Governor saw 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 still 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 residence: troopers’ lethal arrest of Ronald Greene.

There, they privately watched a crucial body-camera video of the Black motorist’s violent arrest that showed a bruised and bloody Greene going limp and drawing his last breaths — footage that prosecutors, detectives and medical examiners wouldn’t even know existed for one more six months.

While the Democratic governor has distanced himself from allegations of a cover-up in the explosive case by contending proof was promptly turned over to authorities, an Associated Press investigation based on interviews and information found 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 essential footage into the fingers of those with the facility to cost the white troopers seen stunning, punching and dragging Greene.

That video, which showed critical moments and audio absent from other footage that was turned over, wouldn’t attain prosecutors till nearly 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, nonetheless 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 is 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 loss of life that troopers initially blamed on a automotive crash have turn out to be questions that have dogged his administration for months. Edwards and his workers are anticipated to be known as within weeks to testify underneath oath before a bipartisan legislative committee probing the case and a possible cover-up.

Edwards’ attorneys say there was no way for the governor to have identified 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 employees to withhold proof.

Regardless, the governor’s attorneys didn’t mention seeing the video in a gathering just days later with state prosecutors, who wouldn’t obtain the footage till a detective discovered 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 information show that the video was turned over to federal authorities about the same time, mid-April 2021.

Edwards, a lawyer from a protracted line of Louisiana sheriffs, did not 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 available to the governor and not the officers investigating the case. The governor’s employees additionally harassed that state police, not Edwards’ office, truly possessed the video.

“I can’t return and fix what was achieved,” Block said. “Everyone would agree that if there would have been some understanding that the district attorney didn't have a chunk of evidence, whether or not it was a video or whatever it is likely to be, then, in fact, the district legal professional ought to have all of the evidence in the case. In fact.”

At situation is the 30-minute body-camera footage from Lt. John Clary, the highest-ranking trooper to respond to Greene’s arrest. It's one in every of two movies of the incident, and captured occasions not seen on the 46-minute clip from Trooper Dakota DeMoss that shows troopers swarming Greene’s car after a high-speed chase, repeatedly jolting him with stun weapons, beating him in 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 important to the investigations because it's the only footage that reveals the second a handcuffed, bloody Greene moans underneath the burden of two troopers, twitches and then goes nonetheless. It additionally exhibits troopers ordering the heavyset, 49-year-old to remain face down on the ground with his hands and toes restrained for greater than nine minutes — a tactic use-of-force specialists criticized as harmful and more likely to have restricted his breathing.

And unlike the DeMoss video, which matches silent halfway by way of when the microphone is turned off, Clary’s video has sound all through, picking up a trooper ordering Greene to “lay on your f------ stomach 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 skilled highlighted the significance of the Clary footage during testimony through which he characterized the troopers’ actions as “torture and homicide.”

Lt. John Clary's body-camera video.

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

Clary’s video reached state police inner affairs officers more than a 12 months after Greene’s demise when they opened a probe and later showed it to the governor. Nevertheless it was lengthy unknown to detectives working the criminal case and missing from the preliminary investigative case file they turned over to prosecutors in August 2019. Its absence has develop into a focal point in the federal probe, which is trying not solely on 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 own from Greene’s arrest and as an alternative gave investigators a thumb drive of other troopers’ movies.

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 think that there was any cover-up by state police of this matter,” Reeves, who has described Greene’s dying as “terrible however lawful,” mentioned 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, stated he didn’t be taught the video existed till 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 internal affairs investigation into whether or not 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 stays 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 building in Baton Rouge and watched videos of the arrest, together with the Clary video, the governor’s office 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 attorney leading the state investigation.

The Oct. 13 assembly was supposed to plan a closed-door occasion the subsequent day wherein Greene’s household would meet the governor and look at footage of the arrest. Although the assembly was about displaying 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 whereas prosecutors were at nighttime.

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

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

That agreement falls apart over what happened the next day.

Greene’s family says it was not proven 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, nevertheless, disputed that, saying the Clary video was in fact proven.

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

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

“The very fact is we never saw it,” added Mona Hardin, Greene’s mother. “They’ve tried to have whole control of the narrative.”

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

An AP investigation that followed discovered Greene’s was amongst at the least a dozen circumstances over the previous decade in 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 said the beatings were countenanced by a culture of impunity, nepotism and, in some cases, outright racism.

Edwards was knowledgeable of Greene’s deadly arrest inside hours, when he obtained a textual content message from Reeves telling him that troopers engaged in a “violent, lengthy wrestle” with a Black motorist, ending in his loss of life. However the governor, who was within the midst of a good reelection race at the time, kept quiet about the case publicly for 2 years as police continued to push the narrative that Greene died in a crash.

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

After the videos have been revealed, the governor broke his silence and called the troopers’ actions felony. In recent months, as his role in the Greene case has come underneath scrutiny, Edwards has gone further to describe them as racist while denying he’s interfered with or delayed investigations.

The governor’s attorneys now acknowledge prosecutors did not have the Clary video till spring of 2021. But Edwards insisted as recently as February that evidence turned over to prosecutors previous to his November 2019 re-election was proof there was no cover-up.

“The facts are clear that the proof of what occurred that evening was presented to prosecutors nicely earlier than my election, state and federal prosecutors,” Edwards said in a news conference.

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

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