New Orleans still waits for justice
“Steering with his right hand, the ex-Marine leans out the window and fires a handgun with his left toward a pack of people he glimpses ahead, gathered at the foot of the bridge. The truck screeches to a halt, sending some in back tumbling over, and officers poured out. Police aim for backs, arms, necks, legs, feet, heads and stomachs of two groups of people now diving over a concrete railing or scattering atop the bridge. One officer aims his pistol at the back of a slight figure sprinting away from the bridge, and pulls the trigger twice. Another points his rifle towards two men trying to race up and over the bridge for cover, and fires. The cacophony is deafening.
“When the shooting stops, 17-yearold James Brissette Jr. is dead, bullets riddling his nearly six-foot, 130pound body from the heel of his foot to the top of his head. Susan Bartholomew is trying to crawl on the pavement, her right arm dangling by a thread. Her daughter’s stomach is shredded by a bullet. Her husband’s head is pierced by shrapnel. Her nephew Jose is shot in the neck, jaw, stomach, elbow and hand. A paramedic arriving soon after says not to bother with him; the teen is too far gone. ‘Don’t give up on me,’ Jose Holmes Jr. pleads. Ronald Madison is slumped over the pavement, the back of his white shirt turned red, with seven gunshot wounds in his back.
“Like every one of the victims, he is black, and unarmed.”
— from Shots on the Bridge: Police Violence and Cover-Up in the Wake of Katrina, by Ronnie Greene
Five officers with the New Orleans Police Department were convicted and sentenced to prison terms ranging from six to 65 years for what happened that catastrophic night on the Danziger Bridge in eastern New Orleans, six days after the levees broke: the unprovoked mowing down of half a dozen innocents, two of them killed, four grievously injured. When Susan Bartholomew took the stand at the 2011 trial — six years, numerous problem-plagued investigations and case-collapsing grand jury improprieties later — she swore oath with her left hand. Her right arm had been severed in the fusillade of fire. “I raised the only hand I had.”
All the cops were found guilty on 25 counts, including murder and an extensive coverup of the crime — fabricated evidence, intimidating witnesses, planting a gun at the scene to bolster their invented story of being shot at first, actually playing the brave heroes of a police department struggling to control the mayhem in a devastated city.
The chaos — looters, criminal gangs run amok — was always grossly exaggerated. Amid the incompetence of federal disaster authorities, no immediate help from Washington until the National Guard was finally called out, and a clueless, overwhelmed mayor (Ray Nagin, now serving 10 years for corruption related to bribes received from city contractors before and after the hurricane), 100,000 souls who hadn’t fled the city were left to fend for themselves. It was often those gangs from the projects that, yes, broke into stores to collect food and water they distributed to the homeless, those still stuck on their roofs of homes, and the miserable hordes who took shelter inside the Superdome.
Two years later, citing “grotesque prosecutorial misconduct,” the same trial judge vacated the guilty verdicts, threw out the convictions and ordered a new trial.
On Tuesday, federal prosecutors lost their appeal of that decision. There will be a new trial. Back to square one.
Unlike the Mississippi waters that deluged New Orleans and then receded — 10 years ago next week — the criminal indignities heaped upon victims of hurricane Katrina continue to roil unabated.
After the original convictions, in what was described as the most significant prosecution of police misconduct since the Rodney King trial, then-U.S. attorney general Eric Holder said: “I am hopeful today’s verdict brings justice for the victims and their family members, helps to heal the community and contributes to the restoration of public trust in the New Orleans Public Department.”
The NOPD? Notorious as the most corrupt police department in America? Its rap sheet includes a patrolman nicknamed Robocop who ran an extortion business protecting cocaine dealers, who was so enraged by a young black mother who filed an abuse complaint against him that he ordered a hit man to kill her. Convicted, he remains on death row.
New Orleans, where each time a city officer fired a weapon in a 17month period from 2009 to 2010, the target was black. New Orleans, where the NOPD did not find a single officer-involved shooting in a six-year span violated department policy, according to a scathing 2011 Justice Department civil rights review.
On Sept. 4, 2005, Susan Bartholomew and several members of her family had ventured out, headed toward a Winn-Dixie in search of medicine for a sick grandmother. From the same area, brothers Lance and Ronald Madison — the latter aged 40, with the mental development of a 6-year-old — were aiming for their mother’s home, two miles away. Ronald had refused to evacuate when the hurricane warnings were issued, unwilling to leave his beloved dachshunds.
According to Shots on the Bridge, the two groups took no notice of each other as they crossed the Danziger Bridge. But police, responding to a dispatcher call-out — “Officer’s life in danger! Shots being fired!” — had piled into a previously commandeered Budget rental truck, 11 of them, and raced to the bridge, bristling with both department-issued and privately owned weapons, even AK-47s.
Screeching to a halt, they did not stop to ask questions, didn’t warn, just began firing. The Morgans ran to get off the bridge, Lance supporting Robert, who’d already been hit. The last words Robert spoke: “Tell mom I love her.” A witness would later testify that one of the officers walked up, stood over the dying Robert, and stomped repeatedly on the back with his police-issued boots. Lance was arrested.
None of the officers made a move to help the wounded, according to the book. No witnesses were interviewed. Instead, the shooters began immediately to contrive their story. A white police lieutenant who arrived minutes later and saw no gun near the dead teen would afterwards admit: “I knew this was a bull---- story but I went along with it.”
Six years the investigative reckoning took, and only after federal prosecutors took over the case.
All of it kicked out now. Why? Because it was discovered that some of the individuals involved in preparing the case, including three of the prosecutors, had posted anonymous comments on the TimesPicayune website — some calling the NOPD “corrupt’’ and “a joke” — which had tainted the judicial process and perhaps influenced jurors. The trial judge, long critical of the prosecution, had also been critical of plea deals offered to co-operating witnesses, cops included.
Yet the evidence has never been disputed.
Justice overhauled, botched and beggared again, on the flimsiest of grounds, a shocking outcome.
Except in New Orleans — The Big Sleazy. Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.