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 top legal professionals gathered in a state police convention room in October 2020 to prepare for the fallout from a troubling case closer to house: troopers’ lethal arrest of Ronald Greene.

There, they privately watched a vital body-camera video of the Black motorist’s violent arrest that confirmed a bruised and bloody Greene going limp and drawing his final breaths — footage that prosecutors, detectives and health workers wouldn’t even know existed for one more 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 Associated Press investigation based on interviews and information discovered 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 essential footage into the hands of those with the power to cost the white troopers seen beautiful, punching and dragging Greene.

That video, which showed critical moments and audio absent from different footage that was turned over, wouldn’t attain prosecutors till practically two years after Greene’s May 10, 2019, dying on a rural roadside close to Monroe. Now three years have passed, and after prolonged, 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,” said Rafael Goyeneche, a former prosecutor who's president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission, 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 demise that troopers initially blamed on a automobile crash have change into questions that have dogged his administration for months. Edwards and his workers are expected to be referred to as inside weeks to testify below oath before a bipartisan legislative committee probing the case and a doable cover-up.

Edwards’ attorneys say there was no means 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 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 receive the footage till a detective found it nearly accidentally six months later. While U.S. Justice Department officers refused to remark, the head of the state police, Col. Lamar Davis, instructed 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 out there for an interview. But 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 officers investigating the case. The governor’s workers additionally confused that state police, not Edwards’ workplace, actually possessed the video.

“I can’t return and fix what was accomplished,” Block stated. “All people would agree that if there would have been some understanding that the district attorney did not have a piece of evidence, whether it was a video or whatever it may be, then, after all, the district legal professional should have all the evidence in the case. Of course.”

At challenge is the 30-minute body-camera footage from Lt. John Clary, the highest-ranking trooper to reply to Greene’s arrest. It's one in every of two movies of the incident, and captured events not seen on the 46-minute clip from Trooper Dakota DeMoss that shows troopers swarming Greene’s automotive after a high-speed chase, repeatedly jolting him with stun weapons, beating him in the head and dragging him by his ankle shackles. All through 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.

But Clary’s video is probably even more significant to the investigations because it's the only footage that shows the second a handcuffed, bloody Greene moans underneath the load of two troopers, twitches after which goes nonetheless. It additionally reveals troopers ordering the heavyset, 49-year-old to stay face down on the ground with his palms and toes restrained for greater than 9 minutes — a tactic use-of-force specialists criticized as harmful and likely to have restricted his respiratory.

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

The state police’s own use-of-force skilled highlighted the importance of the Clary footage during testimony wherein he characterised the troopers’ actions as “torture and homicide.”

Lt. John Clary's body-camera video.

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

Clary’s video reached state police internal affairs officers greater than a year after Greene’s dying after they opened a probe and later showed it to the governor. But it was long unknown to detectives working the felony case and lacking from the initial investigative case file they turned over to prosecutors in August 2019. Its absence has turn out to be a focus in the federal probe, which is trying not only at the actions of the troopers but whether state police brass obstructed justice to protect them.

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

State police say Clary properly uploaded his body-camera footage to an online proof 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 death as “terrible but lawful,” said in current legislative testimony.

However the detectives investigating Greene’s death 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, mentioned he didn’t be taught the video existed until April 2021 when Davis, who had broad entry to body-camera video because the agency’s use-of-force professional, made a passing reference to it in a conversation.

An inside affairs investigation into whether Clary purposely withheld the footage was inconclusive and details of the probe stay secret. Clary, who didn’t respond to requests for comment, prevented discipline and stays in the state police.

In early October 2020, days after AP published 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 videos of the arrest, together with the Clary video, the governor’s workplace said.

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

The Oct. 13 meeting was meant to plan a closed-door occasion the subsequent day during which Greene’s household would meet the governor and examine footage of the arrest. Although the meeting was about displaying video of the arrest, it never emerged that the governor’s legal professionals and police commanders were all aware of the Clary footage while prosecutors were at midnight.

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

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

That settlement falls aside over what happened the following day.

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

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

Lee Merritt, an lawyer for the Greene household, recalled the response he received after they asked if there was a Clary video: “We have been instructed it was of no evidentiary worth.”

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

Throughout this process, Edwards had considered making the Greene arrest movies public, information show, however determined in opposition to it on the request of federal prosecutors. After they had been withheld from the general public more than two years, the AP obtained and revealed both the DeMoss and Clary videos in Could 2021.

An AP investigation that followed discovered Greene’s was among at the very least a dozen circumstances over the past decade by which state police troopers or their bosses ignored or hid evidence of beatings, deflected blame and impeded efforts to root out misconduct. Dozens of present and former troopers mentioned the beatings had been countenanced by a culture of impunity, nepotism and, in some cases, outright racism.

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

Edwards has said he first learned of the “critical allegations” surrounding Greene’s demise 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 were published, the governor broke his silence and known as the troopers’ actions prison. In current months, as his position in the Greene case has come underneath 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 did not have the Clary video until 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 time was offered to prosecutors nicely before my election, state and federal prosecutors,” Edwards stated in a information conference.

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

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