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 prime lawyers gathered in a state police convention room in October 2020 to arrange for the fallout from a troubling case closer to home: troopers’ deadly arrest of Ronald Greene.

There, they privately watched a vital body-camera video of the Black motorist’s violent arrest that showed 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 an additional 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 Related 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 palms of these with the power to cost the white troopers seen gorgeous, punching and dragging Greene.

That video, which showed important moments and audio absent from other footage that was turned over, wouldn’t reach prosecutors till almost two years after Greene’s Could 10, 2019, demise on a rural roadside near Monroe. Now three years have handed, 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,” mentioned 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 dying that troopers initially blamed on a car 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 within weeks to testify under oath earlier than a bipartisan legislative committee probing the case and a attainable 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 workers to withhold evidence.

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 found it nearly accidentally six months later. While U.S. Justice Department officers refused to comment, the top of the state police, Col. Lamar Davis, instructed the AP that his information present that the video was turned over to federal authorities about the identical time, mid-April 2021.

Edwards, a lawyer from a long 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 evidence to be obtainable to the governor and not the officials investigating the case. The governor’s employees also burdened that state police, not Edwards’ workplace, actually possessed the video.

“I can’t return and repair what was finished,” Block stated. “Everybody would agree that if there would have been some understanding that the district lawyer did not have a piece of proof, whether or not it was a video or no matter it is likely to be, then, of course, the district attorney ought to have all the proof within the case. After all.”

At situation is the 30-minute body-camera footage from Lt. John Clary, the highest-ranking trooper to reply to Greene’s arrest. It's one of two videos of the incident, and captured events not seen on the 46-minute clip from Trooper Dakota DeMoss that shows troopers swarming Greene’s automobile 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.

But Clary’s video is perhaps much more important to the investigations as a result of it's the only footage that reveals the second a handcuffed, bloody Greene moans below the load of two troopers, twitches and then goes nonetheless. It additionally shows troopers ordering the heavyset, 49-year-old to stay face down on the ground with his fingers and toes restrained for greater than 9 minutes — a tactic use-of-force consultants criticized as harmful and likely to have restricted his respiratory.

And in contrast to the DeMoss video, which works silent halfway through 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 advised 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 importance of the Clary footage during testimony in which he characterized the troopers’ actions as “torture and homicide.”

Lt. John Clary's body-camera video.

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

Clary’s video reached state police internal affairs officers greater than a yr after Greene’s loss of life when they opened a probe and later confirmed it to the governor. However it was long unknown to detectives working the prison case and lacking from the initial investigative case file they turned over to prosecutors in August 2019. Its absence has turn into a focus within the federal probe, which is trying not solely on the actions of the troopers however 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 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 evidence storage system and the then-head of the agency, 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 loss of life as “awful however lawful,” said in recent legislative testimony.

However the detectives investigating Greene’s death say they had been 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 as the agency’s use-of-force expert, made a passing reference to it in a conversation.

An internal affairs investigation into whether Clary purposely withheld the footage was inconclusive and details of the probe remain secret. Clary, who didn’t respond to requests for remark, avoided discipline and stays 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 high attorneys Block and Tina Vanichchagorn went to a state police building in Baton Rouge and watched videos of the arrest, including the Clary video, the governor’s workplace stated.

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

The Oct. 13 assembly was intended to plan a closed-door occasion the following day in which Greene’s household 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 lawyers and police commanders were all conscious of the Clary footage whereas prosecutors had been in the dark.

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

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

That agreement falls apart over what happened the subsequent day.

Greene’s family says it was not proven the Clary video after meeting Edwards on Oct. 14, a declare 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 reality proven.

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

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

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

All through this process, Edwards had thought of making the Greene arrest movies public, data show, however determined towards it at the request of federal prosecutors. After they had been withheld from the public greater than two years, the AP obtained and published each the DeMoss and Clary movies in Could 2021.

An AP investigation that adopted discovered Greene’s was among at the least a dozen instances over the previous decade through which state police troopers or their bosses ignored or hid evidence of beatings, deflected blame and impeded efforts to root out misconduct. Dozens of current and former troopers said the beatings were countenanced by a tradition of impunity, nepotism and, in some instances, outright racism.

Edwards was informed of Greene’s lethal arrest inside hours, when he obtained a text message from Reeves telling him that troopers engaged in a “violent, prolonged struggle” with a Black motorist, ending in his demise. However the governor, who was within the midst of a decent reelection race at the time, kept quiet concerning the case publicly for two years as police continued to push the narrative that Greene died in a crash.

Edwards has mentioned he first learned of the “severe allegations” surrounding Greene’s death 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 movies were printed, the governor broke his silence and called the troopers’ actions legal. In latest months, as his function within the Greene case has come under scrutiny, Edwards has gone further to explain them as racist whereas denying he’s interfered with or delayed investigations.

The governor’s attorneys now acknowledge prosecutors didn't have the Clary video until spring of 2021. However Edwards insisted as lately as February that proof turned over to prosecutors prior 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 offered to prosecutors nicely before my election, state and federal prosecutors,” Edwards mentioned in a information convention.

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

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