Pages

Sunday, September 29, 2013

Police Beating Caught On Tape: Several Birmingham Police officers beating surrendering suspect

Travarious Daniel


Police Beating Caught On Tape Several Birmingham Police officers pile on a suspect, and they appear to be beating him. 

It was on March 20th on the 16 hundred block of 1st Ave North directly across from Birmingham Police Headquarters where 29-year old Travarious Daniel was arrested. The police report states "minimum force" was used.

Attorney Charles Salvagio says, "My client wanted it to be shown to the public, because he didn't want anyone else to be treated like this."

According to the police report: undercover officers with the burglary unit say they saw Travarious Daniel illegally remove property from a vehicle. You can see Daniel step out of the car with his hands in the air, and it appears he is submitting to the officers orders. However, according to the report, Daniel at first refused to stop his vehicle. He is eventually arrested for unlawful breaking and entering of a vehicle and receiving stolen property.

"We counted 5 officers and we quit counting the blows after 20, I'm going to let you be the judge. A guy comes out he has his hands up appears to me all you have to do put his hands behind his back and put him in the car, but I'll let the tape speak for itself," says Salvagio.

Internal Affairs and ABI Investigators are now involved with this case. The department's project ICE is also going after charges against Daniel for being a felon in possession of a firearm. 

"We going to give all parties involved due process and we want to tell the public is treated fairly by our men and women in the police uniform," Mayor Bell says.

The arresting officer is out of service until the investigation is complete. The assisting arresting officer is already out of service for a medical condition. Salvagio says Daniel is recovering from his injuries which he did not describe in detail. Salvagio says the next step is dealing with the criminal case and seeing if there are any more legal matters.


Saturday, September 28, 2013

Grand Theft Auto 5 Developers Defend Game Against Racial Profiling Programming Toward Black Character!

Some GTA fans complain of extra police attention when playing as Franklin

Via MetroUK

GTA V developer Rockstar has been forced to come out and defend Los Santos’s police force against claims of racial discrimination from gamers.

The world has been absorbed by the free-roaming game over the past week, which has broken sales records and been critically-acclaimed for its immersive gaming experience and realism.

Some players have been irked by what they see as racial profiling by the in-game police however, purportedly experienced when playing as the game’s only black protagonist, Franklin.

‘Walked up to a cop as Franklin, cop dropped his coffee and said “back the f*** up”. Then shot me in the face. For no reason. #Racist #GTAV’ one gamer wrote on Twitter, with another adding: ‘Anytime I’m Franklin, I get chased by cops for “a disturbance.” This never happens with Michael or Trevor. The gta cops are racist’ (sic).

The Grand Theft Auto series is known for its satire and social commentary, but Rockstar insists the in-game police do not have a proclivity towards arresting black people.

The developer told Buzzfeed: ‘This is absolutely false, the in-game police don’t treat one lead character any differently from the others.’

More likely, players choosing to commit crimes in broad daylight with assorted weapons might be the reason for excessive police attention, something that can be remedied with this painfully obvious but useful GTA tip that surfaced earlier in the week.


Friday, September 27, 2013

Police shoot dead 'crazy violent' Marine outside his daughter's school... but Corps questions report saying he was a devoted father never deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan

For the Marines who served with Sgt Manuel Loggins Jr., it would have been an injustice to stay quiet.

So in a move that broke with the military's tradition, Loggins' commanding officer at California's Camp Pendleton publicly rebuked civilian authorities in neighboring Orange County for their handling of the investigation into the fatal February 7 shooting by a deputy of the highly esteemed Marine.

Many Marines have been investigated by police and had their behavior publicly dissected by civilian prosecutors in high-profile cases. Only weeks before Sgt Loggins' death, a former Camp Pendleton Marine was arrested in the killing of four homeless men in Orange County.

Gunned down: A police officer shot Sgt Manuel Loggins Jr when he was allegedly acting strangely and would not obey orders from sheriff's deputies.

While Marines have each other's backs on the battlefield, when they get into trouble back home off base, the military tends to step aside while police investigate. But Marines say this time was different.

The death of Sgt Loggins has rocked the tight-knit Marine Corps community. Fellow troops describe him as a devout Christian man who was dedicated to his pregnant wife and three children — and was nothing like the picture painted by law enforcement.

The Association of Orange County Deputy Sheriffs has said Sgt Loggins plowed a car through a gate at San Clemente High School at 4.30am, and then got out as his 9- and 14-year-old daughters could be heard screaming in the SUV. 

The association said the girls told sheriff's personnel their father had been acting oddly, while Sgt Loggins could be heard in a nearby field yelling irrational statements. When Sgt Loggins returned, he allegedly ignored warnings by deputies not to start the SUV. A deputy shot him, fearing for the children's safety, the statement said.

Sgt Loggins' commanding officer, Col Nicholas Marano, countered back with a bruising statement issued to the media: 'While I am confident they will do the right thing in the end, I am less than satisfied with the official response from the City of San Clemente and Orange County. Many of the statements made concerning Manny Loggins' character over the past few days are incorrect and deeply hurtful to an already grieving family.'

Shooting scene: Sgt Loggins was killed by a sheriff's deputy outside his daughters' school in Orange County, California

The words were especially searing given the military's close relationship with law enforcement agencies — many of whom are made up of former service members — and the fact that the investigation was in its initial stages. The Orange County district attorney's office is leading the probe and declined to comment.

Sgt Loggins' supervisor, Maj Christopher Cox, said Col Marano's bold statement won applause in the Corps.

'We're glad he stepped up and made a statement over the way this has been handled,' he said. 

'Everybody reads the report presented by the Orange County officials. Obviously it contradicts what we know to be the case about him. He was involved with his family. His relationship with his daughters was fantastic. They were a close family. To paint it any other way is not right.'

Col Marano declined to talk to the media after issuing his statement.

Tom Dominguez, president of the Association of Orange County Deputy Sheriffs, also declined to speak to The Associated Press but his office issued this: 'Our statement was about the events of the morning of February 7, 2012 and nothing more. We issued the facts not a commentary on the character of any individual in this case. We await the results of the independent investigation.'

The deputy, Darren Sandberg, served in the Corps. Sandberg, a 15-year Sheriff's Department veteran, is on leave.

The Corps has kept in contact with Sgt Loggins' family and Cox said they have not been given adequate information.

Maj Cox declined to say whether the Corps believes Orange County officials are trying to cover up a mistake. It would be irresponsible to speculate about what happened, he said, but it was not unusual for Sgt Loggins to be at the school at that hour.

Sgt Loggins went there regularly with his daughters so they could run together before he had to be on base by 7.30am. Maj Cox said Sgt Loggins' oldest daughter asked to train with her father so she could join the high school track team one day, and his 9-year-old often tagged along.

The death has been difficult for the Marine community to accept because there are so many unanswered questions, Maj Cox said.

Sgt Loggins was unarmed and had three Bibles in the vehicle — one for himself and the others for his daughters, Maj Cox said.

'There are rules of engagement that have to be followed by anyone carrying a weapon whether that be a law enforcement officer or the military,' Maj Cox said. 

'I know the rules we have are quite stringent. I don't know what they are for Orange County officials, but I imagine they would be about the same.'

The media often points out when someone in trouble is a service member, and Maj Cox said the public may be quick to assume this was another case of military personnel losing control. But Maj Cox said those assumptions can cloud the truth.

Sgt Loggins, of Joliet, Illinois, enlisted in 1998 but was never deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. Maj Cox said he was a humble, kind hardworking Marine who had received multiple medals. The office where Loggins worked handled cargo shipments for the base. He was studying to be a nurse and volunteered at local nursing homes.

There were no signs of trouble, said Maj Cox, who worked with him almost daily.

'Everybody wants closure but that's difficult to do without information. It's made it even more difficult over the fact that it was a shooting by a law enforcement officer,' Maj Cox said. 

'It doesn't add up for a lot of people here.'

Marines deal with death as part of the job, Maj Cox said, but 'we've been left in a state of limbo and in my opinion that's made it more difficult to accept this than if it had been in a combat scenario.'

Sheriff's Department spokesman, Jim Amormino, said deputies are justified in using deadly force if they feel their lives or the lives of others are in danger. He said he is confident the district attorney's office will do a 'thorough examination of the incident' and that his department will continue to have a strong relationship with Marines.

'We both wear a uniform, both serve our country in different ways, and always have had a great relationship,' he said. 

'This was a tragic incident. There's no question about that. It is very tragic for anyone involved and our deepest sympathies go out to them. We just have to let the investigation take its course.'
Sgt Loggins' family could not be reached for comment.




Thursday, September 26, 2013

20 Years For Warning Shots? Marissa Alexander Granted New Trial


Marissa Alexander, the Jacksonville, Fla., mother serving a 20-year prison sentence for firing what she says was a warning shot to scare off her abusive husband, is getting a new trial.

State Attorney Angela Corey filed aggravated assault charges against Alexander that come with a 20-year mandatory minimum sentence when a firearm is involved after the Aug. 1, 2010, incident.

The shooting caused no injuries, but Alexander was found guilty by a six-person jury on March 16, 2012. The sentencing judge said his hands were tied when he ordered as punishment two decades behind bars.".* Ana Kasparian, Desi Doyen (Green News Report) and comedian Jimmy Dore (The Jimmy Dore Show) break it down on The Young Turks.

Man Awarded $1 Million After Being Wrongfully Accused Of Police Assault


A Chicago man who was wrongfully accused of assaulting a police officer during a traffic stop back in 2007 is finally reaping the benefits of his jury-awarded victory.


Cook County jurors on Tuesday awarded $1 million to a man who was wrongfully held in jail for more than a year.

John Collins, a 42-year-old Chicago barber, was arrested in 2006 and spent 385 days in jail due to false charges of aggravated battery to a police office, officials said.

After a three-day trial, a jury found the city of Chicago and Chicago police Officer Michael Garza guilty of malicious prosecution.

“I felt like a right in the pool of wrong,” Collins said of his time in jail. “I didn’t want to swim in that pool no more, but I didn’t want to drown either. So I kept fighting.”

When officers pulled Collins over in 2006,one officer accused him of kicking and spitting on them, but a jury acquitted Collins and he was released from Cook County in 2007.

“All I know is that I ended up a victim,” he said.

Collins [also] missed the birth of his now 7-year-old son Elwood while in jail, a moment he said he can never get back.

Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Funeral director contradicts official autopsy of Marlon Brown: Claims he wasn't just pinned down, he was hit

Funeral director James Cusack, center, addresses the media as Krystal Brown, ex-wife of Marlon Brown, and attorney Benjamin Crump listen during a press conference at the Chisholm Center in DeLand on Tuesday.


DELAND — The funeral director who prepared for burial the body of the man hit and killed by a police car announced at a press conference Tuesday that the body had fractures, contrary to the findings reported by the medical examiner who did the autopsy.

The medical examiner, Shiping Bao, fired by Volusia County earlier this month, said in his report that Marlon Brown was not hit by the patrol car driven by DeLand Police Officer James Harris, and that Brown died of mechanical asphyxia from of the weight of the car. Bao also said that Brown did not have any fractures.
Marlon Brown

But James E. Cusack, funeral director of J.E. Cusack Mortuary in DeLand, presented his findings accompanied by Benjamin Crump, the attorney representing Brown's ex-wife.

“We are here to reveal information that tells us the medical examiner is inaccurate and at best was intentionally deceitful,” Crump said.

Cusack prepared Brown for burial and said he saw evidence the popular Spring Hill barber was hit by the car. He said that Brown's vascular system was collapsed and that when he tried to inject liquids to embalm Marlon Brown, it would not flow through, indicating that there was breakage in the body's blood vessels. There were compound fractures to his skull and below the abdomen, Cusack said.

“My conclusion is that Marlon Brown suffered trauma to the head and neck and had multiple fractures and contusions that come as a result of being hit by car,” Cusack said during the press conference at the Chisholm Community Center in DeLand. “He had compound fractures to the point that fluids would not go through.”

When asked for comment, Volusia County spokesman Dave Byron said: “The autopsy speaks for itself.” Harris, who has since been fired for policy violations in the incident, struck and ran over Brown as he ran from a traffic stop on May 8 about 12:37 a.m. Harris and Officer Justin Ferrari had engaged Brown in a pursuit after a Volusia County deputy announced over the radio that Brown had fled from him as he tried to stop him for a seat belt violation. Brown ran from his car after pulling into an empty lot behind 960 Delaware Ave. and was struck and run over by Harris in a vegetable garden at a chain link fence. Brown was driving without a license and on probation after serving jail time for drug possession, one of 20 arrests on his record.

Crump said that what Cusack observed was corroborated by the video taken from Harris' patrol car.

The video shows the car appears to hit Marlon Brown. Crump also cited sections of deputy John Szabo's interview that said Marlon Brown “was on his stomach and he was just mangled” and that “his neck was not where it was supposed to be.”

“This is a forceful violent impact between a human being and a police car,” Crump said.

“This vital information that Mr. Crump has shared further shows that they lied to us,” said Krystal Brown, the ex-wife of Marlon Brown.

The family fears that the medical examiner's report wrongly influenced the grand jury's decision not to indict Harris for vehicular homicide, Crump said.

“Because we believe the grand jury based its decision on this inaccurate evidence, we are demanding that an independent investigation be done and that the evidence be presented again to a grand jury,” Crump said.

Crump said he hopes that pressure from the public will get the attention of a different “prosecutorial agency” and people who have the authority to look into Marlon Brown's case.

Requests for an independent investigation from agencies had not yet been made “as we are trying to get all our ducks in a row,” Crump said.

Krystal Brown was shocked to learn of the jury's decision, especially after what she was told by Cusack, Crump said.

Harris did not make a statement after the crash and has not spoken publicly since Brown's death.

“The medical examiner saying that the vehicle rolled and stopped on top of Marlon Brown is pleasant to the ear but it's not what happened,” Crump said. “To suggest that Officer Harris' reckless conduct did not cause Marlon Brown's death is not true.”




TO READ ARTCLE ENTITLED: Woman in car recounts friend's death after police run him down

EXCERPT OF ARTICLE BELOW..... 

“I can't sleep and can't eat and I have this vision in my head,” Laheia Olvera, 23, said in a telephone interview. “From his neck to his waist, he was completely smashed. His head was swelled up.”

Cop Runs Over Man, Faces Zero Charges [GRAPHIC VIDEO]



"Marlon Brown, 38, of Deland, Florida was killed on May 8 when police officers ran him over in a patrol car and. Now his family has released the graphic video, hoping to receive justice, reports Huffington Post.

The family has been calling for an independent investigation after a grand jury determined last week that there wasn't enough evidence to criminally prosecute James Harris, the officer driving the patrol car.

"On May 31, the chief of police reviewed the video of the incident. Upon reviewing, he determined the actions in the video did not meet our internal standards," said DeLand Police Sgt. Chris Estes, who said Harris was fired the same day.".* Ana Kasparian, Dave Rubin (The Rubin Report), and Ben Mankiewicz (What The Flick?! and TYT Sports) break it down on The Young Turks.

Monday, September 23, 2013

Breaks Uncooperative Black Woman’s Window And Drags Her Out Car!


1. Did the cop have a legal right to order her to roll down her window further?

2. Did she have a legal right to refuse?

3. Was the cop justified in breaking her window?

Corrections officer charged with assaulting inmate


With felonious assault charges brought against a Bellamy Creek Correctional Facilitys (IBC) corrections officer, the Michigan Corrections Organization (MCO) and corrections officers are not pleased with the decision.

Sunday, September 22, 2013

Men's County Jail Visitor Viciously Beaten by Guards

Carrillo several days after being beaten


Shackled in handcuffs, Gabriel Carrillo was being detained in a small break room near the visitors' lobby in Men's Central Jail when, he says, a Sheriff's deputy knocked him to the floor with an uppercut.

The Men's Central Jail

Carrillo, 5 feet 6 and 160 pounds, doubled over in pain. Three deputies began kicking and punching the baby-faced 23-year-old in his head and thigh, tearing his white T-shirt while blood splattered on his blue jeans and Air Jordans.

With each blow, Carrillo felt his body jerk as his head bounced up and down on the cold, county building floor. He briefly lost consciousness, only to wake to the sting of punches to his head and face.

Through eyes purple with bruises and nearly swollen shut, Carrillo could see blood pouring out of his head onto the floor.

"I'm not fucking resisting," he cried out.

Suddenly, Carrillo felt a blast of chemical spray. He was blinded and gasping for air as more punches pummeled his increasingly numb legs and torso. It was like being caught in a violent ocean wave, Carrillo recalls. Every time he tried to come up for air, another blow drove him back under.

"I can't breathe! I can't breathe!" Carrillo wheezed.

"Shut the fuck up," Carrillo claims a deputy said. "If you can talk, you can breathe."

Finally, Carrillo lay motionless, watching officers wipe his blood off the floor with clean towels, thinking to himself, "How did this happen? All I was trying to do was visit my brother in jail."

Carrillo arrived at Men's Central Jail, a dungeonlike fortress near downtown Los Angeles, around noon on Feb. 26 with his girlfriend, Grace Torres, to visit his younger brother, who was locked up on charges of carrying a concealed weapon.

It was a Saturday, and Torres was on call for her job at an employment agency. She says she was afraid of being fired if she missed a call, so she tucked her cellphone into her boot and sneaked it into the visitors' lobby, despite the signs prohibiting it. Carrillo, a general laborer who helped build a stage for an Academy Awards after-party next to the El Capitan Theater, says he forgot he had a phone in his pocket.

While they waited, Torres moved to scratch her foot and her phone fell onto the floor. Within minutes, she claims, deputies had confiscated the phones, handcuffed Carrillo and taken the two of them into the break room, where a deputy pushed Carrillo into the side of a refrigerator.

Carrillo admits that he mouthed off, telling the officer, "If I weren't in these handcuffs, it'd be a different situation and I wouldn't let myself get thrown around like this." He says he was trying to compensate for being scared.

The deputy, however, called for backup.

When the beating was over, an ambulance took Carrillo to the hospital. He could not open his right eye and received stitches above his eyebrow. A doctor told him he'd suffered chemical burns from the toxic spray. Photos obtained by L.A. Weekly show clear evidence of a severe beating to his head.

The county is prosecuting Carrillo, claiming he attacked the deputies and that the force was justified.

The beating was unusual in that Carrillo was a visitor and not an inmate. But the abuse he suffered is not uncommon. A growing chorus of inmates tells of broken noses, shattered jaws and other injuries from sustained beatings by Los Angeles County Sheriff's deputies who serve as guards at Men's Central Jail.

Conditions at the jail, the largest in the world, have long been considered deplorable. For more than 35 years, civil rights organizations have worked with the Sheriff's Department to make improvements. But in recent years, they say, the severity and brazenness of abuse have escalated.

Men's Central Jail "is the worst facility in the country," says Peter Eliasberg, managing attorney for the ACLU of Southern California — the only outside organization today with regular access inside the jail. The jail "is the most violent, the most dangerous, and it's a cancer right in the heart of Los Angeles."

Twenty-five years ago, a decade after the ACLU filed a federal lawsuit to improve conditions at L.A. County jails, the civil rights organization was allowed to place a monitor inside the jails. One of the hopes was to curtail jailer abuse of inmates, 90 percent of whom are awaiting disposition of their cases and thus have not been found guilty of crimes.

Yet today, the number of inmate complaints to the ACLU about abuse by jailers at all county lockups is greater than ever, with a disproportionate number specifically from inmates at Men's Central Jail.

The ACLU says that as of a couple of years ago, it was receiving from inmates in county lockups three to four complaints per week that allege unprovoked abuse by deputies. It now fields six to seven complaints a week ago.

"Los Angeles County jails are rapidly developing a reputation as perhaps the worst in the nation," says Margaret Winter, a Washington, D.C., attorney who leads the ACLU's National Prison Project effort to combat abuses in jails. "I'm basing that it's the worst on that I've never seen this accumulation of violence. The severity, the frequency and the boldness is stunning, and I believe unprecedented."

Carrillo after his face healed


Winter recently handled a trial in Arizona involving abuses in the Maricopa County jail under hard-line Sheriff Joe Arpaio. She says, "The degree of violence is no comparison with the frequency and savagery we see in L.A. County jails."

Kelly Knapp, an attorney for the Prison Law Office in San Francisco, says L.A. County's Men's Central Jail "is known as notoriously bad in California and nationwide. It's crumbling down and is overcrowded ... and I think when we talk about conditions, old and crumbling down, they go hand in hand with abuse."

The department has constructed a cone of silence around the issue of guard-on-inmate abuse and, according to the ACLU, does not disclose much information about excessive force — not details of internal investigations, not how it determines what is or is not "reasonable force," not the disciplinary actions, if any, taken against offending guards, not the number of complaints inmates make through the inmate grievance process. Attorneys who sue on behalf of abused inmates are prohibited from discussing a deputy's record of using force or the number and nature of complaints against him.

Referring to the Maricopa County case, Winter says, "We've had nothing like the problems in getting the statistical information that we're having in L.A. County."

In response to a public records request from the Weekly, the L.A. County Sheriff's Department revealed that between 2005 and 2010, there were 5,977 use-of-force incidents in all of the county's jails. Men's Central Jail was home to 1,958 of those incidents.

Lt. Mark McCorkle, charged with supervising the county's jails, says that in most cases the use of force is found to have been justified and that no criminal act or internal-policy violation occurred. After reviewing the above statistics, he points out that the number of incidents overall has declined recently throughout the county jails — from 1,051 in 2009 to 708 in 2010.

By refusing to release specific details about those cases in L.A., however, the Sheriff's Department makes it impossible for the public to determine the extent of the abuse problem in its jails. Absent those details, the sole source of information about the jails comes from the ACLU, which is limited to documenting claims of abuse and adding them to a thick federal court case file. The organization has no power to investigate.

Somewhat surprising, perhaps, is that critics of the jail and Sheriff Lee Baca have found one fact to agree upon: Men's Central Jail is unsupervisable and should be shuttered.

Given the county's current budget crisis, however, Baca says there's no money to build a new jail. So despite the troubling conditions and rising tide of inmates complaining to the ACLU about being beaten and treated poorly, life at Men's Central Jail marches on, one allegation of abuse at a time.

Located just east of Chinatown, about a mile from downtown, Men's Central Jail is a testament to hulking, early 1960s jail construction. At nearly 1 million square feet, with a current average of about 4,000 inmates housed there daily, the building has a massive, daunting exterior. Its interior, however, is medieval.

Many of the floors are made up of long corridors lined with cells, making it impossible to see into any one cell without standing directly in front of it. From a supervision standpoint, Men's Central Jail is a nightmare.

Baca and the ACLU blame the layout of Men's Central Jail, in part, for the difficulties overseeing abusive jailers.

"The way the cells are lined up and the way they crowd people in there, Central Jail looks like the hulls in slave ships or the bunks in Dachau," Eliasberg says. "They're in rows and rows of cells, and to think you can monitor and run something like that safely is insane."

For many years, the county's Office of Independent Review and the ACLU have advocated placing cameras throughout the jail to document what occurs. "There are times when deputies are not being held accountable because we can't reach the level of proof we need to go forward," says Michael Gennaco, chief attorney in the Office of Independent Review, which reviews force incidents and Baca's disciplinary decisions. "Cameras tend to be tiebreakers."

Some cameras do exist; however, Gennaco says many of the ones in Men's Central Jail are outdated and don't work well.

Eliasberg says the technology for camera surveillance in jails has existed since the 1980s, yet L.A. County has dragged its feet. "The county says it has no money for cameras, yet they have hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay out lawsuit settlements," he says. In response to a public information request from the Weekly, Los Angeles County says it has paid out only $738,850 from 2008 through 2010 to settle lawsuits alleging abuse by jail deputies.

"We've got to start aggressively pursuing getting cameras in there," says Steve Whitmore, a spokesman for Baca. The L.A. County Board of Supervisors recently approved $7.2 million in one-time funding for closed-circuit television monitoring. But for it to be effective, even the Sheriff's Department concedes there needs to be a camera aimed down each hallway — and into nearly every one of the 2,825 cells.

Peter Eliasberg and Esther Lim of the ACLU

Without those cameras, inmates — and the ACLU — are in a position of weakness. "After a beating, deputies often claim that the prisoners were the attackers, even though many were handcuffed ... cowering from incoming blows," the ACLU wrote in a report.

Carrillo, the laborer who was beaten while visiting his brother, says he was handcuffed during the entire beating and that the officers were trying to teach him a lesson for his smart-aleck remarks.

The deputies, however, state in their reports that Carrillo was not in cuffs and fought wildly, punching and kicking officers as they tried to book him for illegally possessing a phone. They claim the use of force was necessary to subdue him.

After the incident, Carrillo was charged with battery on a custodial officer, resisting an executive official and attempted escape during lawful detention.

"When I read the police report," Carrillo says, "I was blown away how they created such a convenient story for themselves."

Nearly all of those making allegations of abuse at Men's Central Jail face the same fundamental problem as Carrillo: It's their word versus the cops', and the cops rarely lose.

The ACLU's Eliasberg says, "At best you get witness corroboration from other inmates, but by and large it's almost always the inmate against a number of deputies, and juries are very sympathetic to officers."

On Jan. 24 of this year, the current ACLU jail monitor, Esther Lim, reported that she saw a pair of deputies savagely beat inmate James Parker at the county's Twin Towers jail, next door to Men's Central Jail. In a federal court declaration, Lim said the officers continued to beat Parker even though he seemed unconscious and was not fighting back. Parker "looked like a mannequin that was being used as a punching bag," she said.

The sheriff's log, according to news reports, said Parker attacked the deputies and would not stop until he was hit with a stun gun.

Lim, who is relatively new to her job, had never personally filed a declaration against the Sheriff's Department, Eliasberg says. After she did so, the department fired back. Instead of treating Lim as a witness to a potential crime, Sheriff's Department spokesman Whitmore questioned Lim, asking in a widely distributed Associated Press report why she waited several weeks to file a declaration in court and did not report the abuse right away.

Eliasberg has said Lim did not report the abuse immediately because she was scared and because more than a dozen other incidents of abuse reported by the ACLU in the last year had gone nowhere at the department.

Shortly after the Parker incident, the ACLU asked Daniel Richman, a Columbia University law professor and former federal prosecutor, to comment on Whitmore's remarks. Richman issued a stern statement, saying, "It is odd, and indeed troubling, when a law enforcement spokesman publicly disparages the credibility of a potential prosecution witness."

Whitmore has said that both Internal Affairs and the Office of Independent Review are examining the case, and Eliasberg says he has asked the U.S. Attorney's Office to investigate and is optimistic that the feds are looking into it.

Winter, of the ACLU's National Prison Project, says she recently took an informal survey of prison litigators across the country and discovered that most are aware of incidents similar to what Lim witnessed, "in that the inmate claimed they were subjected to a severe beating while the jailers were calling out to an unresisting inmate, 'Stop resisting, stop resisting,' using the typical script as a cue that the victim will be made the criminal.

"What was unique, which no one around the country had ever heard of, was the boldness and brazenness for an attack like this to happen in essentially a public area of the jail," Winter says. "I think this clearly indicates that the violence has been so deeply rooted and has for so long been accepted by the top brass that there's no sense of shame or fear of being punished. There is a boldness that is breathtaking here and that doesn't exist anywhere else."

The ACLU began its journey toward eradicating cruel and unusual punishment from the L.A. County jails in 1975, when it sued the county and the sheriff in federal court. The county lost, reforms were made and conditions slowly began to improve. But when jail populations started to explode in the 1980s, those improvements vanished, and conditions went south. In 1985, the county agreed to allow an ACLU member inside the jails to monitor conditions as a compromise and alternative to the ACLU hauling the county back into court for contempt.

Now, more than 25 years later, the ACLU says its Prison Project team receives an average of 4,500 inmate complaints a year, on issues that include violence, retaliation, mental health care and unsanitary conditions. From March through August of 2010, the ACLU fielded more than 70 complaints about excessive force or retaliation by deputies from inmates inside Men's Central Jail. The organization has received hundreds of like complaints over the past two years from inmates at the jail. The ongoing federal court case file is bursting with declarations from inmates telling stories of bone-rattling abuse.


ACLU staffer said she witnessed deputies beating inmate at Twin Towers


http://witnessla.com/aclu/2011/admin/dangerous-jails-the-witness-part-1/

Part 1: THE WITNESS

On Monday, January 24, 2011, ACLU Jails monitor Esther Lim was seated in one of the seven cubicles reserved for attorneys in module 142 in the Twin Towers facility of the Los Angeles County jail system. She was there in cubicle number five (of the seven) in order to meet with an inmate named Christopher Brown, who was now seated in the matching cubicle directly opposite her. Lim and Brown were separated by a 2 by 3 foot window and spoke to each other via the telephones mounted on the right side of each cubicle.

It is a set-up akin to that depicted in nearly every prison visiting scene you’ve ever seen in the movies or on TV. Except that in Twin Towers, the public visiting area is located on the 1st floor near to the exit, whereas the attorney visiting rooms are inside the various modules in the jail’s interior.


Lim is the latest in a string of So Cal ACLU jails monitors. The monitors were originally put in place after the ACLU sued the County of Los Angeles in federal court in the mid-1970s over what it believed to be unconstitutional conditions at LA’s Men’s Central Jail. The ACLU won the lawsuit—known as Rutherford v. Block, now just called Rutherford, for short—and, as part of the subsequent ruling that mandated improvements in jail conditions, the court appointed the Southern California branch of the ACLU as monitor, to make sure that the ordered changes were being made. Nearly four decades later, some changes have been accomplished, while others are depressingly slow in coming. More recently, however, the sheriff’s department installed special hot lines that allow inmates to call the ACLU to report complaints that they would like to see addressed.

Lim, who is in her late 20s, has been the monitor since last October and visits one of the LA County jail facilities every day of the work week except for Thursday. Much of her time on site is spent talking to inmates who have requested a meeting to tell her about some problem or other. The most common problems reported are things like lack of access to adequate medical care, too little out-of-cell time and not enough recreation.

Sometimes, however, the complaints are more dramatic and involve accusations of excessive use of force and other forms of brutality by the deputies toward the prisoners. Yet such tales are difficult to verify. An inmate who claims he was beat up by sheriff’s deputies usually has no witnesses other than the deputies he has accused of wrongdoing.

However on Monday January 24th, when a beating was alleged to have occurred between an inmate and two deputies, this time an outside witness present.

According to Lim, the incident in question began after she had been talking to Brown for about 30 minutes. She heard what she thought sounded like some kind of scuffle coming from the “staging area” outside two windows that were located on the far right wall of the attorneys room. She later described the noises in a sworn deposition as the “sounds of fists hitting a body.” Lim said she also heard thuds against the attorney room wall underneath the windows, and “other noises that sounded like a fight.” Hearing the commotion, Brown left his cubicle and moved toward the windows and the noises. Lim paused for a moment, then did the same.

What Lim saw at first confused her. An African American prisoner, whom she later learned was a 35-year-old named James Parker, was lying face down on the floor unmoving while, according to Lim, two sheriff’s deputies were punching and “kneeing” the prone man while simultaneously yelling “Stop fighting!” and alternately, “Stop resisting!”

For the first few seconds, Lim could not make sense of the scene. She could see, she said, that Parker was neither fighting back nor was he resisting. He wasn’t even flinching, despite the force of the blows. Instead, he was lying motionless on the floor as if unconscious.

With a nod toward the scene outside the windows, Brown turned briefly to Lim and shrugged. “See. It’s happening now,” he said.

After a bunch of punches, said Lim, one of the deputies tased Parker —first three or four times in his leg, then three or four more times in his back. All the while he kept shouting the same bizarre monotonic chant: “Stop fighting! Stop resisting!”

Parker’s body convulsed at each tasing, then went limp again. Lim thought irrationally that it looked as if the deputies were using a mannequin in inmate garb as a punching bag.

After about a minute of disbelieving observation Lim banged hard on the window with the palm of her right hand, hoping to get the deputies’ attention. The LASD deputies—whom she would later learn were named Ochoa and Hirsch—did not look up. Eventually Deputy Ochoa did look up and, according to Lim, looked at her hard and motioned her emphatically away from the window.

Spooked, Lim dutifully moved away. By that time a frightened Brown had also retreated from the window back to his side of the attorney client cubicle—except that he was no longer sitting in a chair, but lying on the ground as if trying to become invisible. After exchanging a few words with Brown, Lim gathered her purse and other belongings, left the attorney room and walked quickly to the elevator, which she took the first floor, then headed outside to the parking lot. She passed three or four deputies on her way out, but said nothing to them. “I was scared,” she said later. After watching the beating, she was no longer sure whom she could trust.

Peter Eliasberg and Esther Lim of the ACLU

Instead of telling deputies, Lim called her boss, Peter Eliasberg, the ACLU/SC’s managing attorney. The ACLU immediately filed a complaint.

The next morning, Lim was back at the office reviewing the jail logs and reports that she gets from the sheriff’s department every day via email. She noted that there was a “Significant Use of Force” log entry for Twin Towers for Monday, the 24th.

The entry describing an altercation between two unnamed deputies and an inmate named James Parker who, according to the log, attacked the deputies and continued attacking even while being tased in the leg and the back.

Stunned at the alternate version in the log, Lim went to Twin Towers in the afternoon and where she talked with Brown briefly and arranged for a longer meeting in the attorney’s room the next day, Wednesday.

On Wednesday Lim brought one of the ACLU’s attorneys with her and the two met with Brown, who told the attorney and the monitor what had happened after Lim left the jail.

http://witnessla.com/aclu/2011/admin/dangerous-jails-the-witness-part-2/

Part 2: Brown’s account of what happened
__________________________________________________

The ACLU has filed dozens of complaints over the years alleging that sheriff’s deputies inside LA County jail have beaten or otherwise mistreated inmates. As recently as May of last year, they released a 64-page report  on the LA County jail system charging that it fostered a “culture of fear and violence.” However, according to Peter Eliasberg, the managing attorney for the Southern California branch of the ACLU, in most cases, the only witnesses to incidents of alleged mistreatment by deputies are the deputies themselves who say the beatings et al never happened, and prisoners whose accounts are chronically disbelieved. Thus the complaints almost never go anywhere.

Then on January 24 of this year, Esther Lim, the ACLU’s newest jails coordinator, said she witnessed two deputies brutally beating and tasing an inmate named James Safari Parker, a 35-year-old who was awaiting trial on a nonviolent marijuana charge. At the time of the incident in question, Lim was visiting another inmate, a man named Christopher Brown, who also witnessed the alleged beating.

In Part 1 of this story you can read Esther Lim’s account of the incident.
______________________________________________________

Christopher Brown was in one of the cubicles at the Twin Tower jail facility that is reserved for attorneys who need to meet with their clients. He was talking to ACLU jails monitor Esther Lim who was sitting in the twin of his cubicle, right across from him, separated by a glass window. All at once, Brown said, he heard loud “cussing” outside the attorneys’ room. Someone said the word, “motherfucker.” Then Brown heard what he later described as scuffling noises, boots squeaking and various thumps and thuds. A fight, he thought.

Brown stood up and strode to the locked door that separates the attorneys’ room from the “staging area,” a large space that contains the jail module’s recreation area. The door featured two windows—one in the top half of the door, the second in the lower half— that allowed Brown to peer out at the staging area to see what it was that was causing all the scuffling noises.

“I saw an inmate who looked African-American, who I later learned was Parker,” Brown stated in his signed declaration about the events of that day. “He had big braids that were sticking out from his head and [he] was standing next to the water fountain in the staging area with his hands covering his face, with two deputies punching him.”

At that point, Brown said, he could only see the deputies backs, but he could see their punching motions clearly. He glanced at Lim, who by that time, was also standing at the windows on her side of the attorney’s room. “See, it’s happening now,” he said.

Brown then said he looked back out the windows in time to see Parker stumbling forward, then falling to the ground between the two deputies, his hands out in front of him. However, according to Brown, when Parker hit the ground, he stopped moving. “He looked like he was knocked out,” said Brown. “He appeared limp.” The fall brought Parker right up to the door nearest to where Brown was standing.
It was at that point that Brown got an angle on the deputies, whom he identified as Hirsch and Ochoa, both officers who had worked on the module. To his surprise, both deputies began punching the prone and unmoving Parker, according to Brown. Then one of the deputies, whose name Brown happened to know, Hirsch, began “kneeing” Parker. Finally, the other deputy—Deputy Ochoa— got out a taser gun and, according to Brown, tased Parker first in the leg several times, then in his back.

Brown saw Parker’s body convulse each time he was tased, he said, but otherwise the man with the deputies appeared to be out cold.

Like Lim, Brown said that Deputy Hirsch kept yelling “Stop fighting! Stop resisting!” even though Parker was in no condition to resist anything, according to Brown.

At this point, said Brown, Deputy Ochoa pointed a finger at him and yelled, “Lay down on your stomach and face the fucking wall.”

Brown scurried back to the cubicle and did what he was told to do. He laid down on the floor—which is where Esther Lim found him when she went back to the cubicle before leaving the building.

After Lim was gone, more deputies came into the attorneys’ room and into the staging area. Someone took pictures. A jail trustee arrived with a mop to swab down the floor where Parker had been lying and, according to Brown, had bled some on to the ground.

A sergeant asked Brown what had happened. Brown said he told him what he had witnessed. But while he talked, Deputy Ochoa appeared nearby and give him a hard look, said Brown what he took to be a threat, The sergeant escorted Ochoa away then left to get a video camera, at which point Brown spoke to Deputy Ryan Hirsch, the second of the deputies who had allegedly beat James Parker, who complained that he had injured his hand.

Brown said he told Hirsch that “a lady from the ACLU was here and saw what happened.”

“My advice is to stay out of it,” Hirsch said, according to Brown. “It doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

Brown did, however, give a statement on video about the incident. That much was verified by Sheriff’s Department spokesman, Steve Whitmore.

Brown also detailed the sequence of events in a signed declaration for the ACLU, in which Brown said he was interviewed on video by a second sergeant named Ramos who, he said, told him several times that he didn’t have to give a statement if he feared for his safety—or words to that affect.

“I felt very intimidated by this comment,” said Brown, “like he was trying to discourage me from saying anything.”

According to Brown, the same sergeant told him that he looked uncomfortable. “It looks like you don’t want to say anything.” Again, he said, he felt intimidated and thought that Sergeant Ramos was suggesting that perhaps he should not talk about what he had seen.

Brown said he gave the statement anyway. “I thought, if someone had seem me being beat up by deputies like the way it happened to Parker, I’d want that person to stand up for me and tell what happened.”

Brown also told Sergeant Ramos about Esther Lim having witnessed the eventl. According to Brown Ramos said that he knew who Lim was and where she was from and that it would “not change” his report.

BACK AT THE ACLU OFFICE, Peter Eliasberg said he assumed that someone would also want to interview Esther Lim—the sole outside witness to the Twin Towers incident. But, according to Eliasberg, no one from the sheriff’s department attempted to contact Lim.

Lim, however, checked on Parker and learned that he had stitches in his face and bruising in his facial area and his ribs.

By the end of the week, criminal charges had been filed —against James Parker. He was charged with with a felony assault on an officer and obstructing an officer in his line of duty.

When asked why no one from LASD had interviewed Lim before filing charges against Paker, Steve Whitmore said that they had attempted to reach Lim. “And she could have called us. I mean if she was so concerned about Mr. Parker’s safety, why didn’t she immediately report what had happened to the Sheriff’s department.”

As for Brown’s account in the declaration?

“It’s a fabrication,” Whitmore said. Both Brown and Parker were interviewed on video. “And they both said nothing happened.”

When Eliasberg and Lim hear what Whitmore has said about the sheriffs trying unsuccessfully to contact Lim, they are emphatic. “That just isn’t true. No one has called us,” said Eliasberg.

As to why Lim didn’t reported the alleged beating to the sheriffs, she said it was simple.

“I was scared,” she said. “If you see two police officers beating up a man on the street, would you go flag down the nearest police car?”

I’ve read reports of this kind of thing,” said Lim. “But I’ve never seen deputies viciously beating up an inmate. Nothing compares to the brutality of seeing it in person. It was scary.”

ON FEBRUARY 3, JAMES PARKER WAS SET TO BE ARRAIGNED IN IN DEPT. 30 OF THE DOWNTOWN CRIMINAL COURT, but he didn’t show up. According to court records, he wouldn’t come out of his cell. The unofficial word is that he was too spooked. The court records show that the same thing happened on Feb 4.

On Monday February 7, an article appeared in the Los Angeles Times  about the alleged beating and the fact that Lim had witnessed it. That same day, the ACLU filed an official complaint about the incident.

On Tuesday February 8, following the appearance of the Times’ story, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department launched an internal criminal investigation into the alleged beating.

In the meantime, Parker is on what is called “keep-away” status, said Steve Whitmore, meaning he is separated from all other inmates and accompanied at all times by a sheriff’s department sergeant.

On Feb. 9, James Parker was again set to be arraigned. Again he refused to come out of his cell.

When he was once more not present in court on Feb. 10, Superior Court Judge Upinder S. Kalra got fed up and ordered the sheriff’s department to “extract” Parker from his cell and get him to court, “by all means necessary.”

On February 14, Valentines Day, he was a no show.

On February 15, extraction was presumably successful and James Parker was finally arraigned.

He pleaded not guilty to both felony counts

His preliminary hearing is set for February 28.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

https://www.aclu.org/prisoners-rights/aclu-witnesses-brutal-beating-los-angeles-county-jail-inmate-sheriff-s-deputies

A civilian monitor was visiting the jail on another matter on Jan. 24, when she saw two deputies punch and use a Taser on an inmate who lay unconscious. A department log confirms the incident but offers different details.

A civilian jail monitor said she witnessed two Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies treat an inmate like "a punching bag," unjustifiably beating him as he lay unconscious for at least two minutes, according to a court declaration filed Monday by the ACLU.

The violent attack January 24 on James Parker, detained on a non-violent marijuana charge, was witnessed by ACLU/SC’s Esther Lim, who is assigned to monitor all county jails.

The representative for the civil liberties organization was at Twin Towers jail for an unrelated meeting with another inmate when, according to her declaration, she heard thuds from outside the room she was in. Through a window, she said, she saw two deputies punching, kicking and Tasering an inmate.

Esther Lim, the ACLU observer, said the inmate never resisted, and his body was limp "like he was a mannequin" throughout the assault. In an interview with The Times, Lim said the deputies did not realize she was watching until after the beating stopped. A declaration from another inmate supports her account.

An internal sheriff's log also appears to confirm the Jan. 24 incident, but offers a different narrative. The log states that the inmate punched a deputy and charged at him. When another deputy tried to help, the inmate punched him as well and remained combative until he was Tasered, according to the sheriff's log.

Lim called the deputies' account a fabrication, saying inmate James Parker was so still while being beaten that she worried he was dead. During the incident, she said the deputies monotonously repeated "stop resisting" and "stop fighting" as though they "were reading from a script."

Lim said the ACLU commonly receives complaints from inmates who say deputies beat them while repeating "stop resisting" commands, even when the inmates aren't resisting. Lim said she suspects the deputies involved in this incident recited the commands as a ruse to later justify their actions with the help of a jailhouse recording or other deputies who may have heard their commands.

A sheriff's spokesman said the matter is being investigated, though "initial findings" indicate the inmate was combative, and one of the deputies injured his hand and had swelling on his face.

Allegations of deputy brutality in county jails are common but hard to substantiate. Aside from other deputies, usually the only witnesses are inmates, whose accounts are inherently considered less credible, experts say. This incident offers an especially rare instance in which a third party was there to observe.

One of the deputies involved in the incident was identified in court records as Ryan Hirsch. The other was identified by the ACLU by his last name, Ochoa. Sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore declined to confirm their names. Both, he said, declined requests from The Times for an interview. The deputies remain on active duty, Whitmore said.

Parker, 35, was charged Monday with felony counts of battery and resisting an officer in connection with the incident. According to Lim's account, Parker was lying on his stomach, looking "unconscious" or "even dead." Hirsch and Ochoa, she said, simultaneously punched him and kneed him. Parker, she said, never put up his hands to protect his head, which Lim took as a sign that he had lost consciousness.

The deputies Tasered Parker's leg up to four times, she said, and his torso up to three times. A minute into the beating, Ochoa motioned to the other deputy, bringing his index finger to his lips, Lim recalled. Hirsch yelled "stop resisting" and "stop fighting" just once more after Ochoa motioned, she said.

Soon after the incident, Ochoa looked at Lim through the window and signaled for her to move away from the window, she said.

During another visit the next day, she said, she recognized Ochoa and at one point noticed him "staring at me in an aggressive manner."

Parker received stitches to his face, pain in his ribs and a swollen cheek and eye, according to the ACLU.

"This makes me feel even more strongly that these kinds of incidents go on a lot," said Peter J. Eliasberg, managing attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. "And every time we bring them to the Sheriff's Department, they consistently say, 'They're all false, they're all false, prisoners lie.' "

Whitmore said investigators will interview all the witnesses.

"It's rare that you have a civilian eyewitness, and what we don't understand is she never mentioned this to us," Whitmore said. "Why didn't she come forward? Why didn't she talk to us?"

Eliasberg said the ACLU did not notify the Sheriff's Department immediately because in the past officials there have been quick to deny any complaints.

A court declaration from the inmate who was meeting with Lim at the time of the incident also disputed the deputies' telling. Lim said inmate Christopher Brown had seen the altercation develop before she did. Brown said Parker was not resisting.

"I saw him stumbling forward, towards me, falling to the ground," Brown said in a court declaration. "He looked like he was knocked out." After the incident, Brown said, another inmate had to mop up what appeared to be blood.

Brown said he was interviewed by deputies about the incident afterward. He said Ochoa was present at first. "As I was telling the sergeant that I saw Deputy Ochoa punching Parker, Deputy Ochoa stared at me in an aggressive manner, so I asked him 'What?' He aggressively said 'What' back at me.' "

Michael Gennaco, who heads the Office of Independent Review, the department's official watchdog, said involved deputies should not be present during interviews. Whitmore said the deputy was not present and that Brown's allegation was a "fabrication."

After Ochoa was escorted away, Brown said, he saw the other involved deputy, Hirsch, who warned him not to get involved.

"My advice," he said the deputy told him, "is to stay out of it. It doesn't have anything to do with you."

robert.faturechi@latimes.com


Raymond Smoot


An inmate at an overcrowded and long-troubled jail died after a fight with guards. An attorney for his family said he was beaten and stomped to death in his cell.

Six guards were placed on leave Monday while state investigators look into Raymond Smoot’s death, which was ruled a homicide by the state medical examiner’s office.

He was out of his cell asking to talk to a guard supervisor about his medications. A diabetic with high blood pressure, Smoot had been without his medications.

A guard had trouble getting Smoot back in his cell Saturday night at the state-run Baltimore Central Booking and Intake Center, and he called for backup, authorities said. A struggle broke out and 25 to 30 guards were involved, said Archer Blackwell, a spokesman for the guards union.

Smoot, 52, was injured and died at a hospital.

Mark Vernarelli, a spokesman for the state Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, declined to release details of the fight.

But Warren Brown, an attorney for Smoot’s family, said Smoot was “beaten and stomped while in his cell by a number of officers.”

“It’ll be clear that this institution is operating with an absence of rules and regulations on how to deal with these types of procedures,” Brown said.

The Baltimore branch of the NAACP will request an FBI investigation, the civil rights organization said in a news release issued late Monday.

‘Overwhelmed and broken’ 

Since 2002, 27 inmates have died at central booking, according to state Sen. Verna Jones, who called for a task force to investigate the jail, saying Smoot’s death “illustrates a system that is overwhelmed and broken.”

People arrested in Baltimore are brought to central booking to be identified, fingerprinted and photographed before they have court hearings.

Opened in 1995, central booking was designed to process up to 45,000 people a year. Last year, it processed about 100,000. Cells designed to hold five to eight people are frequently jammed with as many as 18. Some inmates nap under toilets. Sick people without medications get sicker, sometimes vomiting on others.

Last month, a judge ordered that all inmates held longer than 24 hours be set free.

Smoot had been in central booking since May 4 on a theft charge, awaiting trial in June. He was initially held on $5,000 bail, which was later reduced. His family said they had intended to bail him out on Monday.

Bruised, bloody 

Delvonna Smoot, Smoot’s niece, said she saw her uncle’s body and his face was bruised and bloody.

“The doctors said they’ve never seen another human being beat somebody as bad as they beat my uncle, never,” she said.

The incident is the latest problem for Maryland’s troubled prison system. An inmate died last year after a violent encounter with prison staff. Another was allegedly strangled in February on a prison bus, leading an inmate to be charged and prison officials to fire three officers and discipline two others.

Rekia Boyd family awarded $4.5 million settlement


The Chicago City Council Wednesday approved a $4.5 million settlement with the family of Rekia Boyd, an innocent by-stander who was shot and killed by a Chicago police officer.

Wednesday night the family is troubled that the officer is still with the department.

It will be a year ago next week that Rekia Boyd was shot in the head by off-duty Chicago detective Dante Servin.

The city acknowledges that Servin, seated in his car, fired five shots blindly over his shoulder at a man with whom he'd exchanged angry words.

That man was Antonio Cross who was on his cellphone when he was shot in the thumb. Another bullet struck 22-year-old Rekia as she turned to escape the gunfire. She died the next day.

"We didn't even get a damn I'm sorry yet. We're still waiting," said Boyd's brother, Martinez Sutton.

Rekia's Boyd's family will receive $4.5 million as part of a wrongful death settlement approved by the city council. But justice, they say, will not be served until and unless Detective Servin is criminally charged.

"Superintendent (Garry) McCarthy and State's Attorney (Anita) Alvarez should accelerate their investigation and bring charges," said Bishop Tavis Grant. "It's very clear this woman was murdered."

Detective Servin was placed on administrative duty after the shooting where he remains today.

The Independent Police Review Authority in November turned over its report on the shooting to the State's Attorney office where it currently remains.

"Before I knew it, he got his gun aimed at my head and started shooting," Antonio Cross said.

Though wounded, Cross was charged after the shooting with aggravated assault, detective Servin as the victim. Cross went to court Wednesday morning. Servin did not, and the charge against Cross was dismissed.

"This has been a farce all along," said Benjamin Starks, Cross' attorney. "They knew they were not going to go forward, but they kept up the charade."

After approving another multi-million dollar settlement involving police conduct, some council members wonder aloud about discipline.

"There are certain mistakes that people make and they do lose their jobs for them. There are consequences for those mistakes," said Alderman Howard Brookins.

The financial settlement in the Boyd death came quickly, but the possible criminal prosecution of a police officer is not moving at the same speed.

The State's Attorney's office says that its review is ongoing and beyond that no comment on when or whether charges may come.