Governor saw 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 prime lawyers gathered in a state police convention room in October 2020 to prepare for the fallout from a troubling case closer to home: 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 ultimate breaths — footage that prosecutors, detectives and medical experts wouldn’t even know existed for another 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 mostly on interviews and records discovered 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 arms of those with the facility to charge the white troopers seen beautiful, punching and dragging Greene.

That video, which confirmed critical moments and audio absent from different footage that was turned over, wouldn’t attain prosecutors till almost two years after Greene’s Could 10, 2019, loss of life on a rural roadside close to 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'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 loss of life that troopers initially blamed on a automobile crash have become questions which 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 doable cover-up.

Edwards’ attorneys say there was no way 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 evidence.

Regardless, the governor’s attorneys didn’t mention seeing the video in a meeting just days later with state prosecutors, who wouldn’t receive the footage until a detective found it virtually by accident six months later. While U.S. Justice Department officials refused to comment, the head of the state police, Col. Lamar Davis, informed the AP that his records 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, didn't make himself out there for an interview. However 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 additionally confused that state police, not Edwards’ workplace, actually possessed the video.

“I can’t go back and fix what was finished,” Block stated. “Everyone would agree that if there would have been some understanding that the district lawyer didn't have a piece of evidence, whether or not it was a video or whatever it is perhaps, then, of course, the district attorney should have all of the proof in the case. In fact.”

At challenge is the 30-minute body-camera footage from Lt. John Clary, the highest-ranking trooper to answer Greene’s arrest. It is one among 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 automotive after a high-speed chase, repeatedly jolting him with stun weapons, 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.

However Clary’s video is maybe much more important to the investigations as a result of it is the only footage that exhibits the moment a handcuffed, bloody Greene moans under the load of two troopers, twitches after which goes still. It also exhibits troopers ordering the heavyset, 49-year-old to remain face down on the bottom together with his fingers and ft restrained for greater than nine minutes — a tactic use-of-force consultants criticized as dangerous and likely to have restricted his breathing.

And unlike the DeMoss video, which works silent halfway via when the microphone is turned off, Clary’s video has sound throughout, choosing 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 personal use-of-force skilled highlighted the significance of the Clary footage throughout 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 level and Ronald Greene’s foot starts kicking up,” Sgt. Scott Davis told lawmakers in March. “The identical factor happened in the George Floyd trial. There was a pulmonologist who said that’s the moment of his demise. The same thing occurred with Ronald Greene.”

Clary’s video reached state police inner affairs officers greater than a year after Greene’s demise after they opened a probe and later confirmed it to the governor. Nevertheless it was lengthy 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 out to be a focus in the federal probe, which is trying not only at 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’ movies.

State police say Clary properly uploaded his body-camera footage to an internet evidence 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 assume that there was any cover-up by state police of this matter,” Reeves, who has described Greene’s demise as “terrible however lawful,” said in current legislative testimony.

However the detectives investigating Greene’s loss of life say they had 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 study the video existed until April 2021 when Davis, who had broad access to body-camera video as the company’s use-of-force professional, made a passing reference to it in a dialog.

An inside affairs investigation into whether Clary purposely withheld the footage was inconclusive and details of the probe remain secret. Clary, who didn’t reply to requests for remark, averted 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 top 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 stated.

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 leading the state investigation.

The Oct. 13 assembly was supposed to plan a closed-door event the subsequent day through which Greene’s household would meet the governor and examine footage of the arrest. Although the assembly was about showing video of the arrest, it by no means emerged that the governor’s attorneys and police commanders were all aware of the Clary footage whereas prosecutors had been at the hours of darkness.

“It didn’t come up at all,” Belton stated, including he solely knew at 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 occurred the following day.

Greene’s family says it was not shown the Clary video after assembly Edwards on Oct. 14, a declare Belton and several others who attended the viewing in Baton Rouge affirmed. State police and the governor’s office, nevertheless, disputed that, saying the Clary video was the truth is 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 attorney for the Greene family, recalled the response he acquired when 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 saw it,” added Mona Hardin, Greene’s mom. “They’ve tried to have complete control of the narrative.”

All through this course of, Edwards had considered making the Greene arrest movies public, records present, however determined towards it on 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 videos in Could 2021.

An AP investigation that followed discovered Greene’s was among at the very least a dozen instances over the previous decade during 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 stated the beatings had been countenanced by a culture of impunity, nepotism and, in some cases, outright racism.

Edwards was knowledgeable of Greene’s deadly arrest within 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 death. But the governor, who was in the midst of a decent reelection race on the time, saved quiet concerning the case publicly for 2 years as police continued to push the narrative that Greene died in a crash.

Edwards has said he first discovered of the “serious allegations” surrounding Greene’s dying 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 had been revealed, the governor broke his silence and called the troopers’ actions criminal. In latest months, as his position in the Greene case has come below scrutiny, Edwards has gone additional to describe 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. However Edwards insisted as recently as February that proof 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 happened that night time was introduced to prosecutors nicely before my election, state and federal prosecutors,” Edwards said in a information conference.

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

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