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 attorneys gathered in a state police convention room in October 2020 to prepare for the fallout from a troubling case closer to house: troopers’ deadly arrest of Ronald Greene.

There, they privately watched an important 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 within the explosive case by contending evidence 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 hands of these with the ability to cost the white troopers seen gorgeous, punching and dragging Greene.

That video, which showed critical moments and audio absent from different footage that was turned over, wouldn’t reach prosecutors until almost two years after Greene’s Might 10, 2019, dying on a rural roadside near Monroe. Now three years have handed, and after prolonged, 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,” 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 demise that troopers initially blamed on a automobile crash have turn out to be questions which have dogged his administration for months. Edwards and his employees are anticipated to be referred to as inside weeks to testify beneath oath earlier than a bipartisan legislative committee probing the case and a doable cover-up.

Edwards’ attorneys say there was no manner 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 staff 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 receive the footage until a detective found it almost by chance six months later. While U.S. Justice Division officers refused to comment, the top 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 same time, mid-April 2021.

Edwards, a lawyer from a protracted line of Louisiana sheriffs, did not make himself available for an interview. However 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 staff additionally careworn that state police, not Edwards’ workplace, really possessed the video.

“I can’t return and repair what was achieved,” Block said. “Everyone would agree that if there would have been some understanding that the district legal professional didn't have a bit of proof, whether it was a video or whatever it may be, then, after all, the district legal professional ought to have all of the evidence in the case. Of course.”

At concern is the 30-minute body-camera footage from Lt. John Clary, the highest-ranking trooper to respond 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 car 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.

However Clary’s video is probably even more important to the investigations as a result of it's the solely footage that shows the second a handcuffed, bloody Greene moans under the load of two troopers, twitches and then goes still. It also shows troopers ordering the heavyset, 49-year-old to stay face down on the bottom with his palms and ft restrained for more than nine minutes — a tactic use-of-force specialists criticized as dangerous and likely to have restricted his breathing.

And in contrast to the DeMoss video, which matches silent halfway through when the microphone is turned off, Clary’s video has sound throughout, selecting up a trooper ordering Greene to “lay in your f------ belly like I told 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 throughout testimony by which he characterized the troopers’ actions as “torture and murder.”

Lt. John Clary's body-camera video.

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

Clary’s video reached state police inside affairs officers more than a 12 months after Greene’s death once they opened a probe and later confirmed it to the governor. But it was long unknown to detectives working the criminal case and missing from the initial investigative case file they turned over to prosecutors in August 2019. Its absence has grow 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 protect them.

Detectives say Clary falsely claimed he didn’t have any body-camera footage of his personal from Greene’s arrest and as a substitute gave investigators a thumb drive of different troopers’ movies.

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 assume that there was any cover-up by state police of this matter,” Reeves, who has described Greene’s dying as “terrible but lawful,” said in current legislative testimony.

But the detectives investigating Greene’s loss of life say they have been locked out of the video storage system at the time and had to depend on Clary to provide the footage.

Albert Paxton, the now-retired lead detective on the Greene case, mentioned he didn’t learn the video existed until April 2021 when Davis, who had broad access to body-camera video because the company’s use-of-force knowledgeable, made a passing reference to it in a dialog.

An inner affairs investigation into whether Clary purposely withheld the footage was inconclusive and particulars of the probe stay secret. Clary, who didn’t respond to requests for remark, avoided self-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, together with the Clary video, the governor’s workplace mentioned.

Days later, the governor’s legal professionals flew with Reeves and other police brass 200 miles north to Ruston to debate the videos with John Belton, the Union Parish district lawyer leading the state investigation.

The Oct. 13 assembly was intended to plan a closed-door occasion the next day through which Greene’s family would meet the governor and look at footage of the arrest. Although the assembly was about exhibiting video of the arrest, it by no means emerged that the governor’s attorneys 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 in any respect,” Belton mentioned, adding he only knew at the time of the DeMoss video.

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

That settlement falls aside over what occurred the following day.

Greene’s household says it was not shown the Clary video after assembly 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, however, disputed that, saying the Clary video was in reality proven.

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

Lee Merritt, an legal professional for the Greene family, recalled the response he received once they asked if there was a Clary video: “We have been instructed it was of no evidentiary value.”

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

Throughout this course of, Edwards had considered making the Greene arrest videos public, data show, but determined in opposition to it at the request of federal prosecutors. After they have been withheld from the public greater than two years, the AP obtained and published both the DeMoss and Clary videos in May 2021.

An AP investigation that followed found Greene’s was amongst a minimum of a dozen cases over the previous decade during which state police troopers or their bosses ignored or hid proof of beatings, deflected blame and impeded efforts to root out misconduct. Dozens of current and former troopers mentioned the beatings had been countenanced by a tradition of impunity, nepotism and, in some instances, outright racism.

Edwards was knowledgeable of Greene’s deadly arrest within hours, when he acquired a text message from Reeves telling him that troopers engaged in a “violent, prolonged battle” with a Black motorist, ending in his demise. However the governor, who was within the midst of a good reelection race at the time, kept quiet about the case publicly for two 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 loss of life in September 2020, months after Greene’s household filed a wrongful-death lawsuit and the FBI sent a sweeping subpoena for evidence to state police.

After the videos had been printed, the governor broke his silence and called the troopers’ actions felony. In latest months, as his position in the Greene case has come beneath scrutiny, Edwards has gone additional to describe 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 till spring of 2021. But Edwards insisted as just lately as February that evidence turned over to prosecutors prior to his November 2019 re-election was proof there was no cover-up.

“The facts are clear that the evidence of what happened that evening was introduced to prosecutors well before my election, state and federal prosecutors,” Edwards stated in a news conference.

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

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