Governor noticed lethal 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 high lawyers gathered in a state police conference room in October 2020 to organize for the fallout from a troubling case closer to house: 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 last breaths — footage that prosecutors, detectives and medical experts wouldn’t even know existed for another six months.

While 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 found that wasn’t the case with the 30-minute video he watched. Neither Edwards, his employees nor the state police he oversees acted urgently to get the crucial footage into the fingers of those with the power to charge the white troopers seen gorgeous, punching and dragging Greene.

That video, which showed essential moments and audio absent from different footage that was turned over, wouldn’t attain prosecutors until almost two years after Greene’s May 10, 2019, death on a rural roadside near Monroe. Now three years have handed, and after prolonged, ongoing federal and state probes, still no one has been criminally charged.

“The optics are horrible for the governor. It makes him culpable in this, in delaying justice,” said 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 men 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 dying that troopers initially blamed on a car crash have develop into questions that have dogged his administration for months. Edwards and his staff are expected to be known as within weeks to testify under oath before a bipartisan legislative committee probing the case and a attainable cover-up.

Edwards’ attorneys say there was no approach for the governor to have known on 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 evidence.

Regardless, the governor’s attorneys didn’t mention seeing the video in a meeting just days later with state prosecutors, who wouldn’t receive the footage till a detective found it almost by chance six months later. Whereas U.S. Justice Division officials refused to comment, the head of the state police, Col. Lamar Davis, told the AP that his records present 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, did not make himself available for an interview. But his chief counsel, Matthew Block, acknowledged to the AP that it was not acceptable for proof to be out there to the governor and never the officers investigating the case. The governor’s staff additionally harassed that state police, not Edwards’ workplace, actually possessed the video.

“I can’t return and fix what was done,” Block stated. “Everybody would agree that if there would have been some understanding that the district legal professional did not have a bit of proof, whether or not it was a video or whatever it is perhaps, then, in fact, the district attorney should have all of the evidence in the case. In fact.”

At difficulty is the 30-minute body-camera footage from Lt. John Clary, the highest-ranking trooper to answer Greene’s arrest. It is one among two movies of the incident, and captured occasions not seen on the 46-minute clip from Trooper Dakota DeMoss that reveals troopers swarming Greene’s automotive after a high-speed chase, repeatedly jolting him with stun weapons, 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 much more vital to the investigations as a result of it is the solely footage that shows the moment a handcuffed, bloody Greene moans below the weight of two troopers, twitches and then goes nonetheless. It additionally exhibits troopers ordering the heavyset, 49-year-old to stay face down on the ground together with his fingers and toes restrained for greater than nine minutes — a tactic use-of-force experts criticized as harmful and prone to have restricted his respiratory.

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

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

Lt. John Clary's body-camera video.

“They’re urgent on his again at one level and Ronald Greene’s foot starts kicking up,” Sgt. Scott Davis instructed lawmakers in March. “The same factor occurred within the George Floyd trial. There was a pulmonologist who stated that’s the second of his dying. The same thing happened with Ronald Greene.”

Clary’s video reached state police internal affairs officers more than a yr after Greene’s demise after they opened a probe and later confirmed it to the governor. Nevertheless it was lengthy unknown to detectives working the prison case and lacking from the preliminary investigative case file they turned over to prosecutors in August 2019. Its absence has become a focus within the federal probe, which is trying not solely on the actions of the troopers however whether or not state police brass obstructed justice to guard them.

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

State police say Clary properly uploaded his body-camera footage to an online evidence storage system and the then-head of the company, Col. Kevin Reeves, defended his administration’s dealing with 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 dying as “terrible however lawful,” stated in recent legislative testimony.

But the detectives investigating Greene’s loss of life say they have been locked out of the video storage system at the time and had to depend on Clary to supply the footage.

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

An inside affairs investigation into whether or not Clary purposely withheld the footage was inconclusive and details of the probe stay secret. Clary, who didn’t reply to requests for remark, prevented discipline and remains in 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 top 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 office stated.

Days later, the governor’s attorneys flew with Reeves and different police brass 200 miles north to Ruston to debate the videos with John Belton, the Union Parish district attorney leading the state investigation.

The Oct. 13 assembly was intended to plan a closed-door occasion the next day wherein Greene’s family would meet the governor and think about footage of the arrest. Though the meeting was about exhibiting video of the arrest, it by no means emerged that the governor’s lawyers and police commanders had been all aware of the Clary footage while prosecutors were at midnight.

“It didn’t come up at all,” Belton stated, adding he only knew at the time of the DeMoss video.

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

That settlement falls apart over what occurred the following 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 workplace, however, disputed that, saying the Clary video was actually shown.

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

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

“The very fact is we by no means noticed it,” added Mona Hardin, Greene’s mom. “They’ve tried to have complete control of the narrative.”

All through this process, Edwards had thought-about making the Greene arrest videos public, information present, however determined in opposition to it at the request of federal prosecutors. After they have been withheld from the public greater than two years, the AP obtained and published both the DeMoss and Clary videos in Could 2021.

An AP investigation that adopted discovered Greene’s was among at the least a dozen instances over the previous decade by which state police troopers or their bosses ignored or concealed 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 tradition of impunity, nepotism and, in some cases, outright racism.

Edwards was knowledgeable of Greene’s lethal arrest within hours, when he received a textual content message from Reeves telling him that troopers engaged in a “violent, prolonged battle” with a Black motorist, ending in his loss of life. But the governor, who was in the midst of a decent reelection race on the time, kept quiet in regards to the case publicly for 2 years as police continued to push the narrative that Greene died in a crash.

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

After the videos had been revealed, the governor broke his silence and called the troopers’ actions felony. In latest months, as his function in the Greene case has come under scrutiny, Edwards has gone additional to describe them as racist whereas denying he’s interfered with or delayed investigations.

The governor’s legal professionals now acknowledge prosecutors didn't have the Clary video until spring of 2021. However Edwards insisted as recently as February that proof turned over to prosecutors previous to his November 2019 re-election was proof there was no cover-up.

“The details are clear that the evidence of what happened that evening was introduced to prosecutors properly before my election, state and federal prosecutors,” Edwards said in a news convention.

“So obviously that isn't part of a cover-up.”

___

Contact AP’s international investigative staff at Investigative@ap.org.