An Especially Tricky Case to Prosecute

A few months ago, I was a juror on a criminal case where a guy was accused of attacking a cop. The cop was the only witness to the attack, and the defendant said he didn’t do it. We the jury thought the defendant’s story had too many problems, so we disregarded it and then convicted him based on the cop’s more-credible testimony.

I bring this up again because Scott at Simple Justice points us to a situation that’s making me wonder if we rushed to convict, just because we had the credible statement of the victim. Maybe we should have insisted on video.

Here’s what we know from the media reports: A woman accused a Shreveport cop of beating her while she was under arrest for alleged drunk driving. He says he didn’t do it.

The twist is that there’s video: We see the cop and the woman are in a room of some kind. She’s being annoying, so the cop cuffs her hands behind her back and pushes her against the wall and then down to the floor. A little later, she’s screaming and resisting as he tries to hold her in a chair, so he stands her up and swings her around and out of the frame where we hear a thump.  Then we see her sitting in the chair again as the cop steps in front of the camera to turn it off.

When the camera’s turned back on, the woman is lying on the floor in a pool of her own blood. She had two black eyes, cuts to the face, and two broken teeth.

The cop has been fired, but he hasn’t been charged with any crime because, police say, the video doesn’t show what happened.

So, to review, we the jury actually convicted a guy of aggravated battery based on even less evidence than this, but no one in Shreveport even thinks it’s worth bringing charges?

I’ll tell you what. If anybody from the Caddo Parish District Attorney’s Office in Louisiana wants some advice, just get in touch with me, and I can give you the name of a Cook County ASA who knows how to win those tricky cases that don’t have complete video evidence of the crime.