Tag: police accountability

The FBI Raided This Innocent Woman’s House. Will She Ever Get Justice?

On an early morning in 2017, Curtrina Martin inadvertently attended a pyrotechnic exhibit she compares to the Fourth of July. Except it was October, and it was inside her home in Georgia.

The source was considerably less joyful. The FBI detonated a flash grenade in the house and ripped the door from its hinges in a raid to arrest a man, Joseph Riley, accused of gang activity, who lived in a different house approximately one block over.

The agents would not realize their mistake until after they made their way into Martin’s bedroom, where they found her and her then-fiancé, Hilliard Toi Cliatt, hiding in the closet, which the couple had retreated to when they were jolted awake by the commotion. An officer on the SWAT team dragged Cliatt out and handcuffed him, while another officer screamed and pointed his gun at Martin, who had reportedly fallen on a rack amid the chaos.

“I don’t know if there is a proper word that I can use” to describe her fear that night, Martin tells me. She says she initially had no idea it was law enforcement that had broken into her home. Her 7-year-old son was in a different room she couldn’t get to.

The leader of the SWAT raid, Lawrence Guerra, who was then a special agent with the FBI, noticed that Cliatt did not match the physical description of Riley, while Michael Lemoine, another FBI special agent, saw a piece of mail with a different address than the target. Guerra ultimately ended the raid. 

Almost seven years have gone by, and Martin and Cliatt are still trying to find recourse for what happened that night. A federal lawsuit they filed continues to wind its way through the judiciary, although the courts have thus far immunized the government from having to pay any damages.

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Man Who Was Arrested for Flipping Off Cop Settles for $175,000

A man who was arrested and charged for flipping off a Vermont State Police (VSP) officer settled his case last month for $175,000.

“Far too often, police abuse their authority to retaliate against and suppress speech they personally find offensive or insulting,” Lia Ernst, the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Vermont, tells Reason about the case. “This settlement demonstrates that violating these rights does not come without a cost.”

Through the settlement, Gregory Bombard will receive $100,000 in damages. The ACLU of Vermont and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which both represented Bombard in his suit, will receive the remaining $75,000.

All told, Bombard spent “about a year fighting the criminal charges and more than three years seeking declaratory relief,” a spokesperson for FIRE tells Reason.

Jay Riggen, the officer who arrested Bombard, “retired from VSP effective May 31, 2024,” a spokesperson for the Vermont State Police tells Reason. “We have no additional comment on this case.”

In February 2018, Bombard was stopped by Vermont State Trooper Riggen, who believed Bombard had given him the finger while driving—an allegation Bombard denies. However, after Riggen walked away from the car, Bombard flipped Riggen off and swore at the officer in frustration for having been pulled over.

In response, Riggen pulled Bombard over again and arrested him for disorderly conduct. “The first one may have been an error,” said Riggen during the arrest, referring to the reason for the initial stop, but “the second one certainly was not.”

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Sotomayor Is Right: The Supreme Court Should Reevaluate Absolute Immunity for Prosecutors

Consider the following hypothetical: You are jailed for two years as you await trial for murder. You are facing the death penalty. You have cancer, which relapsed during your incarceration without access to adequate treatment. And it turns out you were charged based on a false witness confession, which the local prosecutor allegedly destroyed evidence to obscure.

Now imagine suing that prosecutor and being told you have no recourse, because such government employees are entitled to absolute immunity.

This is the backdrop for Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s opinion Tuesday arguing that the Supreme Court may need to reevaluate the confines of that legal doctrine—absolute prosecutorial immunity—which prevents victims of alleged prosecutorial misconduct from getting recourse in the vast majority of circumstances.

The case at issue centers around Nickie Miller, a Kentucky man whom a woman named Natasha Martin implicated in a bizarre murder plot after the government offered her a deal to avoid prison time. The primary issue: She almost immediately sought to recant that confession. Law enforcement wouldn’t accept that. So she testified before a grand jury, and then tried to recant again, writing in jailhouse letters to another man she implicated that her statement came in response to “coercive interrogation techniques, threats, and undisclosed promises of consideration.”

When Miller’s defense team heard about those letters, it tried to obtain them. Martin reportedly asked Assistant Commonwealth Attorney Keith Craycraft how she should comply with the order, to which he allegedly responded that she should destroy the correspondence. She obliged.

The state eventually dropped the charges against Miller. The two years in jail, however, took a toll, according to his criminal defense attorney, who said that his cancer was in remission but recurred after the state locked him up, as he could not access his medication.

After his release, he sued Craycraft; the district court concluded he was entitled to absolute immunity. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit subsequently noted that Craycraft’s alleged misconduct was “difficult to justify and seemingly unbecoming of an official entrusted with enforcing the criminal law.” And then that court, too, confirmed the grant of absolute immunity, a testament to the sort of behavior the doctrine greenlights with its sweeping inoculation.

Miller has since died, and his estate is continuing the litigation on his behalf.

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SCOTUS Makes It Easier for Victims of Retaliatory Arrests To Vindicate Their First Amendment Rights

When someone claims to have been arrested in retaliation for constitutionally protected speech, what sort of evidence is necessary to make that case? Five years ago in Nieves v. Bartlett, the Supreme Court held that an arrest can violate the First Amendment even if it was based on probable cause, provided the claimant can present “objective evidence that he was arrested when otherwise similarly situated individuals not engaged in the same sort of protected speech had not been.” Today in Gonzalez v. Trevino, the Court said that showing does not require “very specific comparator evidence” indicating that “identifiable people” engaged in very similar conduct but were not arrested.

“This is a great day for the First Amendment and Sylvia Gonzalez, who has courageously fought against retaliatory actions by government officials,” says Anya Bidwell, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, which represents Gonzalez, a former Castle Hills, Texas, city council member who says her political opponents engineered her arrest on a trumped-up charge of tampering with a government document. The document in question was a petition that Gonzalez herself had spearheaded, calling for the replacement of City Manager Ryan Rapelye. Gonzalez had run for office on a promise to seek Rapelye’s removal, and she claimed his allies were determined to punish her for that position.

During a May 2019 city council meeting that addressed complaints about Rapelye’s performance, Gonzalez picked up the petition, which had been presented to the council, and placed it in her personal folder. She says she did that accidentally. But Mayor Edward Trevino, Police Chief John Siemens, and Alexander Wright, a “special detective” assigned to investigate Gonzalez, accused her of deliberately removing the document to avoid scrutiny of alleged improprieties in collecting signatures for the petition.

As a result, Gonzalez was briefly jailed and suffered the attendant damage to her reputation. Bexar County District Attorney Joe Gonzales, according to Gonzalez’s Supreme Court petition, “dropped the charges as soon as he learned about them.” Trevino et al. nevertheless achieved what Gonzalez says was their goal all along. “Gonzalez was so hurt by the experience and so embarrassed by the media coverage of her arrest,” the petition says, that “she gave up her council seat and swore off organizing petitions or criticizing her government.”

In July 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit rejected Gonzalez’s First Amendment claim against Trevino, Siemens, and Wright, saying it was doomed by her failure to cite other cases in which people had not been arrested for conduct like hers. “Were we writing on a blank slate,” Judge Kurt D. Engelhardt wrote in the majority opinion, “we may well agree” that “the Constitution ought to provide a claim here, particularly given that Gonzalez’s arrest was allegedly in response to her exercise of her right to petition.” But “Nieves requires comparative evidence,” he said, “because it required ‘objective evidence’ of ‘otherwise similarly situated individuals’ who engaged in the ‘same’ criminal conduct but were not arrested. The evidence Gonzalez provides here comes up short.”

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Prosecutor had dog cremated, bought Target pillows on taxpayers’ dime with funds meant for crime victims: Cops

Authorities in Georgia have arrested an Atlanta prosecutor who allegedly used taxpayer funds meant to help crime victims to buy items for herself such as cremation for her dog, breakfast and pillows from Target.

A grand jury indicted Hall County Solicitor General Stephanie Woodard on 11 counts of theft by taking and 13 counts of false statements and writings, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr said in a press release. Woodard on “several occasions from July 2018 through September 2022” used funds from Hall County and the Prosecuting Attorneys Council of Georgia for personal expenses, according to Carr. She also allegedly accepted reimbursement for travel and continuing education classes she didn’t actually attend.

“Those elected to uphold the law must operate honestly, ethically and transparently, and anything less undermines our system,” Carr said in a statement. “Theft of taxpayer dollars and falsifying documents to cover up that theft are entirely unacceptable.”

Woodard was tasked with prosecuting misdemeanor cases within the county, but now faces felony charges herself.

Among the allegations: Woodard turned in a receipt from a breakfast restaurant, claiming it was for abuse awareness when it was not. She said she was paying an expense related to law school admissions for a victim in a local youth program when it was really for someone else. Woodard requested reimbursement for costs related to a court case but it was actually to pay for cremation for her dog. She bought pillows for herself at Target and said they were for a victim.

Atlanta Fox affiliate WAGA has been investigating Woodard’s actions for years. The TV station even tracked down the person who cremated her dog. Rick Farmer, of Precious Memories Crematory, gave a statement to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation about the $190 expense.

“It was paid to me, for her dog,” Farmer told the outlet. “Sounds like she owes the county some money and a whole bunch of other people a big apology.”

Woodard’s attorneys released a statement calling the indictment “absurd” and “unfathomable.”

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A Florida Man Was Arrested for Filming Marion County Sheriff’s Deputies. Now He’s Suing.

A Florida man has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit three years after a Marion County sheriff’s deputy arrested him for filming officers from a public sidewalk.

In 2021, Marion County Sheriff’s Deputy Neil Rosaci arrested George Nathansen and charged him with obstruction of justice for refusing to follow his orders to leave the scene of an investigation. However, body camera footage showed Nathansen standing at least 30 feet away on a public sidewalk before Rosaci walked over and handcuffed him.

In Nathansen’s lawsuit, filed last Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, he alleges that Rosaci and the Marion County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) violated his Fourth Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment rights by falsely arresting and incarcerating him.

Numerous federal appeals courts have ruled that filming the police is protected under the First Amendment, but police around the country continue to illegally arrest people for it. The Justice Department released a report this month on pervasive civil rights violations by the Phoenix Police Department, including retaliating against citizens who were trying to record them. Earlier this year, Texas prosecutors dropped charges against a citizen journalist who was arrested, strip-searched, and jailed for filming police.

Nathansen’s case is yet another example of police retaliation against someone for core First Amendment activities.

The incident began on July 24, 2021, when Rosaci arrived at the scene of a car crash. While deputies were talking to the two parties involved in the accident, Nathansen arrived and began filming with his cell phone. There are a growing number of self-styled “First Amendment auditors” around the country who record police interactions and post them online. (In response to alleged harassment, several states have passed dubious “buffer-zone” laws that criminalize being too close to a first responder.) 

Rosaci’s body camera footage, obtained by the Ocala Post, showed that Nathansen was filming near the deputies’ cars when Rosaci first shooed him away and told him, “You can stand on the sidewalk over there.”

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Investigation Finds NYPD Disciplinary Records Often Go Missing

In the summer of 2021, New York Police Department officer Willie Thompson had sex at least twice with a witness to a Harlem carjacking that he was investigating. When a prosecutor questioned Thompson about his relationship with the witness, Thompson first lied, denying the relationship, before recanting and confessing the next day, according to an internal discipline report. About a week later, the woman, sounding upset, called the prosecutor and said Thompson had cornered her at a bodega, blaming her for getting him in trouble and threatening that officers from the precinct would be coming to her home, the document shows.

Thompson, who declined to comment, was found guilty by the NYPD on two misconduct charges and was placed on probation.

But if you looked up his disciplinary history on the department’s public database of uniformed officers, you would be unlikely to learn that.

ProPublica has found the NYPD site for allowing the public to track officers’ misconduct is shockingly unreliable. Cases against officers frequently vanish from the site for days — sometimes weeks — at a time. The issue affects nearly all of the officers in the database, with discipline disappearing from the profiles of patrol officers all the way up to its most senior uniformed officer.

ProPublica examined more than 1,000 daily snapshots of the database’s contents and found that, since the fall of 2022, the number of discipline cases that appear in the database has fluctuated often and wildly. Try to pull up the record for a disciplined officer and the site sometimes spits back, “This officer does not have any applicable entries.”

Since May 2021, at least 88% of the disciplinary cases that once appeared in the data have gone missing at some point, though some were later restored. As of this week, 54% of cases that had at one point been in the system were missing.

“It is really disconcerting to see that there are records that are there one day that are not the next,” said Jennvine Wong, a supervising attorney with the Legal Aid Society’s Cop Accountability Project.

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A SWAT Team Blew Up This Innocent Couple’s Home and Left Them With the Bill. Was That Constitutional?

A federal court yesterday heard arguments in an appeal concerning an area of law that, while niche, has seen a streak of similarly situated plaintiffs pile up in recent years. At stake: When a SWAT team destroys an innocent person’s property, should the owner be strapped with the bill?

There is what I would consider a commonsense answer to that question. But in a reminder that common sense does not always guide law and policy, that is not the answer reached by several courts across the U.S., where such victims are sometimes told that “police powers” provide an exception to the Constitution’s promise to give just compensation when the government usurps property for public use.

It remains to be seen where the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit will fall as it evaluates the complaint from Mollie and Michael Slaybaugh, who are reportedly on the hook for over $70,000 after a SWAT team destroyed much of their home in Smyrna, Tennessee.

In January 2022, Mollie Slaybaugh stepped outside her house and was greeted by a police officer with his gun drawn. She was informed that her adult son, James Jackson Conn—who did not live with her but had recently arrived to visit—was wanted for questioning concerning the murder of a police officer, which she says was news to her. Although she offered to speak to Conn and bring him out of her house, law enforcement declined to permit that, or to let her re-enter at all, so she went to stay at her daughter’s house nearby.

The next day, police broke down the door and launched dozens of tear gas grenades into the Slaybaughs’ home, laying waste to nearly everything in the house. Their insurance declined to assist them, as their policy—like many policies—does not cover damage caused by the government. Yet both Smyrna and Rutherford County said they were immune from helping as well.

But despite Mollie Slaybaugh’s offer to coax Conn out sans tear gas, her complaint does not dispute that it was in the best interest of the community for law enforcement to do as they did that day. It merely contests the government’s claim that innocent property owners should have to bear the financial burden by themselves when police destroy their homes in pursuit of a suspect.

“Law enforcement is a public good. Through our taxes, we pay for the training, equipment, and salaries of police officers. We pay to incarcerate criminals. We pay for a court system and public defenders,” reads her complaint. “When the police destroy private property in the course of enforcing the criminal laws, that is simply another cost of law enforcement. Forcing random, innocent individuals to shoulder that cost alone would be as fair as conducting a lottery to determine who has to pay the police chief’s salary each year.”

That hypothetical is absurd. And yet the spirit of it is at the heart of several court decisions on the matter. That includes the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee, which ruled last year that the Slaybaughs were not entitled to a payout because, in the court’s view, the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment does not apply when the state seizes and destroys someone’s property in the exercise of “police powers.”

The Slaybaughs are unfortunately not alone. The notion that “police powers” immunize the government from liability is what doomed Leo Lech’s lawsuit, which he filed after a SWAT team did so much damage to his home—in pursuit of a suspect that broke in and had no relation to the family—that it had to be demolished. In 2020, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

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An Atlanta Cop Killed This Man For Refusing To Sign a Ticket

Johnny Hollman called 911 after he was in a minor traffic accident. But instead of helping, the responding officer beat and tased Hollman after he was hesitant to sign a ticket, resulting in the 62-year-old’s death. 

Hollman’s family sued, and they’ve now been awarded a $3.8 million settlement.

“While nothing can undo what has been done,” Atlanta mayor Andre Dickens said in a statement this week, “my priority was to get this family as close to full closure from this unfortunate tragedy as soon as possible.”

During the evening of August 10th, 2023, Hollman was driving home when he was involved in a low-speed collision with another vehicle. According to Hollman’s family’s lawsuit, both Hollman and the other driver called 911 to report the accident. While no one was injured, both drivers disputed who was at fault for the accident. 

After more than an hour, Atlanta Police Department Officer Kiran Kimbrough arrived on the scene. Soon after, he decided that Hollman was at fault and wrote him a citation. 

However, Hollman was hesitant to sign the citation. “Deacon Hollman did not explicitly refuse to sign the citation,” the suit states. (Hollman was a Deacon at his local church). “But in each instance when directed to do so, responded that the collision was not his fault.”

Eventually, Kimbrough threatened to send Hollman to jail unless he signed the ticket, and Hollman called one of his daughters.

According to the suit, Kimbrough then began walking towards Hollman. Almost simultaneously, Kimbrough reached to grab one of Hollman’s arms, and Hollman said “I’ll sign the ticket.”

Hollman said several more times that he would sign the ticket. However, “ignoring Deacon Hollman’s concession to his request that he sign the ticket, Defendant Kimbrough performed a leg sweep maneuver on Deacon Hollman, taking Deacon Hollman to the ground,” the suit states. “While doing so, Defendant Kimbrough commented to Deacon Hollman: ‘You acting crazy!'”

Over the next several minutes, Kimbrough struck the back of Hollman’s head at least twice with his fist, tased him twice, and allowed another citizen to “assist” him by sitting on Hollman’s head and neck, while ignoring Hollman’s frequent statements that he couldn’t breathe.

Eventually, Hollman was taken to a local hospital where he was pronounced dead. An autopsy later concluded that the cause of Hollman’s death was homicide.

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Former Ligonier Valley police chief facing multiple felonies for alleged sexual assault

Officials with DreamLife Recovery reached out to Channel 11 on Saturday and confirmed that Berger had been fired.

A former Westmoreland County police chief is now on the other side of the law.

Former Ligonier Valley Chief John Berger is behind bars at the Westmoreland County Jail after being arrested Friday on sexual assault charges.

This comes after he was fired from Ligonier Valley Police last May following a raid by federal agents.

“It’s unbelievable. I can’t believe it,” said Daniel Beranek. He was one of several people Channel 11 spoke to in Donegal, shocked to learn of Berger’s arrest Friday for allegedly sexually assaulting a patient at a Donegal rehab center.

“Very, very horrible,” said Beranek.

According to State Police, the sexual assault happened at DreamLife Recovery in Donegal.

Berger began working there in January as a Behavioral Health Technician following a stint at the drug and alcohol rehab center as a patient and his firing as the Ligonier Valley Police Chief last May.

He was fired after federal agents raided the department and seized his phone and police cruiser.

“There’s no excuse for it honestly but definitely being held accountable and being a police officer to held to a higher standard and falling like that is pretty atrocious,” said Zachary Buchholz, who also spoke to Channel 11 in Donegal.

Investigators say Berger first met the victim last year when they were both patients at DreamLife.

She told police, “Berger would make unwanted sexual advances towards her almost weekly if not daily.”

The police report states those advances resumed starting in March when the victim returned to DreamLife.

“Unbelievable honestly. I wouldn’t say that he should be working there anymore or around in that environment and definitely should probably seek a little bit of help for that as well,” said Buchholz.

On Monday around 11:00 pm, police paperwork states Berger went into the victim’s room while she was sleeping, woke her up by whispering her name and “forcefully started to kiss her.”

State Police say he then groped her and forced her to give him oral sex.

“I would never think a law enforcement officer would be doing that,” Beranek said.

In an interview with State Police Friday, investigators say Berger owned up to the charges.

Berger is now being held at the Westmoreland County Jail unable to post $100,000 bail.

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