Governor saw lethal 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 still simmering over the killing of George Floyd, Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards and his high attorneys gathered in a state police convention room in October 2020 to prepare for the fallout from a troubling case closer to residence: 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 ultimate 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 in the explosive case by contending evidence was promptly turned over to authorities, an Related Press investigation primarily 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 crucial footage into the palms of those with the ability to charge the white troopers seen gorgeous, punching and dragging Greene.

That video, which showed important moments and audio absent from different footage that was turned over, wouldn’t attain prosecutors till practically two years after Greene’s Might 10, 2019, demise on a rural roadside near Monroe. Now three years have passed, 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,” 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 death that troopers initially blamed on a car crash have turn into questions that have dogged his administration for months. Edwards and his staff are anticipated to be referred to as inside weeks to testify underneath oath before a bipartisan legislative committee probing the case and a attainable cover-up.

Edwards’ attorneys say there was no manner 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 employees to withhold evidence.

Regardless, the governor’s attorneys didn’t mention seeing the video in a meeting simply days later with state prosecutors, who wouldn’t receive the footage till a detective found it nearly by chance six months later. While U.S. Justice Department officers refused to remark, the head of the state police, Col. Lamar Davis, advised 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 an extended line of Louisiana sheriffs, didn't 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 not the officers investigating the case. The governor’s employees also pressured that state police, not Edwards’ office, really possessed the video.

“I can’t go back and repair what was executed,” Block stated. “All people would agree that if there would have been some understanding that the district lawyer didn't have a bit of proof, whether or not it was a video or whatever it could be, then, in fact, the district legal professional ought to have all of the proof within the case. In fact.”

At concern is the 30-minute body-camera footage from Lt. John Clary, the highest-ranking trooper to reply to Greene’s arrest. It is 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 guns, beating him within 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 important to the investigations as a result of it's the only footage that exhibits the second a handcuffed, bloody Greene moans beneath the load of two troopers, twitches after which goes nonetheless. It also exhibits troopers ordering the heavyset, 49-year-old to remain face down on the bottom together with his fingers and feet restrained for greater than nine minutes — a tactic use-of-force experts criticized as harmful and more likely to have restricted his respiration.

And unlike the DeMoss video, which matches silent halfway by way of when the microphone is turned off, Clary’s video has sound throughout, selecting up a trooper ordering Greene to “lay in your f------ stomach 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 professional highlighted the significance of the Clary footage during testimony in which he characterised the troopers’ actions as “torture and murder.”

Lt. John Clary's body-camera video.

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

Clary’s video reached state police inner affairs officers greater than a 12 months after Greene’s demise when they opened a probe and later showed it to the governor. Nevertheless it was long unknown to detectives working the prison case and missing from the preliminary investigative case file they turned over to prosecutors in August 2019. Its absence has turn out to be a focal point in the federal probe, which is looking not solely at the actions of the troopers but whether 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 instead 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 handling 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 demise as “awful but lawful,” mentioned in current legislative testimony.

However the detectives investigating Greene’s demise say they have been locked out of the video storage system on the time and needed to depend on Clary to supply the footage.

Albert Paxton, the now-retired lead detective on the Greene case, stated he didn’t study 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 inside affairs investigation into whether or not Clary purposely withheld the footage was inconclusive and particulars of the probe remain secret. Clary, who didn’t reply to requests for remark, avoided discipline and stays in the state police.

In early October 2020, days after AP printed 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 constructing in Baton Rouge and watched movies of the arrest, including 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 debate 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 next day in which Greene’s family would meet the governor and think about footage of the arrest. Although the assembly was about showing video of the arrest, it never emerged that the governor’s attorneys and police commanders have been all conscious of the Clary footage whereas prosecutors were at nighttime.

“It didn’t come up at all,” Belton mentioned, including 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 occurred the following day.

Greene’s household says it was not shown the Clary video after assembly 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 office, however, disputed that, saying the Clary video was in actual 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 attorney for the Greene family, recalled the response he obtained once they asked if there was a Clary video: “We had been told it was of no evidentiary value.”

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

Throughout this process, Edwards had considered making the Greene arrest videos public, records show, however decided in opposition to it at the request of federal prosecutors. After they have been withheld from the public more than two years, the AP obtained and printed both the DeMoss and Clary videos in Could 2021.

An AP investigation that adopted found Greene’s was among at the least a dozen instances over the previous 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 tradition of impunity, nepotism and, in some cases, outright racism.

Edwards was informed of Greene’s lethal arrest within hours, when he acquired a text message from Reeves telling him that troopers engaged in a “violent, prolonged struggle” with a Black motorist, ending in his dying. However the governor, who was within the midst of a tight reelection race on 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 realized of the “critical allegations” surrounding Greene’s loss of life in September 2020, months after Greene’s household filed a wrongful-death lawsuit and the FBI despatched a sweeping subpoena for proof to state police.

After the movies have been published, the governor broke his silence and known as the troopers’ actions prison. In latest months, as his function in the Greene case has come beneath scrutiny, Edwards has gone additional to describe them as racist while denying he’s interfered with or delayed investigations.

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

“The details are clear that the proof of what occurred that night time was introduced to prosecutors well before my election, state and federal prosecutors,” Edwards said in a news conference.

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

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