Word: louima
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...police brutality case that shocked New York City -- and threatened to complicate Mayor Rudolph Giuliani?s bid for national office -- has come to a close with another major conviction. On Tuesday, a jury found officer Charles Schwarz guilty of beating and holding down Abner Louima, a black Haitian arrestee, as another officer violently sodomized Louima with a broomstick in a station house bathroom. That other officer, Justin Volpe, pleaded guilty to the assault last month in the face of overwhelming evidence and the corroborating testimony of four fellow officers. Schwarz and Volpe, both white, could now face life in prison...
...ingrained habit of refusing to "rat" about misconduct by fellow officers. They ought to call it just obstruction of justice, so ruthlessly enforced by ostracism and even bodily harm that only a few officers have the guts and integrity to break ranks when misconduct occurs. But the assault on Louima was so savage that Volpe's fellow cops could not tolerate it. Detective Eric Turetzky testified that he saw Volpe lead Louima, in handcuffs and with his pants around his ankles, away from the bathroom area where the incident occurred. Officer Mark Schofield said that when Volpe returned a pair...
Faced with this evidence, Volpe pleaded guilty to six federal charges, in the hope of avoiding the maximum sentence of life in prison. (Four other cops accused in the attack remain on trial.) "If you tell anybody about this, I'll find you and kill you," Volpe admitted warning Louima that night. But, tellingly, while Volpe apologized "for hurting my family," he offered no apology to his victim. Nor was there any apology from Volpe's lawyer, Marvyn Kornberg, who had claimed--without evidence--that the ruptured bladder and rectal lacerations that Louima, a married father of two, had suffered...
...there is a deeper reason that the Louima case doesn't necessarily portend a slowdown in attempts to cover up police brutality. Call it the white wall of silence--the implicit bargain that Giuliani, like the mayors of many cities, has made with his mostly white core political supporters. They reckon that voters will tolerate heavy-handed police tactics as long as they don't have to see them; that most nonwhites, especially young males, are considered suspect, and that wholesale violations of their civil liberties are an acceptable price to pay for a drop in the crime rate. That...
PLEADED GUILTY. JUSTIN VOLPE, 27, New York City police officer accused of torturing Haitian immigrant Abner Louima in a precinct rest room in 1997; in Brooklyn. Volpe faces a minimum of 30 years in prison...