life. The office is now run by Gabriel Gore, a former federal prosecutor appointed by Gov. Mike Parson, a Republican, to serve until an election next year. Gore has issued updates about his supervision of the office, including hiring dozens of prosecutors and reducing a backlog of pending cases.

Murphey, who sees himself as a righteous renegade in St. Louis’ beleaguered law enforcement system, wishes other officers had taken similar stands against prosecutors like Gardner. But he said he understands why they haven’t. “They have wives, they have kids, they have tuition, medical bills,” he said. “But me — it’s just me and my wife, and my wife is like, ‘Go for it.’”

At least 10 other officers refused to cooperate with Gardner’s team, according to interviews and court records. But Murphey stood apart because of his crucial role in some of the city’s most significant, and most violent, cases.

While expressing some sympathy for the family of the victim whose fatal beating Vincent was tried for, Murphey stood by his decision not to cooperate.

“Brian Vincent should be sitting in a penitentiary right now for the rest of his life,” he said. “But he’s not.”

The report of a suspicious death came across Murphey’s desk just after sunset on a cold November evening in 2018. A man named Larry Keck had been found in his bed, partly covered by a sheet, his face and body severely battered.

Murphey pulled up to a four-family flat in Shaw, a neighborhood of red brick homes on the city’s south side. As he stepped into Keck’s apartment, a painting in the living room caught his eye. It depicted an Italianate-style mansion in Lafayette Square, and it stirred a memory from his childhood. The mansion had once been owned by Keck, whom Murphey had known when he was young. Keck had spent his working life restoring some of St. Louis’ grandest homes, fixing windows and other architectural elements. Murphey had once helped him move furniture.

Murphey and other officers quickly zeroed in on Vincent, 40, as a suspect. Police reports and interviews show that Vincent and Keck, who was 68, had been in a romantic relationship, and that Vincent had been staying at Keck’s apartment on and off after getting out of prison earlier that year. A friend of Keck’s told police she had seen them together at his house late the night before.

Vincent had at least 31 felony convictions at the time and had served five stints in prison over the previous two decades; the longest was six years. His most recent conviction was for a 2014 home burglary, where he stole hundreds of dollars’ worth of electronics and jewelry, according to police and court records.

Six months before Keck’s death, neighbors called the police one night as Vincent loudly banged on Keck’s door for 45 minutes. An officer provided Keck with a form to request a restraining order against Vincent, but there’s no record of Keck filing it. Keck’s friends told police they had noticed bruises on him in the past, leading them to suspect that Vincent was abusing him. Keck had also told the friends that Vincent was stealing from him.

Murphey brought Vincent to police headquarters for questioning and placed him in a small, windowless room. According to a video of the interrogation, which Murphey provided, Vincent told Murphey and another detective that he and Keck had been out with friends the night before Keck was found dead and that some of them had gone back to Keck’s apartment at about 10 p.m. to smoke crack cocaine. Vincent said that afterward he slept in the alley behind the house and woke around 2 a.m. He said he then walked downtown — a distance of 4 miles — to see his probation officer.

Murphey questioned Vincent’s account, pointing out that his clothes, which Vincent said he was still wearing from the night before, were remarkably clean for someone who had slept in an alley. He noted, too, that the overnight temperature was 19 degrees, making it difficult to believe that Vincent had slept outside. Vincent seemed indignant, telling Murphey that he should be looking at Keck’s drug dealers as possible suspects.

“Some of them are probably dangerous,” he said in the video of the interrogation.

In an interview room at St. Louis police headquarters, Detective Roger Murphey questions Brian Vincent, a suspect in the 2018 killing of Larry Keck. (Obtained by ProPublica)

Murphey told Vincent that he believed Vincent had killed Keck. When Vincent asked for a lawyer, according to the video, Murphey ended the interrogation, arresting Vincent on a first-degree murder charge.

Murphey later tracked down two maintenance workers who had been at the building. One of them picked Vincent out of a photo lineup, according to police reports, and said he saw Vincent go in and out of Keck’s apartment a short time before Keck’s body was discovered.

Murphey said in a sworn deposition, taken by Vincent’s lawyer as part of pretrial proceedings, that the lack of a plausible alibi was “what sealed it for me,” according to the deposition.

Vincent, in a brief interview, said he was innocent and described Keck as a close friend: “We worked together and had our differences but he was a good man.” He called Murphey a “crooked cop” who tried to frame him.

He said Murphey “didn’t have the balls to show up” at his trial.

Murphey started his working life in 1982 at age 17 as an Army cook, and three years later he enlisted in the Air Force as a security specialist. During Operation Desert Storm, he spent close to two years at bases in Europe, but he returned to the U.S. and Whiteman Air Force Base in western Missouri when his wife became ill.

During his time at Whiteman, he got a part-time job as a police officer in La Monte, a small town near the base. It was light work, he said, watching over a general store and a handful of shops.

Murphey returned to St. Louis and entered the police academy, graduating in May 1995. Two years later, he was named officer of the year in the city’s 9th police district. The head of a neighborhood association had written a letter to Murphey’s captain commending Murphey for helping to oust drug dealers from a problem property.

Paris Bouchard, who wrote that letter, said he remembered Murphey as being uncommonly accessible and helping to “bring amazing change to our block.”

“He was so good at what he was doing,” Bouchard said.

Murphey became a detective in 2007 — work that he said satisfied his curiosity. “I like finding out what happened. I’m nosy,” he said. Four years later, he won a coveted transfer to the homicide unit.

“I’m not saying that I was the greatest,” Murphey said. “But you know, to get there, you’ve got to be able to prove yourself. You did your time on the street.”

In audio recordings of his interviews with witnesses and suspects, which Murphey provided, he seemed to balance sternness with empathy, establishing an initial rapport before launching into his questioning. His questions started out broad, then zeroed in on details.

In one recording, he began to question a suspect’s wife by asking, “What kind of dogs you got? I’ve got pit bulls myself.” Then he moved to the matter at hand. “You weren’t with him today when he shot at this lady?”

Scott Ecker, who supervised Murphey in the homicide unit, called him a great detective. “You’re just not going to find a more passionate individual that actually cares about not only the victim but the victim’s family,” he said.

Yet Murphey was prone to office disputes. He accused colleagues of tampering with his phone and desk. When residents protested against police brutality, he criticized Black leaders who put a spotlight on racial bias within the department, sometimes accusing them of twisting facts to ascribe racial motives to situations where he believed race was not a factor.

His comments didn’t go unnoticed. Sgt. Heather Taylor, then a supervisor in the homicide unit and the leader of an organization for Black officers, challenged Murphey’s comments as racially insensitive. Murphey, in turn, said that he complained to the command staff about what he viewed as Taylor’s false claims of racism in the department.

In a recent interview with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Murphey named three Black, female leaders — Gardner, Taylor and St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones — as the reason many officers had left the department. He called the women “catalysts that broke the system.”

Taylor, who is now the city’s deputy public safety director, said that during their time in the homicide unit, she had dealt with complaints about Murphey being insubordinate and combative with colleagues. “If fighting racism is me breaking the police department,” she said, “I hope more people do exactly what I did.”

Gardner and the police force were at odds even before she was elected. Speaking to supporters days before her resignation, she recounted a meeting with officials from the St. Louis Police Officers Association before the election, where, she said, union officials told her, “We will let you be in this office if you make sure you never hold any police officer accountable.”

Representatives for the union did not respond to requests for comment.

During her first year in office, Gardner accused the police department of withholding evidence in about two dozen cases in which a police officer shot someone, and she asked the city to launch an independent team to lead all investigations into such incidents. A city bill to create the team did not advance to a vote.

The police union, meantime, routinely criticized Gardner, saying she refused to issue criminal charges in cases where officers had made arrests; they argued that she rejected far more cases than her predecessor, Jennifer Joyce. In response, Gardner said the cases often lacked sufficient evidence.

Gardner’s first high-profile prosecution was one she inherited from Joyce: a murder case against Jason Stockley, a white St. Louis police officer who was accused of shooting and killing a Black man during a chase and then planting a gun on him. Stockley was acquitted, which sparked street protests. Gardner said the acquittal showed the need for independent investigations of police shootings, which she said her office should lead.

In August 2018, Gardner created what became known as her “exclusion list,” which she said included 28 officers whose conduct had undermined their credibility. She said prosecutors would refuse to issue charges in any case involving an officer on the list that depended on their testimony.

Some officers, however, would still be allowed to testify on cases that had been launched before the list was created. Murphey wasn’t yet on the list.

Prosecutors are required to disclose to the defense any evidence that may favor the accused or undermine the credibility of a witness. A national police chiefs association recommends that police departments inform prosecutors when any issues arise that could affect officers’ credibility, such as making false reports or expressing racial bias. But St. Louis police have not had a procedure for this. Joyce said the extent to which the police department shared such information depended on who was the chief at the time. “Some were more forthcoming than others,” she said.

Nationally, the approach to these lists varies. While some prosecutors offices don’t maintain such lists, others do but choose to keep them private. Some offices, including that of State’s Attorney Kim Foxx in Chicago, have made them public. Joyce said her office did create internal records on officers to be excluded from prosecutions but mainly operated with a “mental list.”

Gardner’s replacement, Gore, said he had no exclusion list and had no plans to try to keep tabs on officers with credibility problems. He said that was up to the police department to do.

“I don’t have the attorney manpower to send people over and have them scouring through police personnel files, looking for things that might potentially be relevant to a witness’s credibility and necessary to be produced at a trial,” Gore said.

The first batch of names on Gardner’s list included officers who had refused to cooperate with her office in cases where they had shot someone. The police union said after Stockley’s trial that other officers who had used force to arrest suspects feared becoming targets of prosecutors. Gardner said their refusal to testify prevented her from bringing cases to trial. Tensions continued to rise after the police union said it wanted the state legislature to change the law so Gardner could be impeached or recalled.

In this 2019 Facebook post, the St. Louis Police Officers Association encourages a commenter to advocate for the removal of St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner. (Via Facebook. Redactions by ProPublica.)

One afternoon in March 2019, St. Louis police officers entered Gardner’s office with a search warrant and seized a computer server. The raid had been ordered by a special prosecutor investigating a perjury claim tied to an investigator in Gardner’s office. But an appeals court intervened and the police returned the equipment.

Gardner saw the raid as a direct affront to her authority. She sharply criticized the police, accusing them of deploying tactics “to intimidate, harass and embarrass this office.”

In June 2019, the Plain View Project, a national research project that identifies officers across the country making racist, violent or anti-Muslim social media posts, released a database that included posts from St. Louis officers. Using the information, Gardner added 22 more names to the exclusion list, telling the city’s public safety director and police chief in a letter that the posts were “shocking and beneath the dignity of someone who holds such a powerful position.”

Murphey was one of those officers whose social media posts were exposed and was added to the list. After the Stockley acquittal, he posted that the protestors were supporting “a violent thug,” and he referred to Gardner as “kimmy g.”

In this 2017 Facebook post, Murphey refers to a man fatally shot by a St. Louis police officer as a “thug” and to Gardner as “kimmy g.” (Via Facebook)

Over several interviews with reporters, Murphey said he was not a racist. He said he had a right to express his views, particularly about the Stockley case. He had been involved in the initial investigation of Stockley, he said, and said that Stockley “did not commit a crime.”

Miriam Krinsky, a former federal prosecutor and currently the executive director of Fair and Just Prosecution, a think tank focused on prosecution reform, said if an officer’s posts indicate troubling attitudes or biases, prosecutors are right to question “whether they still have integrity and still can be trusted to pursue their job in a fair and unbiased and professional way.”

Foxx, the state’s attorney in Cook County, said in an interview that “credibility matters.” A defense attorney, she added, would be able to use those posts “to demonstrate how this person described the victim of a crime, and his credibility before a jury or before a judge would be called into question.”

But R. Michael Cassidy, a law professor at Boston College and an expert in prosecutorial ethics, said that Gardner’s use of the list seemed fraught. He questioned why a prosecutor would expect any officer on an exclusion list to cooperate with them.

“You might take the position that ‘I’ve justifiably alienated the police officer and there’s a public interest in not having racist police officers,’” he said. “Now you have to deal with the consequences of that.”

Those consequences can be significant, including allowing some defendants to go free even though they may have committed serious crimes because a prosecutor can no longer call an officer to the witness stand. As a result, prosecutors who keep these lists need to be selective about who they include, said Alissa Marque Heydari, a former Manhattan assistant district attorney who is now a research professor at Vanderbilt University.

A more flexible approach, Heydari said, would be for prosecutors to keep another list of officers who have committed misconduct that would not be disqualifying — an officer who was arrested for drunken driving, for instance — but that must still be disclosed to the defense as part of a robust effort to fulfill legal requirements. It’s the difference between using a scalpel and a chainsaw.

“Once you put them on that list, there’s not much flexibility,” said Heydari. “You can’t then go back and say, ‘Well, I need this officer because it’s a homicide.’”

After Murphey was placed on the exclusion list, supervisors struggled to find a role for him since any case he became involved in would be compromised. At times, he did nothing more than stream movies at his desk.

Left Sitting Idle

Murphey describes how he spent his time at the police department after he was placed on a list that questioned his credibility and, as a result, was excluded from case work. This has been condensed for clarity.

(Sacha Pfeiffer/NPR)

At the same time, some former colleagues said, he openly criticized the police department’s management and talked more and more about Gardner. Some detectives who shared his criticism of the circuit attorney came to understand that it could harm their cases if he played a role in them.

In August 2019, two months after Murphey was placed on the exclusion list, he was transferred to the patrol division. He would no longer wear a suit to work. The department issued him a standard blue uniform and assigned him to respond to radio calls. He was a beat cop again.

Then, in January 2020, Gardner filed a federal civil rights lawsuit accusing the city, the local police union and others of a coordinated and racist conspiracy to force her out of office. Murphey’s Facebook posts were among the evidence she cited.

Gardner’s clash with the police only seemed to bolster her reputation among city voters. After a resounding victory in the August 2020 Democratic primary, her reelection was all but assured.

Weeks later, a federal judge dismissed her lawsuit, deeming it “nothing more than a compilation of personal slights.”

Although Murphey was downgraded to patrol, his murder cases continued moving forward in court. Lining up and preparing the testimony of the lead detective is a basic step for prosecutors as they get ready for trial. The lead detective often weaves together the details of a crime and the investigation that followed, providing a narrative for the jury.

But if the lead detective is absent, the prosecution can be undermined. Key information about the crime scene and witness interviews, which the detective usually provides from the witness stand, may be lost. Jurors may suspect something is amiss.

The cases against Terrence Robinson and Naesean Thompson, two men charged with first-degree murder in the 2017 shooting of Raymond Neal, were the first of Murphey’s investigations to head to trial after Gardner put him on the exclusion list.

Murphey’s investigation had found that the incident started when Neal got into an argument with Thompson, who was allegedly selling drugs outside a convenience store. Neal grabbed Thompson’s jacket and the men began to fight. Thompson pulled out a gun. Robinson — who was there with Thompson — then pulled out his own gun and shot Neal, according to police.

Murphey obtained surveillance video from the store, which showed the shooting. He interviewed witnesses, helped identify Thompson and Robinson as suspects, and wrote the police reports that concluded that the two men were responsible for Neal’s death.

The prosecutor handling the case, H. Morley Swingle, recognized how important Murphey was going to be and sought clarification about Murphey’s status from a top Gardner official. The official assured Swingle that Murphey could testify, according to an email from Swingle to Murphey’s attorney, which Murphey provided.

Although Gardner had indefinitely banned certain officers, Murphey wasn’t one of them. He fell into “some lesser category,” Swingle wrote in the email. Still, Murphey refused to testify for Swingle.

In October 2019, Swingle made a deal with Robinson: He dropped the murder case, and Robinson pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and armed criminal action. Robinson was sentenced to seven years in prison with eligibility for parole early in the third year of his incarceration, far less than he would have received if convicted of first-degree murder.

Robinson was released on parole last year. He could not be reached for comment and his attorney did not respond to a request for comment.

In February 2020, Thompson pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and was sentenced to time served in the city jail. He did not respond to a request for comment through his lawyer, Neil Barron. Barron said that while proving the murder charge against his client to a jury would have been challenging, “Murphey refusing to testify absolutely makes this a harder case to prosecute.”

Marcia Miller, Neal’s mother, said that prosecutors told her that a plea bargain was their only option in the case “because of the evidence,” even though she reminded them that they had a videotape of Robinson killing her son. She said that the prosecutors never mentioned that Murphey had refused to testify.

Swingle said Murphey’s refusal to cooperate was not the only factor influencing his decision to accept a plea deal in the Robinson case. He said it would have been difficult to secure a murder conviction for a killing over a drug deal, even though it had been captured on video.

Murphey refused to testify even as prosecutors negotiated what he viewed as lenient deals with defendants he was convinced were guilty of particularly brutal crimes and deserved life sentences.

“Do What I Can Do”

Murphey describes his reasoning behind refusing to testify.

(Jacob Wiegand, special to ProPublica)

One of those defendants, he said, was Collin Aubuchon, who was charged with killing Richard Kladky in March 2019. The men had been staying in the same sober living facility, but after clashing over Aubuchon’s flirtatious text exchange with Kladky’s wife, Kladky moved to another facility.

On Kladky’s first day at his new home, Aubuchon used GPS to locate Kladky and shot him five times, killing him. He then surrendered to a security guard and claimed he had just shot someone who had threatened him.

During the interrogation, Aubuchon confessed, saying Kladky had been sending him threatening texts warning him to keep away from his wife, according to a video of the interrogation, which Murphey provided to the news organizations. While examining Aubuchon’s phone and tablet, Murphey found that Kladky had threatened to hurt Aubuchon if he didn’t stop flirting with his wife, the video showed. Aubuchon, in turn, taunted Kladky by saying he was going to have sex with her.

“I was just being an asshole,” Aubuchon told Murphey.

With the confession in hand, Murphey said that he viewed the case as a “slam dunk” that would have resulted in a life sentence — if he had cooperated. “I don’t know of anything that would mitigate what he did,” Murphey said.

In May 2021, Assistant Circuit Attorney Chris Desilets agreed to a plea deal with Aubuchon that called for a 13-year prison term for voluntary manslaughter; Aubuchon is scheduled for release in early 2026.

In a brief telephone interview from prison, Aubuchon said he didn’t know Murphey had refused to testify against him and acknowledged that he might have benefited from that refusal. He said he took a plea deal rather than risk life in prison.

Desilets said that pushing the Aubuchon case, as well as others, to trial without Murphey’s cooperation would have been like “playing chicken.” He said he did the best he could to get justice for the victims.

“Roger caused a lot of problems,” he said.

Eric Lee Boehmer, Aubuchon’s lawyer, said that while he wasn’t sure how important Murphey’s testimony would have been to the prosecution, his refusal to testify wasn’t the sole factor influencing the plea bargain. He said there was strong evidence his client acted in self defense.

Kladky’s relatives said they were never told about Murphey’s refusal to cooperate in the case.

Mary Kladky, his sister, said it was “heartbreaking” that a police officer would abandon a case. As for Aubuchon, she said, “Just as we’re beginning to heal, he’s going to walk free.”

Murphey’s refusal did not always sink a case. At times, prosecutors still went to trial without him. Three cases proceeded to trial without Murphey’s cooperation — each resulting in first-degree murder convictions. In one of the cases handled by Desilets, he said the prosecution would have been “smoother” with Murphey’s testimony.

In some cases, prosecutors could not even salvage a plea deal. Chigurupati, the prosecutor in the Larry Keck murder, went to trial against Brian Vincent without his lead detective.

It’s hard to pinpoint the impact of Murphey’s absence on the outcome of the case. Missouri law considers records from criminal proceedings confidential after an acquittal, so reporters were unable to get a copy of the trial transcript, which could have illuminated the prosecution’s shortcomings.

In an interview, one juror said gaps in the evidence hurt the case, but that the absence of the lead detective was particularly noticeable. He said he wondered, “Why the heck weren’t there a couple of key players there?” said the juror, who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect his privacy. “Why wasn’t the lead detective there?”

A second juror noted that, although Murphey’s absence wasn’t a pivotal factor, the prosecution seemed to her “scattered.” Vincent’s lawyer adeptly cast doubt on his guilt, leaving her believing in his innocence.

Murphey said his absence likely prevented Chigurupati from presenting a coherent narrative of the crime and investigation. “I’m pretty much sure that me not being there didn’t help the case at all. If I’m sitting on a jury and the main detective’s not there, I’d be wondering why,” he said.

During his holdout, Murphey agreed to testify in one case: the trial of Eric Lawson, who was accused of murdering his 10-month-old son, his ex-girlfriend and her mother in 2012. Murphey agreed to cooperate because Gardner’s office recused itself due to a conflict of interest, leaving the prosecution with then-Attorney General Eric Schmitt, a vocal critic of Gardner.

Murphey also said he felt a special duty to one of the victims, the sister of a police officer. “The bias,” he explained, “is it’s a policeman’s family. And, you know, we’re all supportive for each other.”

In pretrial motions, defense attorneys argued that Murphey’s credibility was a central issue in the case, and said that, during the trial, they should be allowed to ask him about his Facebook posts and his removal from the homicide unit. Since Lawson was Black, they contended that Murphey’s use of the word “thug” and his disrespectful nickname for Gardner “could be perceived by jurors as evidence of racial animus.”

The judge in the trial refused to allow the defense to cross-examine Murphey about his social media activity, saying it “may be unprofessional, but it’s not racist.” Murphey ultimately testified at trial and, in May 2021, a jury convicted Lawson and sentenced him to life in prison without parole.

Murphey never faced disciplinary action for his refusal to cooperate with prosecutors. In fact, the police department continued to send him to investigate cases after he was placed on the exclusion list. He continued to draw the same salary.

Murphey said that, in mid-2020, during staffing shortages in the worst months of the pandemic, his supervisors asked him to work again as a detective, though not in the homicide unit. Murphey said he warned supervisors that putting him back on investigations was ill-advised. “I said, ‘I’m not going to be good to you, because I’m just going to be sitting there,’” he recalled. He even cautioned supervisors about pairing him with a partner as a way to work around his restrictions.

Peter Joy, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis who specializes in legal ethics, said Murphey’s stance was “absurd” and a “dereliction of duty.”

“If you’re hired to do something, you do it,” he said. “You don’t have to love your boss. If you hate your boss, you should leave. But don’t sabotage the work you’re doing.”

But he said the police department was wrong as well to let Murphey continue investigating cases while he was on Gardner’s exclusion list because the department knew his involvement could compromise those cases.

Joyce, Gardner’s predecessor, said it was hard to believe the department allowed Murphey to refuse to testify for so long. “The mindset that ‘I’m not going to testify in murder cases as a protest’ is, I believe, unprofessional,” she said.

Cassidy, the Boston College law professor, said “the police chief needs to order that person to testify, and on threat of discipline.” He said the prosecutor “needs to either convince the police chief to order him to testify or needs to go to court to get a subpoena, and when he refuses to come in, ask the court to issue an arrest warrant for his appearance.”

None of that was done. Desilets said forcing Murphey to court would have done no good. Murphey would have still refused to testify and become a hostile witness. And hostile witnesses, he said, are “mostly ineffective with jurors.”

Just before her resignation, Gardner had scored a major victory, one that epitomized what many say is the ideal role of progressive prosecutors. On Feb. 14 of this year, a local judge exonerated Lamar Johnson, who had spent almost three decades in prison for a crime he did not commit. Gardner had spearheaded the effort to free Johnson after her conviction integrity unit uncovered prosecutorial misconduct and shoddy police work in his case. The state attorney general’s office under Eric Schmitt, before his election to the U.S. Senate in November 2022, had opposed the effort.

But a series of events quickly sapped her political support. Four days after Johnson’s release, a 17-year-old visiting downtown St. Louis for a volleyball tournament was struck by a reckless driver and had to have both legs amputated. The driver had been free on bond even though he had violated the conditions of his release dozens of times.

The responsibility for the lapse was unclear, falling somewhere between Gardner’s office and the judge, but public outrage rained hard on Gardner. Republican lawmakers began to push for legislation that would allow the governor to appoint a special prosecutor to handle violent crime in St. Louis, effectively undermining Gardner’s authority.

Mayor Tishaura Jones, a former Gardner ally, added her voice to the criticism. She said Gardner had lost the “trust of the people.” Attorney General Andrew Bailey, who succeeded Schmitt, sued to remove Gardner from office.

Then Gardner’s office, which had been losing key lawyers, failed to appear on the first day of a high-profile murder trial of a man accused of killing someone on the grounds of the Gateway Arch. Gardner’s office blamed the snafu on a staff attorney not properly requesting time off; a text message from that lawyer, which became public, showed him writing of Gardner: “I half expect her to be in jail before my vacation ends.”

The following week, Gardner’s office failed to show up at a hearing in the case of a man accused of shooting an 11-year-old. The prosecutor’s office had already missed the first day of the scheduled trial, and this second no-show prompted the judge to appoint a special prosecutor to consider contempt charges against Gardner and the prosecutor assigned to the case.

The judge, during a court hearing, called Gardner’s office “a rudderless ship of chaos.”

Gardner dug in. But the following weeks saw her office embroiled in additional controversies, including the resignation of a prosecutor who criticized her leadership. As her office continued to lose staff, it was revealed that Gardner was enrolled in an advanced nursing program, a possible violation of a state law requiring the circuit attorney to give their “entire time and energy” to their official duties.

A few days before her resignation, Gardner spoke from the pulpit of a church to a few dozen supporters and said she “never had a fair shake.” All along, she said, she was surrounded by people “who have colluded and conspired inside this office and out to make sure we’re not successful.”

One unresolved murder case that involves Murphey — though he did not act as lead detective — is the 2015 death of Kristopher Schmeiderer, who died from a knife attack that had occurred in 2014.

Before Schmeiderer’s death, Andrew Lynn Barnett had been convicted of first-degree assault and armed criminal action for attacking Schmeiderer. But the Missouri Supreme Court overturned the conviction in 2019, ruling that the judge in the case had erred by not giving the jury an instruction that self-defense could have justified the attack, even though Barnett had claimed in his defense that he didn’t attack Schmeiderer at all.

In 2021, the circuit attorney’s office charged Barnett with second-degree murder. A trial is expected this fall.

Though Murphey didn’t testify at the assault trial, he did contribute to the evidence collection. He helped find clothes that Barnett allegedly discarded in a sewer after the attack and seized them as evidence.

Now, his testimony has become more valuable. One of the detectives who testified at Barnett’s first trial has since died, and the circuit attorney’s office is trying to line up its witnesses — including Murphey.

Kathy Schmeiderer, the victim’s mother, said she hopes Murphey will testify.

“We want justice for our son, to close the wound,” she said.

But Murphey said he won’t take the stand.

Sacha Pfeiffer of NPR contributed reporting.

This post was originally published on Articles and Investigations – ProPublica.

by Bianca Fortis

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. This story was originally published in Dispatches, a weekly newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country and journalism from our newsroom.

Recently, my co-reporter Laura Beil and I published an investigation into the way in which Columbia University allowed a sexual predator to operate within its walls for more than 20 years. We examined the case of Robert Hadden, a former OB-GYN, and found that Columbia had allowed him to continue practicing, despite multiple patient complaints. The university also undermined the criminal investigation into Hadden.

Hadden’s crimes were first covered in the local New York press in 2013 and made national headlines as the criminal and civil cases against him made their way through the courts. But Columbia’s role was never thoroughly examined. Laura and I wanted to understand what the university knew about his behavior, when, and whether it had missed opportunities to protect patients.

Following publication of our story, the new university president, Minouche Shafik, and the CEO of the Columbia University Irving Medical Center, Katrina Armstrong, issued an apology to the survivors. But so far, the university has not formally notified Hadden’s patients about the reason for his departure or his criminal convictions. Columbia has still not commissioned an independent investigation into what happened under its roof.

As with much investigative reporting, documents proved crucial in helping us understand what went wrong. Police and prosecutors’ reports informed us about patients’ experiences, and they helped us establish timelines. Letters filed in court created a record of communication between Columbia and Hadden, as well as the university and its patients. Some of these documents are public (if you know where to look) and some of them we obtained from sources. Together with dozens of interviews and nearly two years of research, they helped us reconstruct decades of abuse and ignored warnings.

I want to tell you more about the documents themselves and how we got them:

1. The Police Report

One of the patients Hadden assaulted was Laurie Kanyok. In interviews, she told us what had happened to her in late June 2012, including the fact that she reported Hadden to the police immediately after the assault. The police arrested him that afternoon.

We were able to get an unredacted copy of the report made after her complaint by submitting a public records request to the New York City Police Department, along with a notarized affidavit she provided giving permission for it to give the records to us.

This document was important because it confirmed what Kanyok had told us about the timeline of events. But it also revealed that there were administrators within the OB/GYN department who immediately knew of Hadden’s arrest. One showed up to the office once she learned the police were present. We reached out to those administrators to see if they would talk to us. (They either declined or never answered our requests.)

2. The “Dear Bob” Letter

We were aware that Hadden had been allowed to continue practicing following his arrest because several women said he had assaulted them after that date. What we didn’t know is how quickly he had been allowed back.

Hadden was indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2020, but the criminal case against him didn’t go to trial until January of this year. Before and throughout the trial, Laura and I religiously checked Pacer, an online database that provides public access to documents filed in federal court cases. Late one Sunday night, I got a call from Laura who had just spotted something important: an excerpt from what we now call “The ‘Dear Bob’ Letter.”

A document filed by prosecutors referenced the letter, which was addressed to Hadden and sent on July 2, 2012. It said that, despite the allegations against him that were being investigated by the police, if Hadden complied with university and hospital policies — specifically that a chaperone be in the room — he was allowed to “resume clinical activities.”

We realized that he had been allowed to go back to work almost immediately. We discussed whether we might be able to get the full letter via a public records request, but before we submitted one, we got lucky: Prosecutors shared it in another filing. And this time, we learned, it had been signed by Hadden’s supervisor and three high-level administrators had been cc’d. This was evidence that even more people knew of the arrest.

In a statement, Columbia said, “we are profoundly sorry for the pain that Robert Hadden’s patients suffered as a result of his abhorrent misconduct. We also deeply regret, based on what we know today, that Hadden saw patients for several weeks following his voided arrest in 2012.”

3. The “Dear Valued Patient” Letter

Hadden stopped practicing in August 2012. In April 2013, Columbia sent a letter to Hadden’s former patients to inform them that he had left the practice. Conspicuously absent in the letter? The reason. We got a copy early on from the attorney who has filed many of the civil cases against the university.

The letter is significant because this was an opportunity for Columbia to inform patients why Hadden had left. More than 10 years after his arrest, Columbia has yet to notify Hadden’s former patients that he has been convicted of sexual abuse.

Some of those patients have called on legislators to push for the passage of the Adult Survivors Act, a New York law that opened a temporary window for victims of abuse to file civil suits against their abusers, even when a statute of limitations has expired. The window will close on Nov. 23.

According to federal prosecutors, 245 patients have alleged abuse, but we estimate that Hadden likely saw tens of thousands of patients during his career, so the number could be much higher. Because Columbia refuses to notify them, those patients remain unaware that he has been convicted of the abuse charges he faced.

4. The Post-It Note

(Courtesy of Sandy Abramowicz)

In 2014, patient Sandy Abramowicz told another Columbia OB-GYN that Hadden had abused her. The doctor left the room and returned with a Post-it note that had the name and phone number of Patricia Catapano, who at the time was deputy general counsel of the university.

We later learned that Columbia had failed to alert the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office to new patients who had come forward while the DA’s office was investigating. The Post-it note served as tangible proof that the university was referring patients to its own general counsel’s office and not the DA during that time.

We were surprised — and relieved — to know that Abramowicz had kept the note for all these years. It was evidence of the way Columbia was responding to patients who were coming forward.

Abramowicz never called the number. During an interview, she told us: “The fact that she said, ‘This is where they’re referring former patients of Dr. Hadden’ told me I’m not the only one. And Columbia knows that I’m not the only one. And then the thing that hits me is — if she represents Columbia and I’m Sandy, whose interests is she representing here?”

We reached out to Catapano, but she said she had no interest in responding to the inquiry.

5. The DA Report

We knew that the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office had opened a criminal investigation into Columbia in 2020. We repeatedly asked the DA’s office about the status of the investigation, but we got no answers, only that the investigation was ongoing.

Eventually, we got hold of documents that were directly related to the criminal investigation. It was like finding the Holy Grail.

The documents proved invaluable: They listed patient complaints that we didn’t know about, said that Columbia had failed to share those complaints during the DA’s investigation into Hadden, despite subpoenas, and said that Columbia had failed to place record-retention holds. Administrators had also failed to establish guidelines for documenting additional patient complaints.

These documents were our clearest record that Columbia had undermined prosecutors in the Hadden case. In an interview, Cy Vance, who was the district attorney at the time, told us that if Columbia had fully cooperated with the investigation, it could have made a difference in his office’s decision to accept a plea deal for Hadden in 2016. In a statement, Columbia told us that it continues to cooperate fully with the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and the Manhattan district attorney.

Do you have information about Columbia that we should know? Visit propublica.org/tips to get in touch securely.

by Caleb Bedillion, Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal and The Marshall Project. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

In 2017, the Mississippi Supreme Court’s then-Chief Justice William Waller Jr. helped mandate that judges throughout the state explain in writing how they deliver on their duty to provide poor criminal defendants with a lawyer.

He hoped the rule would spur improvements in Mississippi’s patched-together public defense system, regarded by many legal experts as among the worst in the country.

Now, six years after the rule went into effect, only one of the 23 circuit court districts in the state has responded. The 22nd Circuit Court in southwest Mississippi became the first to comply this summer, according to the Supreme Court’s docket.

The requirement was part of a push to move “toward a statewide system,” said Waller, who retired a couple of years after it went into effect. He said he’s partly responsible for not enforcing it. “We should have started going court by court and asking them to show us their plans.”

Public defense systems across the country are overburdened and underfunded, but Mississippi stands out. Nationally, it ranks last in how much money it spends per capita on public defense, according to the Sixth Amendment Center, a nonprofit that advocates for a robust defense for the indigent — those who can’t afford their own lawyer. Mississippi is one of only eight states that rely on local officials to fund and deliver almost all public defense for people facing trial, according to the center.

Mississippi has long failed to monitor or evaluate local courts to see whether they’re delivering that defense, which is guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Without such oversight, no one knows whether all the state’s courts, especially smaller ones in the vast rural stretches of the state, are doing the job that’s required of them.

The Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, ProPublica and The Marshall Project have identified courts that aren’t following the state Supreme Court’s rules on public defense, including judges who fail to appoint lawyers as early as required, or who deny counsel to defendants for inappropriate reasons. Even once appointed, some lawyers say they do little for defendants and that local judges know this.

Such problems show why it’s important for courts to explain how they provide public defense, said André de Gruy, who runs Mississippi’s Office of State Public Defender and has written a model plan for local courts that they could adapt to meet their needs. Without these plans, he said, “we can’t say whether we are in compliance with the Constitution.”

André de Gruy, head of Mississippi’s Office of State Public Defender, says that unless judges file indigent defense plans with the state, it’s hard to know whether courts are meeting constitutional standards. (Imani Khayyam for ProPublica) “Not Much Lawyering Going On”

In the last three decades, there have been repeated efforts to overhaul Mississippi’s public defense system, including four state committees or commissions, two major reports by outside legal experts and numerous pieces of legislation. They’ve been largely unsuccessful.

There’s widespread agreement about the systemic problems: Defendants can sit in jail for months at a time without a lawyer. The way that many lawyers are paid gives them an incentive to cut corners. There are few full-time public defenders in the state.

“There is not much lawyering going on. I get them through the system and get them out of here,” an unidentified, part-time public defender bluntly told consultants for the Mississippi Bar Association as part of a state government effort to reform the public defense system in the 1990s.

Shortcomings in Mississippi’s Public Defense Persist Over 20 Years

• 1995: “There is no statewide oversight of indigent defense in Mississippi, which leads to a hodge podge, county-by-county approach to providing defense services,” wrote the Spangenberg Group, a consulting firm hired by several legal groups to evaluate the state’s public defense system.

• 2003: The right to counsel is “functionally meaningless in Mississippi, a state which provides almost no regulation, oversight, or funding for indigent defense,” said the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

• 2018: “The state of Mississippi has no method to ensure that its local governments are fulfilling the state’s constitutional obligation to provide effective assistance of counsel to the indigent accused in felony cases in its trial courts,” according to the Sixth Amendment Center.

In a 2003 study, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund reported that a lawyer on the Gulf Coast said that he never tried to locate or interview witnesses because by the time he’s been appointed, nine months to a year have typically passed since the crime.

“By then,” researchers wrote, recounting what the lawyer told them, “crime scenes have changed, witnesses have moved, and memories have faded.”

That study highlighted the case of a man arrested in the northeast Mississippi city of Tupelo for possession of crack cocaine. The court appointed three different lawyers in succession. The first two never spoke with the defendant and did not respond to his phone calls or letters. On the day before the trial, the third lawyer told the court that he had not prepared for his client’s case. The evidence against the man was so weak that he was acquitted by a jury after less than 15 minutes of deliberation. He’d spent eight months in jail.

From 2000 to 2011, several task forces successfully pressed for a series of reforms, including the creation of a state office to handle death penalty defense and indigent criminal appeals. That’s the office de Gruy now runs.

But reforms to public defense in local courtrooms remained out of reach. “I remember being very frustrated,” said Waller, who was part of those efforts after joining the state Supreme Court in 1998.

The sheer number of courts across the state, and the lack of coordination among them, is a factor in why it’s so hard to reform the system.

“In other states, any discussion of policy change takes place at one or two systems,” said David Carroll, director of the Sixth Amendment Center. “There are nearly 500 indigent defense systems in Mississippi.”

New Rules for Public Defense

In 2009, Waller became chief justice and went on to play a key role in an ambitious effort to create rules of criminal procedure that would be shared by all courts in the state.

Eight years later, those statewide rules went into effect. For the first time, judges were required to write down exactly how they delivered on their obligation to provide lawyers for defendants who couldn’t afford one. The courts were then required to send those plans to the Mississippi Supreme Court for approval.

“The intent of the rule was, as much as possible, to have consistency across the state,” Waller said. “A lawyer would be able to look at the rules and know what the practice is, and it would be fairly consistent, and he wouldn’t be memorizing the Magna Carta every time he went into a new court.”

Former Mississippi Supreme Court Chief Justice William Waller Jr. said he’s partly responsible for not ensuring that courts around the state followed through on a requirement to develop public defense plans. (Bruce Newman for Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal)

Waller knew it was a limited effort. But in the absence of legislation to create a statewide system for public defense or a movement by counties to hire full-time lawyers, the Supreme Court could at least encourage uniformity among courts and reject inadequate plans.

In combination with other new rules, including measures to make bonds less onerous and give defendants more opportunities to argue their case before a judge, he hoped counties would move to create full-time public defender offices.

That didn’t happen. To date, just seven counties have full-time public defender offices, and only the 22nd Circuit Court has filed the required paperwork laying out its indigent defense system. The Mississippi Supreme Court approved the plan last month.

The plan is not lengthy, but it shows that the 22nd Circuit’s lone judge knows what’s required by the Sixth Amendment and that she has developed a process for how she fulfills that duty. It says when appointed counsel should be provided to poor defendants, it directs judges to monitor attorneys’ performance, and it outlines a procedure to ensure that defendants don’t lose representation as their case moves from one court to another.

The Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, The Marshall Project and ProPublica asked the court administrators in all 23 circuit court districts, as well as the county-level clerks in all 82 counties, if they have a written plan for indigent defense. Many would not comment, but clerks in nearly 20 counties said they don’t.

Waller called on the current justices to remedy the failure to enforce the public defense rule. Chief Justice Michael Randolph and Justice Jim Kitchens, who heads the court’s criminal rules committee, declined to comment.

“I’m Not Too Quick to Pull the Trigger on a Public Defender”

At least a few judges aren’t only ignoring the requirement to write down how they provide lawyers for poor criminal defendants. They’re not following state rules on providing those lawyers in the first place.

The Daily Journal, ProPublica and The Marshall Project identified two courts that aren’t properly appointing lawyers for indigent defendants, according to Waller, legal experts and the rules of criminal procedure.

A lawyer who acts as a part-time judge in the small northeast Mississippi city of Guntown told a reporter that he usually handles defendants’ first appearances over the phone and doesn’t ask if they can afford a lawyer. This contravenes Mississippi’s criminal rules, which require that during a defendant’s initial court appearance, a judge should find out if that defendant can afford a lawyer and appoint one if not.

“They hear their charges and get a bond if they deserve one,”said Harry Sumner, the part-time judge. “I do not appoint a public defender at the initial [appearance] at that time.”

Told that this practice doesn’t meet the state standard for an initial appearance, Sumner said he believes that defendants waive those requirements when they agree to appear before a judge by phone. If someone wants a lawyer, he said, one could be appointed at a preliminary hearing, although he acknowledged that those hearings are rarely requested.

The state’s rules, however, are clear that while defendants held in jail may agree to appear before a judge by audiovisual means, the requirements of an initial appearance still apply.

In nearby Yalobusha County, a judge said he doesn’t move quickly to appoint a lawyer if a defendant posts bond and is released from jail.

“If they’re arrested on a felony and they’ve made bond, I’m not too quick to pull the trigger on a public defender, particularly if they’ve made a high bond,” said Yalobusha Justice Court Judge Trent Howell.

The rules, however, instruct judges not to base their decision about whether to appoint a lawyer on the ability of defendants or their friends or family to pay money to get them out of jail. Pressed on why he doesn’t abide by that instruction, Howell defended his approach. “It’s just human nature” to consider whether someone has been able to raise money for a bond, he said.

Even as courts have ignored the requirement to file their public defense plans, the Mississippi Supreme Court recently issued another rule to improve public defense. It’s supposed to eliminate what critics call the “dead zone” — the practice of withdrawing legal counsel from poor defendants after their initial appearance, leaving them without a lawyer as they wait to be indicted.

The Daily Journal, The Marshall Project and ProPublica found that many courts are not prepared to implement that rule either. That suggests that poor defendants will remain deprived of meaningful legal assistance as they wait months or years, often in jail, for prosecutors to decide whether to pursue felony charges.

De Gruy said the recent mandate to eliminate the dead zone offers courts an opportunity to grapple with much larger problems with public defense in Mississippi. “I was hoping,” he said, “this would be a reminder to the courts that they’ve got unfinished business.”

This post was originally published on Articles and Investigations – ProPublica.

by Jennifer Smith Richards and Jodi S. Cohen

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Prosecutors in Illinois have dropped at least 15 court cases that hinged on the word of a former Chicago police officer who’s now charged with perjury and forgery after he got dozens of traffic tickets dismissed by testifying each time that his girlfriend had stolen his car.

Jeffrey Kriv is accused of lying under oath 44 times to get out of speeding, parking and red light camera tickets involving his personal vehicles.

In his 26 years as a Chicago officer, Kriv was known for being one of the city’s most prolific drunken-driving enforcers, which means many more pending cases in which he was an arresting officer could be in peril. The most recent DUI arrests he made involve allegations of dangerous driving.

On just one morning this month, an assistant state’s attorney made motions declining to prosecute seven cases where Kriv was the arresting officer, some of which dated to 2021. The assistant state’s attorney offered no reason, but in court, defense attorneys mentioned Kriv’s alleged credibility issues.

“This is the officer who has been charged with a felony,” one defense lawyer told Judge Chloe Pedersen after his client’s DUI case was called.

“This is a Kriv matter,” another defense attorney said as his client’s case was dismissed.

Kriv is charged with perjury and forgery. (Via Chicago Police Chaplains Ministry)

While Kriv retired in January just before he was charged criminally, he had faced nearly 100 misconduct complaints from citizens and fellow officers in his tenure on the force. ProPublica and the Chicago Tribune previously detailed Kriv’s long history of alleged misconduct as an officer and his current legal trouble. Prosecutors charged him in January with four counts of perjury and five counts of forgery, all felonies, in connection with four of the traffic tickets he accrued. He has pleaded not guilty.

The Chicago Police Department knew in early 2022 that the Office of Inspector General was investigating Kriv for lying to get out of tickets. Then, on Oct. 28, the state’s attorney’s office added Kriv to its list of officers whose credibility issues meant the office would not call them to testify in criminal cases, sometimes called the do-not-call list.

But the Police Department would not answer ProPublica when asked why it kept Kriv on the streets until January, when it stripped him of police powers.

In those few months, Kriv made two dozen arrests and issued seven traffic citations, according to Police Department records obtained by ProPublica. He was the primary arresting officer in 18 of those cases; charges already have been dropped in seven of them. A spokesperson for the Police Department declined to comment.

The state’s attorney’s office said there are 10 pending felony cases in which Kriv was the arresting officer. Two cases filed after he was put on the do-not-call list are moving forward; the other eight cases remain under review, a spokesperson said.

There may be other cases — most of them likely misdemeanor DUIs — involving Kriv that are still pending. The state’s attorney’s office said it does not track misdemeanors, and the Cook County clerk’s office and chief judge’s office also said they did not have that information. Most DUI cases are misdemeanors, however, and Kriv regularly made about 100 arrests a year on DUI charges, according to annual counts published by an anti-drunken-driving group. Kriv estimated last year that hundreds of his cases might be awaiting an outcome.

Kriv’s attorney, Tim Grace, told reporters that he and his client would not comment for this story, though Kriv has twice emailed reporters to defend himself against misconduct complaints and call ProPublica’s reporting biased, including in an email last week.

In a 2,000-word email sent in June, he said that he had nearly 150 honorable mentions and two life-saving awards and was consistently one of the city’s top arresting officers for DUI charges. He also criticized other officers, a judge and the Police Department as a whole.

“I’ve been on the job for 27 years and I was a worker. Any officer that works will get complaints. Some false, some true,” Kriv wrote. “I could do what many, many officers do and that would be nothing.”

Kriv also sent a strongly worded email to a prosecutor last November, while he was still working as a police officer, after he learned he would not be allowed to testify about arrests he made. In the email, he defended his honesty and threatened to “not go out of my way to arrest people for DUI” going forward.

“My reputation as a Chicago Police Officer is immaculate and all my testimony on any case that I have been involved in is spot on,” he wrote to Assistant State’s Attorney Emily Leuin, after calling her a coward. ProPublica obtained the email through a public records request.

“Go ahead and dismiss my cases where someone was seriously hurt because the offender was drunk. This is something you have to live with but by all accounts, you obviously have no qualms about doing so. I’m sure [anti-drunk-driving groups] will like to know what is going on with the dozens, if not hundreds of cases of mine that are currently pending an outcome,” he wrote.

The beginning of an email that Kriv sent to Assistant State’s Attorney Emily Leuin. (Obtained by ProPublica. Redacted by ProPublica)

Leuin did not respond to a request for comment.

Despite his threats, Kriv did make DUI arrests for the rest of his tenure as an officer. He arrested a Chicago man in December 2022 after he said he watched the driver go the wrong way on a one-way street and then go through a stop sign. “Very strong odor of alcoholic beverage on breath, slurred/thick-tongued speech, glassy eyes, confused,” Kriv wrote in the charging documents.

That case was dismissed in April.

Other cases, meanwhile, are moving forward despite Kriv’s indictment. In traffic court this month, defense attorney Steve Roach asked the prosecutor whether Kriv, who made the arrest, would be subpoenaed in his client’s DUI case. The prosecutor said no, leaving Roach to wonder how the state could continue with its case.

“Because you’ve got a primary arresting officer who has an indictment against him which involves questions of one’s honesty, I wouldn’t be playing games with these cases,” Roach said in an interview.

The Cook County public defender’s office is representing several people in Kriv’s arrest cases. A spokesperson said that in cases the state continues to pursue, the office will demand trials and the state will have to decide whether to make its cases without Kriv.

The collapse of Kriv’s cases shares some similarities with the problematic DUI arrests made by Chicago police officer John Haleas nearly 20 years ago. Even after the police administration confirmed that Haleas had falsified reports in DUI arrests, he remained on duty. (In fact, he is still a Chicago police officer, though he was later convicted of attempted obstruction of justice and the department tried to fire him.)

There’s also a key difference between Haleas and Kriv: how the state’s attorney has reacted to pending court cases. The state’s attorney dismissed more than 150 of Haleas’ pending cases when he was found to have lied.

The state’s attorney’s office in July made public its list of officers in Cook County who it has barred from testifying in criminal cases — more than 300 officers in all, the vast majority of them from the Chicago Police Department. About 60 officers were added this year, and the office adopted a new policy last month that spells out prosecutors’ duty to disclose its problematic witnesses to defendants.

“The culture that allowed disreputable law enforcement officers to testify in court propelled Cook County’s reputation as the wrongful conviction capital of the country,” State’s Attorney Kim Foxx said in a press release about the disclosure list.

Chicago has a long history of scandalous cops whose cases fell apart when their own corruption or misdeeds were revealed. Over the years, officials have grappled with how to handle the fallout in court, as well as what to disclose to defendants and the public about these cases.

A spokesperson for the state’s attorney’s office said the list of officers with credibility issues is public and that disclosures to defendants would be made when evidence is typically shared.

ProPublica contacted more than a dozen defense attorneys currently representing clients arrested by Kriv, and only one said he had been notified by a prosecutor that Kriv was barred from testifying. Other lawyers were unaware that Kriv would not be called as a witness. One said the state’s attorney’s office had left his case “in limbo” and he is skeptical that the prosecutor can mount a case without Kriv.

“Every time I show up, the state’s attorney doesn’t know what’s going on,” said defense attorney Marco Rodriguez, who is representing a client in a DUI case.

Among the Kriv cases that have been dismissed is one from October 2022 involving a woman who was idling in a crosswalk but asleep, according to Kriv’s police report. He noted in the report that there was vomit on the car seat and on the woman’s pants. Her blood alcohol content was 0.19%, more than twice the legal limit to drive, according to the report, obtained through a public records request.

Prosecutors dropped the case against her in March.

Even in his last weeks as a police officer, Kriv arrested at least five people over four days on DUI charges, including a 41-year-old driver he said he’d found on Dec. 10 passed out behind the wheel of his running Honda Accord in the middle of a dead-end street. The man “seemed confused” and the “whole front end” of his car was damaged and the tires shredded.

Kriv noted that the driver had an explanation for the car’s damage.

He wrote that the man “stated his car was like that from his girlfriend as it was her fault previously.”

That case also has been dismissed.

This post was originally published on Articles and Investigations – ProPublica.

by Jodi S. Cohen, ProPublica, and Jennifer Smith Richards, Chicago Tribune

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week. This story was co-published with the Chicago Tribune.

Each time he stood before a Chicago traffic court judge and told his story, the judge asked his name.

“Jeffrey Kriv,” he’d say. That was true.

Then he’d raise his right hand and get sworn in. What came next was also consistent.

“Well, that morning, I broke up with my girlfriend and she stole my car,” Kriv, who had been ticketed for running a red light, testified in January 2021.

“Yeah, I broke up with my girlfriend earlier that morning, had a knock-down, drag-out fight, verbally, of course. She took my car without my knowledge,” he told a different judge when fighting a speeding ticket in August 2021.

“I broke up with my girlfriend that day and she took my car without my knowledge. … I didn’t get my car back for like three days. But it was her driving the car,” he said while contesting a speeding ticket, once again under oath, in May 2022.

The excuse worked, just as it had many times before.

At the ticket hearings, Kriv often provided what he said were legitimate police incident reports as evidence of the car thefts; they had officer names and badge numbers, and he explained that he got the reports at police headquarters.

But Kriv did not let on that he, himself, was a Chicago cop.

As bold as he was when fighting his tickets, he was equally brazen in his professional life. He attracted a remarkable number of complaints from citizens he encountered — and even from other officers. And just as he did in his personal life, he defended himself vigorously against the allegations.

Kriv doesn’t register as one of Chicago’s most notorious corrupt cops — those who tortured suspects for confessions or shook down drug dealers. But his on-duty conduct regularly flouted rules and disrupted lives. Once, he punched a handcuffed man in the back of his patrol car, records show.

But given Chicago’s long-standing and dramatic shortcomings in police discipline, none of his on-duty misconduct cost him his badge and gun.

It took a tip to an outside agency and questions about Kriv’s testimony as a private citizen in traffic court to unravel his career.

A spokesperson for the Chicago Police Department would not comment for this story or answer any questions.

A lawyer for Kriv, informed of the reporting by ProPublica and the Chicago Tribune, said “many of the facts you compose are incomplete or not true,” though he did not say what was inaccurate. The lawyer, Tim Grace, said that Kriv had received nearly 150 commendations and recognitions and had earned two awards for saving lives.

“Officer Kriv has served his city with honor for over 25-plus years,” Grace said.

Listen to Former Chicago Police Officer Jeffrey Kriv Try to Avoid Traffic Fines by Repeatedly Claiming His Ex-Girlfriend Stole His Car

Kriv used the alibi to get out of paying for 44 traffic tickets since 2013, Cook County prosecutors allege.

(Lucas Waldron, ProPublica) His Troubles Began Almost Immediately

In 1996, Kriv was sworn in as a Chicago police officer. The first complaint about him came about eight months later, while Kriv was still a probationary hire. A man said Kriv broke his car window with a flashlight while directing traffic; Kriv was not disciplined in that incident.

Supervisors reprimanded him a few months later, however, after Kriv failed to notice there was a marijuana cigarette on the back seat of his squad car.

But there was more to come, records show: being rude, offensive or physically abusive; flipping someone off; and writing in a police report that one woman was “white trash” and a “raving lunatic.”

He was held in contempt of court and arrested after he flung papers into the air and called the judge’s ruling “a joke.” He apologized in court the next day, and the contempt charge was vacated. An assistant deputy superintendent recommended against removing his police powers after the incident, records show. In another case, a different judge ordered him removed from a courtroom after he wouldn’t stop talking.

Most officers face only a handful of complaints over the course of their careers. But at least 92 misconduct complaints were filed against Kriv, according to city and police disciplinary records compiled and analyzed by the Chicago Tribune and ProPublica. Even more exceptional: About 28% of complaints against Kriv were found to have merit, compared with about 4% of complaints against all Chicago police officers going back decades.

In 2005, after a city Streets and Sanitation Department employee towed his illegally parked personal car, Kriv sent a letter via the city’s interoffice mail system threatening to ticket the cars of Streets and Sanitation workers in retaliation. He was suspended for 20 days. In 2006, he left the scene of a vehicle fire he had responded to, removed the numbers that identified his squad car and went into a strip club to visit a waitress, according to internal police investigation records. He was issued a 90-day suspension that was later knocked down to 45 days.

In 2009, Kriv was accused of punching a woman whom he’d arrested after seeing her arguing with her husband on the street. The woman was found not guilty at trial on charges of domestic battery and resisting arrest.

“I had to have surgery. I had to have plastic implanted under my eye because of this,” said Jessie Wangeman, who lives in Indianapolis. “My face is not symmetrical anymore. He really messed me up on the outside. And inside it was a really traumatic experience.”

Wangeman sued Kriv and the city of Chicago over the encounter; the city paid her $100,000 to settle in 2011. Wangeman declined to talk with investigators looking into Kriv’s alleged misconduct, and Kriv wasn’t disciplined.

Meanwhile, Kriv’s personal vehicles — a BMW sedan and a Harley-Davidson motorcycle — were ticketed 22 times between 2008 and 2013. He paid some of those tickets, records show.

At a traffic court hearing in December 2013, Kriv used the girlfriend alibi for the first time, authorities now allege.

“May I ask you why you’re contesting this ticket, Mr. Kriv?” the judge asked.

“Yes, my ex-girlfriend, well, took my car two days prior after I broke up with her. I filed a police report that it was stolen and they recovered it approximately a week after the fact,” he testified. “Here’s the police report that was done. I did have her arrested approximately three weeks ago and I got a court date coming up in January.”

The judge reviewed the report and dismissed the ticket.

False Statements and False Arrests

Kriv was investigated at least 26 times over allegations of dishonesty as a police officer. That included accusations of falsifying records, writing unwarranted tickets, performing improper searches, making false arrests.

One man accused Kriv of writing him false parking citations. A woman complained that Kriv issued her eight baseless citations in two weeks while her vehicle was parked in an assigned space on private property. And another man made two other complaints accusing Kriv of repeatedly writing tickets to him at his business as a way to harass him. Department investigators concluded that Kriv wrote unwarranted tickets to that man; investigations into the other allegations could not be pursued because the accusers did not sign formal complaints.

As a cop, Kriv’s specialty was DUI enforcement. He made more DUI arrests in Chicago than any other officer in 2021, and he topped the list statewide the same year, according to one anti-drunken-driving group.

But one woman sued him over her 2015 drunken driving arrest after she was acquitted at trial. The lawsuit alleged that Kriv falsely arrested her and made false statements against her. Kriv denied the allegations.

“He would lie under oath for a piece of bubble gum,” the woman, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from Kriv, told a reporter.

The woman later dropped the lawsuit because she said Kriv was disparaging and intimidating her.

Even outside of his job and his chutzpah in traffic court, Kriv’s history is notable.

While Kriv was growing up in Highland Park, his father, an attorney, funded a messy fraud scheme, survived an assassination attempt meant to silence him about it, and was sent to federal prison for a second fraud racket that involved sending falsified accident claims through the mail, according to court records at the National Archives. Kriv’s father testified at trial in the first fraud case and did not face charges for his role in that scheme.

Kriv then attended the University of Iowa for six years. A university spokesperson said he never graduated — though he claimed that he had in an application for another city job in 2013. Kriv’s attorney did not respond to a question about his educational history.

When Kriv was in his late 20s, the unemployment insurance division of the Illinois attorney general’s office sued him to recoup about $3,800 in benefits for which the government claimed he wasn’t eligible, records show. Details about what led to the attorney general’s claim are missing from court files, and there’s no public record of how it was resolved.

Neither the Police Department nor the city’s human resources division could locate Kriv’s initial application to the Police Department, so it’s unclear how much hiring officials knew about his background.

It’s also unclear whether the department knew how often Kriv was being ticketed for traffic violations — nine times in 2014 alone, records show. He got all of those tickets dismissed, including a speeding ticket issued in the fall for going 21 miles an hour over the speed limit near a school.

“My ex-girlfriend stole my car,” Kriv told the judge. “There is this police report over here that was done and, a matter of fact, I had another ticket I contested last week … another speed camera.

“They only charged her with trespassing because it was my girlfriend. She stole my key and racked up all these tickets here.”

The judge reviewed the report and dismissed the ticket.

When Other Cops Complained

Kriv’s conduct as a cop stands out in yet another way: Even other cops complained about him.

Internal affairs records show that a police lieutenant filed a complaint against Kriv in 2016 accusing Kriv of failing to arrest an off-duty sergeant who was involved in a crash, even though the sergeant was unsteady, was slurring his speech and had urinated in his pants — “wasted,” according to a police report. Kriv was suspended for 15 days for violating five department rules in that incident.

His police partner once reported that he made her get out of their squad car after an argument, forcing her to walk more than a half-mile back to their station. Investigators concluded there wasn’t enough evidence in that case to discipline Kriv.

In 2014, supervisors — including the head of the DUI task force that Kriv was on — filed a complaint against Kriv alleging that he disobeyed commands from a higher-ranking officer and impounded a car without justification after a traffic crash.

Over the other officers’ objections, Kriv declared that the driver of the car involved in the crash was drunk, handcuffed him, and put him in the back of his squad car, according to accounts from the driver, Jaime Garcia, and other officers. He also ordered Garcia’s Nissan Altima towed and impounded.

“He kept telling me, ‘I know you’re drunk, I know you’re drunk.’ I didn’t know what to do, I was in shock, I was scared,” Garcia said in an interview.

The officers on the scene filed the complaint against Kriv.

“For some reason, he was trying to put a false arrest on this guy. I apologized to him, said, ‘Sorry you had to go through this.’ I told him about filing a complaint,” said retired Lt. David Blanco, the supervisor that night. After its investigation, the department acknowledged Kriv was wrong to have impounded Garcia’s car, knowing there would be no DUI charges against him.

Kriv ultimately wasn’t disciplined for his behavior that night, once again benefiting from the Police Department’s feeble accountability system, which has long been marked by delays, red tape and lax punishment.

Though he regularly escaped punishment altogether for alleged misconduct on the job, in some cases, he was reprimanded or received suspensions of between one and 45 days. The department suspended Kriv at least 20 times for 170 days total, according to a Tribune-ProPublica analysis of his disciplinary records.

One citizen told the investigating agency that Kriv was unconcerned when he threatened to file a complaint. Kriv, the man said, told him that complaints “are not going to go anywhere,” no matter how many an officer was facing. The man’s complaint was closed after he declined to participate in the investigation.

Kriv appealed disciplinary decisions at least eight times over his career, including through the department’s grievance system. A 2017 investigation by the Chicago Tribune and ProPublica found that 85% of disciplinary cases handled through the department’s grievance process since 2010 had led to officers receiving shorter suspensions or, in many cases, having their punishments overturned entirely.

“It doesn’t hurt to grieve it. Why wouldn’t I?” Kriv told the Chicago Tribune and ProPublica for that story.

Kriv got a five-day suspension reduced to a reprimand, another five-day suspension reduced to two days, and a 90-day suspension — for going to the strip club while on duty — cut in half.

“It sounds to me like several of these cases — each of them standing on its own, independently — should have triggered a discharge case,” said Mark Iris, who until 2004 was the executive director of the Chicago Police Board, the civilian body that decides disciplinary cases involving Chicago officers. He also studied the use of mathematical analysis to prevent police misconduct and taught at Northwestern University.

“The unit commanders had to have known this guy was a headache,” Iris said in an interview.

Records show the department never tried to fire Kriv.

Blanco, like many of the people Kriv encountered, said he doesn’t get how Kriv remained on the force.

“That’s what I couldn’t understand — with all the suspensions, why they didn’t get rid of this guy. There’s obviously a red light flashing over this guy’s head,” Blanco told ProPublica and the Tribune.

During Kriv’s career, the Chicago Police Department had eight superintendents, three iterations of an independent police investigation body and at least two versions of an internal affairs division. The Police Department has stalled on at least two attempts to implement an early-warning system to spot problem behavior.

In its 2019 consent decree with the Justice Department, the Police Department agreed to develop a system to identify officers at risk of misconduct, alert their supervisors and provide training. That system still has not been implemented, according to the latest consent decree update.

In addition, for most of Kriv’s career, the police union’s contract with the department allowed investigators to consider only the most recent five years of an officer’s disciplinary history. (The current union contract eliminates that requirement). That meant that even officers with extensive histories of misconduct could have looked problem-free when department leaders weighed discipline options.

As a result, when investigators in 2013 looked into a complaint against Kriv, his recent disciplinary history was clean, so they proceeded as if he’d never been disciplined. The truth was that, by then, he had been suspended or reprimanded for at least 15 different incidents, but the most recent complaints were more than five years old or didn’t appear on his record yet because they were still under investigation.

As Kriv successfully appealed Police Department discipline, he also was successfully beating more and more traffic tickets.

From 2015 through mid-2022, Kriv got 51 tickets but paid only two.

(Obtained by ProPublica and the Chicago Tribune)

Other tickets — issued for reasons including exceeding the speed limit by at least 11 miles an hour, running red lights, blocking an area and parking where he shouldn’t — were dismissed.

He got some tickets dismissed by making technical arguments — claiming a ticket wasn’t filled out properly, for example — but most were dismissed after he blamed his girlfriend, records show.

Kriv contested tickets using that defense before at least 23 different judges. Sometimes he went before the same judge with the same story, but those appearances were typically years apart.

At a hearing in 2018, he tried to get out of a speeding ticket issued in a school zone.

“My girlfriend and I got in an argument that morning,” he told the judge. “We broke up. She took my fob and she took my car and I do have a police report.”

“I didn’t get it back until later that night around 9 o’clock. And I did have her arrested about a week later. We went to her workplace, but here’s a copy of the police report.”

The judge reviewed the report and dismissed the ticket.

“The System’s Like a Joke”

Citywide, it’s rare for people to succeed in getting their tickets dismissed. In a typical year, the city issues about 1 million automated-camera tickets for speeding and red-light violations. People contest about 4% of those tickets, and about 1 in 10 win, according to an analysis of city ticket data.

There’s no indication the Police Department knew how often Kriv was contesting his tickets in court. There’s also no indication in records that the girlfriend he used as his alibi was real.

Last year, the city’s Office of Inspector General received a tip to look at Kriv — not for his work in uniform, but for a potentially fraudulent defense of a parking ticket he had received, records show.

The OIG followed that tip and concluded that Kriv had provided false testimony and fraudulent documentation related to parking and traffic violations since 2009, according to prosecutors. Since 2013, he had contested 44 tickets by saying his girlfriend had stolen his car. All 44 had been dismissed.

The office notified the Police Department that it was investigating Kriv.

The Cook County state’s attorney’s office in October barred Kriv from testifying in court as a witness, placing him on a list of police officers whose truthfulness is in question. Nonetheless, the police department kept him on the streets and he continued to write tickets and make DUI arrests.

The final time Kriv took an oath to tell the truth and then blamed his girlfriend for a speeding ticket was in September of 2022, records show. Once again, the story worked.

“Well, I had her arrested,” Kriv said when the judge asked what happened to the woman. “They charged her with a misdemeanor trespassing to a vehicle. That pretty much went nowhere.

“She got, like, three months’ supervision or something like that. It’s kind of a, I don’t want to say the system’s like a joke, but it didn’t really do anything.”

As Kriv, who is 56, was defending himself in traffic court last year, he also was eyeing retirement, going back and forth with the Policemen’s Annuity and Benefit Fund of Chicago to sort out his pension benefits. He was told he’d gain another year of seniority — and a larger pension — if he stayed on the force until Jan. 15.

On Jan. 12, the department collected his badge and stripped him of police powers.

On Jan. 14, Kriv got another speeding ticket.

On Jan. 17, Kriv retired.

The next day, Kriv’s car was ticketed again for speeding.

On Jan. 31, Cook County prosecutors charged Kriv with four counts of perjury and five counts of forgery, all of them felonies, for allegedly lying to judges under oath and providing fictitious police reports in four traffic ticket cases.

The girlfriend story, prosecutors allege, was fake. Prosecutors calculated that, by getting out of 44 tickets, Kriv saved himself $3,665.

Excerpt of a police report that Kriv provided to a judge, which says that Kriv’s girlfriend took his car. (Obtained by ProPublica and the Chicago Tribune)

The state’s attorney’s office declined to comment about its case against Kriv.

Kriv emailed the pension board the day after he was charged and released on $10,000 bond, writing: “When do I start getting my pension checks and does it come bi-weekly or once a month?” His pension started at about $6,000 a month, according to the board.

Deborah Witzburg, the inspector general whose office helped build the case against Kriv, declined to comment for this story. In a news release about the charges, she said: “The truthfulness and credibility of police officers is foundational to the fair administration of justice, and to CPD’s effectiveness as a law enforcement agency.”

Grace, Kriv’s attorney, noted that the criminal charges are not related to his duties as a police officer. “He understands the importance of accountability by all citizens when it comes to paying his outstanding tickets and looks forward to resolving this matter by making good on any oversights he may have,” Grace said.

In late March, a Cook County judge called out, “Jeffrey Kriv,” and the former officer stepped forward to be arraigned. He pleaded not guilty. Each offense is punishable by up to five years in prison.

When reached by phone, Kriv said he didn’t want to talk because “nobody gets a fair shake with the media” and his attorney had advised him not to say anything.

“When it is all said and done, this will be dismissed,” he said. “There is nothing to it.”

Kriv got three more speeding tickets soon after he retired in mid-January. He didn’t contest any of them, and he paid the fines.

Then he got three more speeding tickets.

Do You Have a Tip for ProPublica? Help Us Do Journalism.

Melissa Sanchez contributed reporting.

This post was originally published on Articles and Investigations – ProPublica.

by Caleb Bedillion, Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

The Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal has sued Mississippi’s Union County, asking a judge to order that search warrants in its county-level justice court be made open for public inspection.

The lawsuit comes after an investigation last year by the Daily Journal and ProPublica found that almost two-thirds of Mississippi’s justice courts obstruct access to search warrants and to the affidavits used by police to obtain them.

That thwarts public scrutiny of searches, including no-knock raids in which police sometimes enter people’s homes at night with guns drawn. Last year, two Mississippi counties settled lawsuits involving such raids in which police shot people, one fatally.

Law enforcement usually must get permission from a judge before searching someone’s property, and normally they must knock and announce themselves before entering. But they can ask a judge for a no-knock warrant if they provide specific reasons.

They must bring search warrants back to court after a search, along with a list of what they seized.

The news organizations found that some Mississippi courts break statewide rules that require clerks to keep those warrants on file. Other courts — such as the Union County Justice Court — have the documents but claim the public can’t look at them.

“Our goal is to ensure that judicial records are kept open and that the government at all levels does its work where the public can see it,” Daily Journal Executive Editor Sam Hall said. “It seems clear to us — and to many other courts across the country — that the records we’ve requested should be public.”

The U.S. Supreme Court has recognized a centuries-old norm that court proceedings and papers should be open to the public. Judges can order that certain documents be sealed, but that must be done on a case-by-case basis.

Federal appeals courts have agreed that search warrants are judicial records that should be open to inspection, though they disagree about when exactly the document becomes subject to access.

It is “highly unusual” for a court to claim “that search warrants and related materials are simply never accessible to the public,” Katie Townsend, deputy executive director and legal director for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, told the news organizations last year.

But many of Mississippi’s justice courts, which frequently handle search warrants, did just that.

An attorney acting on behalf of Union County told the Daily Journal that records of executed search warrants on file with the clerk of the Union County Justice Court are shielded from public view because of a state law that protects the investigative records of law enforcement agencies.

In its lawsuit, the Daily Journal argues that this claim runs afoul of Mississippi’s Public Records Act and the common-law right to access court records. Mississippi’s public records law does contain an exemption for certain investigative records, but the exemption applies only to law enforcement agencies, not courts.

The county later offered to make some search warrants available, but only if a criminal investigation had concluded and a judge gave permission. The Daily Journal’s lawsuit argues that these conditions aren’t supported by law.

A representative of Union County did not respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit.

Experts say it’s not easy to get access to search warrants in many courthouses across the country. Even so, they said the problems with record-keeping and public access in Mississippi’s justice courts were extreme.

After a search warrant has been executed, it “should be a part of the files and available for public inspection,” William Waller Jr., a retired chief justice of Mississippi’s Supreme Court, told the news organizations last year. He helped draft the state’s rules of criminal procedure.

In response to the Daily Journal and ProPublica’s investigation, Mississippi’s judicial training body has advised court clerks and judges at training sessions that executed search warrants must be kept on file by the clerk and that the documents should be considered public if a judge hasn’t sealed them.

Last month, an insurance program run by many Mississippi counties held a risk management conference for law enforcement agencies, featuring sessions on search warrants and no-knock raids. Lawyers warned sheriffs that deputies should carefully document their reasons for conducting no-knock searches.

Rural Monroe County, in Mississippi’s northeast corner, settled a lawsuit for $690,000 last year over a 2015 fatal shooting by sheriff’s deputies during a 1 a.m. raid to look for drugs. Ricky Keeton came to the door with an air pistol as deputies pried open his door. His girlfriend said he thought someone was breaking in.

Also last year, Coahoma County, in the Mississippi Delta, settled a lawsuit that involved a 2020 raid in which sheriff’s deputies shot an unarmed man multiple times. He wasn’t even the target of the search and only happened to be at the house at the time of the raid. The amount of the settlement has not been disclosed.

This post was originally published on Articles and Investigations – ProPublica.

by Kyle Hopkins, Anchorage Daily News

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Anchorage Daily News. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

An Alaska Superior Court judge has dismissed a sex abuse case against former acting state Attorney General Clyde “Ed” Sniffen. In an order Friday, Judge Peter Ramgren sided with Sniffen’s lawyer, who argued too much time had passed for him to be charged with the alleged 1991 crime.

A grand jury indicted Sniffen in September on three counts of sexual abuse of a minor by an authority figure, based on his alleged sexual relationship with a then-17-year-old student. Sniffen was 27 at the time and a coach for the West Anchorage High School girls’ mock trial team.

While Alaska state law currently has no statute of limitations for felony sexual abuse of a minor, Ramgren dismissed the charge based on the argument that the law was different in 1991, when a five-year statute of limitations was in place.

The alleged victim, Nikki Dougherty White, learned of the dismissal Saturday morning by email. She called the ruling a “huge disappointment.”

“A huge sense of being let down by the court system,” she said.

White said that despite the dismissal, she does not regret going public with her story in January 2021, after she learned Sniffen had been appointed attorney general by Gov. Mike Dunleavy. Sniffen resigned as the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica prepared to publish an article about the allegations.

“Because the truth is important. And because Alaska has too long been a place that favors abusers, that does not provide a safe space for victims, for women, for girls. For anybody who doesn’t fit, you know, the white male profile,” White said in a phone interview.

“The Alaska judicial system isn’t built for us and it doesn’t protect us,” she said.

Sniffen pleaded not guilty to the charges. He could not be reached for comment Saturday. His attorney, Jeffrey Robinson, was out of state Saturday for a professional obligation and had just received the judge’s order on Saturday afternoon, he wrote in an email.

“I’ve not had any time to review it,” Robinson wrote.

The special prosecutor in the case, Gregg Olson, said Saturday that no decision has been made on whether the state will appeal the order.

Another Superior Court judge, Erin Marston, presided over the case in January when Sniffen’s attorney argued it should be dismissed on the grounds that the statute of limitations had expired and that the long delay between the alleged abuse and the filing of charges violated Sniffen’s right to due process.

Marston on Jan. 26 rejected a motion to dismiss the case related to alleged due process violations. Ramgren replaced Marston as the case judge on Feb. 7 due to Marston’s retirement. Ramgren was appointed to the bench in 2019 by Dunleavy.

In his Friday order, Ramgren wrote that a five-year statute of limitations was in place for the crime of sexual abuse of a minor at the time of the alleged offense, May 1991. The Legislature reduced or removed time limits to charge people for certain crimes in 1992 and again in 2001, the judge wrote, but he concluded those changes did not apply to Sniffen’s case.

“The court finds the applicable statutes and legislative history indicate these changes cannot be applied to the alleged offenses,” Ramgren wrote. “For that reason, the statute of limitations governing Mr. Sniffen’s conduct has expired and he cannot be subject to indictment.”

Sniffen led the state Department of Law, as Alaska’s top lawyer and legal adviser to the governor, for roughly five months in 2020 to 2021. His predecessor, Kevin Clarkson, resigned as attorney general when the newsrooms reported Clarkson had sent hundreds of unwanted text messages to a junior colleague.

This post was originally published on Articles and Investigations – ProPublica.