Governor noticed deadly arrest video months earlier than prosecutors

By JIM MUSTIAN and JAKE BLEIBERG

https://apnews.com/article/death-of-ronald-greene-politics-arrests-race-and-ethnicity-racial-injustice-599fae0d1018e0632554043f4e5b8fd3

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — With racial tensions nonetheless simmering over the killing of George Floyd, Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards and his top legal professionals gathered in a state police convention room in October 2020 to arrange for the fallout from a troubling case closer to home: troopers’ lethal arrest of Ronald Greene.

There, they privately watched an important body-camera video of the Black motorist’s violent arrest that confirmed a bruised and bloody Greene going limp and drawing his remaining breaths — footage that prosecutors, detectives and health workers wouldn’t even know existed for an additional six months.

Whereas the Democratic governor has distanced himself from allegations of a cover-up within the explosive case by contending proof was promptly turned over to authorities, an Related Press investigation primarily based on interviews and records discovered that wasn’t the case with the 30-minute video he watched. Neither Edwards, his staff nor the state police he oversees acted urgently to get the crucial footage into the fingers of these with the power to cost the white troopers seen gorgeous, punching and dragging Greene.

That video, which showed critical moments and audio absent from different footage that was turned over, wouldn’t reach prosecutors till nearly two years after Greene’s Might 10, 2019, death on a rural roadside close to Monroe. Now three years have handed, and after lengthy, ongoing federal and state probes, still nobody has been criminally charged.

“The optics are horrible for the governor. It makes him culpable in this, in delaying justice,” stated Rafael Goyeneche, a former prosecutor who's president of the Metropolitan Crime Fee, a New Orleans-based watchdog group.

“All it takes for evil to prevail is for good males to do nothing,” Goyeneche added. “And that’s what the governor did, nothing.”

What the governor knew, when he knew it and what he did about an in-custody loss of life that troopers initially blamed on a automotive crash have turn out to be questions which have dogged his administration for months. Edwards and his staff are expected to be referred to as inside weeks to testify beneath oath before a bipartisan legislative committee probing the case and a possible cover-up.

Edwards’ attorneys say there was no approach for the governor to have identified at the time that the video he watched had not already been turned over to prosecutors, and there was no effort to by the governor or his staff to withhold proof.

Regardless, the governor’s attorneys didn’t point out seeing the video in a gathering just days later with state prosecutors, who wouldn’t obtain the footage till a detective found it virtually accidentally six months later. Whereas U.S. Justice Division officials refused to comment, the top of the state police, Col. Lamar Davis, advised the AP that his data show that the video was turned over to federal authorities about the same time, mid-April 2021.

Edwards, a lawyer from an extended line of Louisiana sheriffs, didn't make himself accessible for an interview. However his chief counsel, Matthew Block, acknowledged to the AP that it was not acceptable for proof to be accessible to the governor and not the officials investigating the case. The governor’s workers also stressed that state police, not Edwards’ office, truly possessed the video.

“I can’t return and repair what was performed,” Block stated. “All people would agree that if there would have been some understanding that the district legal professional didn't have a piece of evidence, whether it was a video or whatever it might be, then, after all, the district attorney should have all of the proof within the case. In fact.”

At difficulty is the 30-minute body-camera footage from Lt. John Clary, the highest-ranking trooper to reply to Greene’s arrest. It is considered one of two movies of the incident, and captured events not seen on the 46-minute clip from Trooper Dakota DeMoss that exhibits troopers swarming Greene’s automobile after a high-speed chase, repeatedly jolting him with stun guns, beating him within the head and dragging him by his ankle shackles. Throughout the frantic scene, Greene is barely resisting, pleading for mercy and wailing, “I’m your brother! I’m scared! I’m scared!”

Trooper Dakota DeMoss' body-camera video.

However Clary’s video is maybe even more significant to the investigations because it's the solely footage that reveals the moment a handcuffed, bloody Greene moans beneath the weight of two troopers, twitches after which goes nonetheless. It also reveals troopers ordering the heavyset, 49-year-old to stay face down on the bottom along with his fingers and toes restrained for greater than 9 minutes — a tactic use-of-force experts criticized as harmful and more likely to have restricted his respiratory.

And in contrast to the DeMoss video, which matches silent halfway through when the microphone is turned off, Clary’s video has sound all through, selecting up a trooper ordering Greene to “lay in your f------ belly like I informed you to!” and a sheriff’s deputy taunting, “Yeah, yeah, that s--- hurts, doesn’t it?”

The state police’s own use-of-force expert highlighted the significance of the Clary footage during testimony in which he characterised the troopers’ actions as “torture and murder.”

Lt. John Clary's body-camera video.

“They’re urgent on his back at one level and Ronald Greene’s foot starts kicking up,” Sgt. Scott Davis told lawmakers in March. “The same factor happened within the George Floyd trial. There was a pulmonologist who said that’s the moment of his death. The identical thing happened with Ronald Greene.”

Clary’s video reached state police inner affairs officers greater than a year after Greene’s loss of life once they opened a probe and later confirmed it to the governor. But it was lengthy unknown to detectives working the legal case and missing from the preliminary investigative case file they turned over to prosecutors in August 2019. Its absence has change into a focus in the federal probe, which is trying not solely on the actions of the troopers but whether or not state police brass obstructed justice to protect them.

Detectives say Clary falsely claimed he didn’t have any body-camera footage of his own from Greene’s arrest and as a substitute gave investigators a thumb drive of other troopers’ videos.

State police say Clary correctly uploaded his body-camera footage to a web-based proof storage system and the then-head of the company, Col. Kevin Reeves, defended his administration’s handling of the Greene case.

“I don’t suppose that there was any cover-up by state police of this matter,” Reeves, who has described Greene’s death as “awful but lawful,” said in latest legislative testimony.

But the detectives investigating Greene’s dying say they were locked out of the video storage system at the time and needed to depend on Clary to supply the footage.

Albert Paxton, the now-retired lead detective on the Greene case, mentioned he didn’t study the video existed until April 2021 when Davis, who had broad entry to body-camera video because the agency’s use-of-force skilled, made a passing reference to it in a conversation.

An inside affairs investigation into whether Clary purposely withheld the footage was inconclusive and particulars of the probe remain secret. Clary, who didn’t respond to requests for remark, prevented self-discipline and remains within the state police.

In early October 2020, days after AP revealed audio of Trooper Chris Hollingsworth bragging that he had “beat the ever-living f--- out of” Greene, Edwards and his high attorneys Block and Tina Vanichchagorn went to a state police constructing in Baton Rouge and watched movies of the arrest, together with the Clary video, the governor’s workplace mentioned.

Days later, the governor’s lawyers flew with Reeves and other police brass 200 miles north to Ruston to discuss the movies with John Belton, the Union Parish district attorney main the state investigation.

The Oct. 13 meeting was meant to plan a closed-door occasion the following day during which Greene’s family would meet the governor and look at footage of the arrest. Though the meeting was about displaying video of the arrest, it by no means emerged that the governor’s attorneys and police commanders had been all conscious of the Clary footage while prosecutors were in the dead of night.

“It didn’t come up in any respect,” Belton mentioned, adding he solely knew on the time of the DeMoss video.

Block agreed, saying, “We didn’t go through what occurred on the videos.”

That settlement falls apart over what happened the next day.

Greene’s family says it was not shown the Clary video after meeting Edwards on Oct. 14, a claim Belton and several other others who attended the viewing in Baton Rouge affirmed. State police and the governor’s office, nonetheless, disputed that, saying the Clary video was in truth shown.

But state police spokesman Capt. Nick Manale acknowledged, “The division has no proof of what was shown to the family that day.”

Lee Merritt, an legal professional for the Greene family, recalled the response he obtained when they requested if there was a Clary video: “We had been advised it was of no evidentiary value.”

“The fact is we never noticed it,” added Mona Hardin, Greene’s mother. “They’ve tried to have complete management of the narrative.”

Throughout this process, Edwards had thought-about making the Greene arrest movies public, information present, but decided in opposition to it at the request of federal prosecutors. After they had been withheld from the public more than two years, the AP obtained and revealed both the DeMoss and Clary movies in Might 2021.

An AP investigation that adopted found Greene’s was among not less than a dozen cases over the previous decade through which state police troopers or their bosses ignored or hid proof of beatings, deflected blame and impeded efforts to root out misconduct. Dozens of current and former troopers stated the beatings were countenanced by a culture of impunity, nepotism and, in some circumstances, outright racism.

Edwards was informed of Greene’s deadly arrest inside hours, when he received a textual content message from Reeves telling him that troopers engaged in a “violent, lengthy wrestle” with a Black motorist, ending in his dying. However the governor, who was in the midst of a decent reelection race at the time, saved quiet concerning the case publicly for two years as police continued to push the narrative that Greene died in a crash.

Edwards has said he first discovered of the “severe allegations” surrounding Greene’s dying in September 2020, months after Greene’s family filed a wrongful-death lawsuit and the FBI sent a sweeping subpoena for proof to state police.

After the movies have been revealed, the governor broke his silence and called the troopers’ actions criminal. In current months, as his role within the Greene case has come beneath scrutiny, Edwards has gone additional to explain them as racist while denying he’s interfered with or delayed investigations.

The governor’s lawyers now acknowledge prosecutors didn't have the Clary video till spring of 2021. But Edwards insisted as just lately as February that proof turned over to prosecutors prior to his November 2019 re-election was proof there was no cover-up.

“The information are clear that the proof of what happened that night was presented to prosecutors properly earlier than my election, state and federal prosecutors,” Edwards said in a information conference.

“So clearly that is not part of a cover-up.”

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Contact AP’s global investigative group at Investigative@ap.org.