Governor noticed deadly arrest video months before 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 attorneys gathered in a state police conference room in October 2020 to prepare 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 last 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 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 workers nor the state police he oversees acted urgently to get the essential footage into the fingers of these with the power to cost the white troopers seen beautiful, punching and dragging Greene.

That video, which confirmed essential moments and audio absent from other footage that was turned over, wouldn’t reach prosecutors until practically two years after Greene’s Might 10, 2019, demise on a rural roadside close to Monroe. Now three years have handed, and after lengthy, 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,” 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 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 demise that troopers initially blamed on a automobile crash have develop into questions that have dogged his administration for months. Edwards and his staff are expected to be referred to as inside weeks to testify underneath oath before a bipartisan legislative committee probing the case and a potential cover-up.

Edwards’ attorneys say there was no approach 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 workers to withhold evidence.

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 until a detective discovered it nearly accidentally six months later. While U.S. Justice Division officials refused to comment, the pinnacle of the state police, Col. Lamar Davis, instructed 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 long line of Louisiana sheriffs, did not make himself out there 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 never the officers investigating the case. The governor’s workers additionally careworn that state police, not Edwards’ office, really possessed the video.

“I can’t go back and fix what was achieved,” Block said. “Everyone would agree that if there would have been some understanding that the district attorney did not have a chunk of evidence, whether or not it was a video or whatever it might be, then, after all, the district attorney should have all 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 respond to Greene’s arrest. It's one in every of two videos of the incident, and captured events not seen on the 46-minute clip from Trooper Dakota DeMoss that reveals 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.

But Clary’s video is perhaps much more important to the investigations because it's the solely footage that reveals the second a handcuffed, bloody Greene moans underneath the weight of two troopers, twitches and then goes still. It additionally exhibits troopers ordering the heavyset, 49-year-old to stay face down on the ground along with his arms and ft restrained for more than nine 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 midway through when the microphone is turned off, Clary’s video has sound all through, picking 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 knowledgeable highlighted the importance of the Clary footage throughout testimony wherein he characterised the troopers’ actions as “torture and homicide.”

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 identical thing happened in the George Floyd trial. There was a pulmonologist who said that’s the second of his dying. The same factor happened with Ronald Greene.”

Clary’s video reached state police inner affairs officers more than a 12 months after Greene’s demise after they opened a probe and later showed it to the governor. Nevertheless it was lengthy unknown to detectives working the criminal 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 on the actions of the troopers but 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 own from Greene’s arrest and as an alternative gave investigators a thumb drive of different troopers’ videos.

State police say Clary properly uploaded his body-camera footage to an internet proof 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 dying as “terrible but lawful,” stated in recent legislative testimony.

But the detectives investigating Greene’s death say they have been locked out of the video storage system at the time and needed to rely on Clary to provide the footage.

Albert Paxton, the now-retired lead detective on the Greene case, stated 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 skilled, made a passing reference to it in a dialog.

An inner 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 comment, averted self-discipline and stays within 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 prime 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 workplace said.

Days later, the governor’s attorneys 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 event the subsequent day during which Greene’s family would meet the governor and view footage of the arrest. Although the assembly was about showing video of the arrest, it by no means emerged that the governor’s lawyers and police commanders have been all conscious of the Clary footage while prosecutors had been in the dead of night.

“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 movies.”

That settlement falls apart over what happened the next day.

Greene’s household 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 office, nonetheless, disputed that, saying the Clary video was the truth is 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 advised it was of no evidentiary worth.”

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

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

An AP investigation that adopted found Greene’s was among no less than a dozen circumstances over the past decade in which state police troopers or their bosses ignored or concealed evidence of beatings, deflected blame and impeded efforts to root out misconduct. Dozens of present and former troopers said the beatings have been countenanced by a culture of impunity, nepotism and, in some circumstances, outright racism.

Edwards was knowledgeable of Greene’s lethal arrest inside hours, when he obtained a textual content 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 on the time, saved quiet about the case publicly for two years as police continued to push the narrative that Greene died in a crash.

Edwards has stated he first discovered of the “critical allegations” surrounding Greene’s dying 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 were printed, the governor broke his silence and called the troopers’ actions prison. In current months, as his role 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 lawyers now acknowledge prosecutors did not have the Clary video until spring of 2021. But Edwards insisted as not too long ago as February that evidence turned over to prosecutors prior to his November 2019 re-election was proof there was no cover-up.

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

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

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