Barack Obama was heckled today by a small group of young people representing the “International African Revolution”.  Protesters wanted to know why Obama hadn’t been addressing the concerns of Black America, including the plight of the Jena 6.

In an odd and unintended way, these folks are helping Mr. Obama’s campaign.  Focusing on the plight of the poor and the outcast in the heat of a general election is a sure path to defeat for any candidate in these United States.  As a people, we are uneasy with “soft” politicians.  We want to hear about personal responsibility, hard consequences, common sense and “a strong America”.  Criticizing the actions of soldiers, police officers and prosecutors is suicidal politics.

Barack Obama has a strong shot at the presidency because he understands these things.

I am trying to make Middle America more sensitive to the need for criminal justice reform.  I wish the average Joe and Jane cared about folks like Sean and Mychal Bell.  Tragically, the reality is otherwise.

Barack Obama and John McCain realize there is no political mandate for sweeping criminal justice reform in America.  It is our job–yours and mine–to change hearts and mind through patient, respectful and sensitive advocacy.  There are no short cuts here.  We must cross culture war battle lines and take our case to the kind of people who control the political process.   

Purity and power have never been on good terms.  Our first job is to elect a candidate who favors reform.  Our second job is to make reform a viable real-world option.  Only then will we be in a position to hold presidential feet to the fire.

Judge J.P. Mauffray has been recused from the five remaining “Jena 6” cases.  The USA Today story below provides all the particulars. 

It has often been said that last September’s massive march had little lasting effect.  While it is true that march organizers lacked a long-range plan, the avalanche of concern that descended upon this tiny community has put Louisiana officials on notice.  The full range of due process protections must be extended to the Jena defendants or the crowds will return in force.

This explains why a conservative Louisiana judge is insisting that Mr. Mauffray step aside.  The LaSalle Parish magistrate has always viewed the Jena 6 defendants as dangerous thugs.  This widespread perception, coupled with a refusal to consider the assault on Justin Barker in historical context, made it very likely that multi-decade prison terms would destroy six young lives. 

Flipping through the pages of the Jena Times in January of 2007, I realized that only a massive intervention could forestall this dreadful scenario.  We needed top-flight attorneys and the money to keep them on task.  Judge Mauffray was recused because a tight, dedicated team of legal professionals placed every prejudicial statement he had ever made in the most devastating light. 

The abiding threat of massive protest and skilled legal work have produced a magnificent (and highly unusual) result.

The Jena defendants won’t be guaranteed a fair judicial progress until District Attorney Reed Walters joins Judge Mauffray on the sidelines.  Secondly, we need a change of venue.  No Jena jury can be impartial.  All of this will take some time, but today’s victory shows that the legal momentum is shifting in the direction of justice.  Would that all poor black defendants received the kind of representation these young men are enjoying.

Judge removed from cases against ‘Jena Six’ teens

NEW ORLEANS (AP) – A state district judge on Friday decided that the judge presiding over the cases of five black teens prosecuted for allegedly beating a white teen could not be fair and removed him.
Judge J.P. Mauffray Jr. had acknowledged calling the teens “trouble makers” and “a violent bunch” but insisted he could be impartial. Judge Thomas M. Yeager, who was asked by defense attorneys to review the case, found there was an appearance of impropriety and took Mauffray off the case.

“The right to a fair and impartial judge is of particular importance in the present cases,” Yeager wrote.

Six black teens were arrested and initially charged with attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder in connection with a December 4, 2006, attack on fellow Jena High School student Justin Barker, who is white. The charges were later reduced.

Jesse Ray Beard, Robert Bailey Jr., Carwin Jones, Bryant Purvis and Theo Shaw now face aggravated second-degree battery charges. Beard is charged as a juvenile.

Mychal Bell is the only member of the group that has been tried. He was originally charged as an adult with attempted murder. The charge was reduced before a jury convicted him last June of aggravated second-degree battery.

In September, an appeals court overturned the verdict and ordered Bell tried as a juvenile. He pleaded guilty to a juvenile charge of second-degree battery. He now lives in Monroe, Louisiana, with a foster family and is attending school.

The case aggravated racial tensions in the tiny, central Louisiana town, and led to a massive civil rights demonstration last September.

Mauffray was out of town, court officials said, and would not comment on the ruling.

District Attorney Reed Walters said he may appeal the decision.

“Whatever ultimately happens concerning the judge, this does not mean these cases go away,” he said. “It will just take longer to get them to trial. However, I may seek to have the decision overturned.”

An attorney for Beard said he hoped it the Louisiana Supreme Court would quickly appoint a new judge to hear the remaining cases.

“Everyone is entitled to a fair judge, not the judge they want,” attorney David Utter said. “It mystifies me why the district attorney would fight this.”

Howard Witt of the Chicago Tribune just sent me this dramatic follow-up to his original reporting.  Media scrutiny often forces the system to play by its own rules.  Winn Parish DA Chris Nevils appears to be feeling the pressure from both directions on this one.  He can get an indictment if he wishes–the old saw about DAs indicting a ham sandwich is only a slight exaggeration.  If the grand jury refuses to indict it will be because Mr. Nevils has hinted strongly that he doesn’t want to pursue this case. 

I’m not sure ex-officer Scott Nugent is guilty of murder.  That depends on whether his bizarre behavior suggests an intent to cause death.  But manslaughter charges are certainly warranted by the known facts. 

Mr. Witt reprises the emphasis on local corruption we saw in his initial report.  When the police chief is a drug offender pardoned by a corrupt ex-Governor you know you’ve got problems.

Just how common is this kind of corruption?  Well, consider that Edwin Edwards, the ex-governor in question, drew the attention of the Department of Justice for receiving kickbacks from ex-Houston mayor Fred Hofheinz.

The plot thickens when you realize that one of the favors Edwards performed in exchange for the tainted money was agreeing to build a juvenile prison in Jena, Louisiana.  That prison was subsequently closed in the aftermath of racially charged prisoner abuse.  It re-opened in the wake of Katrina to house New Orleans prisoners on an emergency basis only to be closed again after new charges of racism and prisoner abuse surfaced.

The Jena prison has now reopened (in greatly expanded form) under the auspices of GeoCorp (formerly Wackenhut) as a private prison for illegal residents.  Jena residents now have their third shot at staffing a prison without creating scandal.

But there’s more.  One of the middle men in the Edwin Edwards scam was Patrick Graham, a Houston based con man who once sold six small West Texas counties on the idea of building private prisons in their communities.  (I researched all of this when I was writing a book on the ill-famed Tulia drug sting.)  One of the private prisons was built west of Tulia only to stand empty for several years before radical revisions to the Texas criminal justice system quadrupled the size of the prison population in a single decade (no, I’m not making this up).

In other words, Tulia, Jena and Winnfield are all wrapped up in the tentacles of official corruption engulfing the great states of Texas and Louisiana.  More on this can be found here and here for those who are interested.

The corruption Howard Witt has rightly emphasized is not limited to Winnfield or to the state of Louisiana.  Those of you who have read my stuff on Alvin Clay know that Arkansas is just as prone to corruption as Louisiana and Texas (and we haven’t even mentioned Mississippi). 

Indictment sought for police Taser death in Louisiana

By Howard Witt

Tribune correspondent

10:54 AM CDT, July 28, 2008

HOUSTON

Seeking to defuse growing racial tensions in the small Louisiana town of Winnfield, the local district attorney announced Monday that he will seek an indictment against a white police officer for the death of a black man who was shocked nine times with a Taser device while handcuffed in police custody.

Winn Parish District Atty. Chris Nevils said he would convene a grand jury Aug. 12 to consider possible charges against the officer, Scott Nugent, 21, who was fired from the Winnfield Police Department following the death of Baron “Scooter” Pikes.

Pikes, 21, died Jan. 17 within 39 minutes of being arrested on a drug possession warrant. Winnfield police claimed Pikes told them he suffered from asthma and was high on crack cocaine and PCP, but the local coroner found that Pikes had been healthy and had no drugs in his system. He ruled the death a homicide.

“Now is the time to take this case to the grand jury for a determination about whether charges should be brought,” Nevils said in a statement. “I know there are strong feelings on both sides of this matter. But my obligation, and that of the grand jury, is to objectively sort through the facts and make a decision that is in the best interest of justice. That is what we intend to do.”

Nevils’ decision came a little more than a week after the Tribune published the first full account of the case amid fears expressed by the victim’s family and civil rights groups that the incident would be covered up in a town with a florid history of backroom dealings and political corruption.

Nevils’ predecessor as district attorney committed suicide after he came under suspicion for skimming $200,000 from his office accounts and extorting bribes from criminal suspects. The former police chief, who was Nugent’s father, also killed himself, after losing a bitterly-contested election campaign marred by fraud allegations. The current police chief is a convicted drug offender who was pardoned by former Louisiana Gov. Edwin Edwards, who is currently serving a federal prison sentence for corruption while in office.

In his own written report of the Pikes’ incident, Nugent acknowledged that he had subdued and handcuffed Pikes after a foot chase and that Pikes had not struggled or resisted arrest. Instead, Nugent wrote, he began Tasering Pikes after the suspect did not respond quickly enough to Nugent’s order to stand up and walk to a waiting police car.

Witnesses reported that Pikes had pleaded with Nugent and two other arresting officers to stop Tasering him.

Nugent’s attorney has said the former officer acted according to police procedures. But the Winnfield Police Department’s written Taser policy states that the device should only be used “where it is deemed reasonably necessary to control a dangerous or violent subject.”

Dr. Randolph Williams, the Winn Parish coroner, determined after investigating the death that Nugent administered a total of nine 50,000-volt Taser shocks to Pikes over a 14-minute period-and that the last two jolts were delivered after Pikes had lost consciousness.

Nevils would not reveal the range of possible charges he will ask the grand jury to consider against Nugent.

hwitt@tribune.com

Copyright © 2008, Chicago Tribune

Scott “Grits” Henson reviews a review of Dr. Robert  Burton’s On Being Certain: Believing you are right even when you are not.  Burton’s research suggests that the sense of certainty witnesses sometimes feel has more to do with emotion than rationality.  Certainty stimulates the pleasure centers in the brain while uncertainty creates anxiety.  This explains the tendency of witnesses to firmly believe what ain’t so. 

I have posted Scott’s excellent summary below, but I would add one comment.  It isn’t just witnesses that fall victim to a sense of false certainty; police officers, prosecutors and jurors frequently succumb to the same ailment.  As Henson suggests, recent advances in neuroscience coupled with a shocking raft of DNA exonerations call for a thorough re-evaluation of the role of eyewitness testimony in criminal cases.

Eyewitnesses and the “feeling of knowing”

I’m increasingly convinced that recent advancements in neuroscience will, in a very few years, begin to revolutionize several fundamental sets of assumptions on which the criminal justice system is presently based – most immediately regarding eyewitness identification and the reliability generally of witness testimony.In Dr. Ginger Campbell’s Brain Science Podcast #42, she reviews a book by Dr. Robert Burton – On Being Certain: Believing you are right even when you are not – focusing on a question that comes up frequently in cases resulting in DNA exonerations involving erroneous eyewitness identifications: How is it that witnesses can believe to their core they are testifying accurately but identify alleged perpetrators who absolutely didn’t do it?

How can one be certain, in other words, and at the same time utterly and profoundly wrong?

According to Dr. Burton, “certainty” is really the equivalent of an emotion – it’s a feeling, not a conclusion, that has “involuntary neurological roots.” We don’t know what makes us feel certain because in a literal sense by the time we do, the information no longer exists. When our synapses fire, they release and extinguish all the information about why they fired in the first place – the conscious mind, OTOH, merely notes whether they did or they didn’t. Those subterranean “hidden” impulses underlying our thoughts and behavior constitute what psychologists consider the subconscious or unconscious mind.

There is no physiological distinction between the processes in our brain that generate conscious or unconscious thought, says Burton. That distinction has a philosophical but not necessarily a biological basis; for the mind, conscious and unconscious thought are an intermingled process that simultaneously includes both types of brain activity. According to this view, the “feeling of knowing,” i.e., certainty, is an unconscious impulse that attaches itself onto conscious ideas and makes us believe them.

From the research Burton cites, you get the sense that people’s certainty in their beliefs routinely outdistance the accuracy of their memory, a notion which has important implications when evaluating eyewitness testimony. Burton detailed the results of a study performed following the Challenger space shuttle disaster, where an academic interviewed 106 students the day after the tragedy then again 2.5 years after the event about their memories of where they were, who told them, how they reacted, etc. Half the respondents made errors compared to their original recollection, and a quarter of the accounts were significantly different than students originally remembered. Fewer than 10% remembered all the details the same. Many students whose stories had changed, however, maintained a high degree of confidence in their later, false recollections … even after being shown their original answers in their own handwriting.

This “feeling of knowing” is “not under conscious control.” Citing the example of a baseball player who physically must begin to swing before the pitcher releases the ball but says later he reacted to the trajectory, Campbell says, “Our brain makes us think that it knows things that it can’t really know.” (Many optical illusions similarly rely on the brain’s ability to force itself into such moments of cognitive dissonance, thinking it knows things that cannot be.)

Burton calls this sense of being right “thought’s original yes-man.” But what is the genetic benefit of a feeling of knowing that’s sometimes actually false? Burton says the feeling stems from the brain’s pleasure-reward system in the upper brain stem, using dopamine as its key neurotransmitter. The pleasure-reward mechanism activated by certainty, he says, connects to parts of the brain that manage both emotion and cognition.

This sense of certainty could be an evolutionary adaptation to confronting abstract choices that have no clear cut answers in the face of perilous threats, says Campbell. Without this internal reward system endorsing the correctness of our actions, we could be paralyzed by fears and uncertainty in the face of immediate danger. All the talk of evolutionary adaptations, she and Burton emphasize, are speculative explanations, but it’s a reasonable hypothesis for why our biological reward system might be hardwired that way.

The brain dynamics involved with certainty are essentially similar to patterns of addiction, said Burton, with the brain getting satisfying rewards in the form of a dopamine boost that reinforce certainty just like addicts get a dopamine jolt from drugs through the same expectation-reward mechanism.

In other words, Drs. Campbell and Burton think people can be addicted to their own beliefs in the same way an addict might be hooked on heroin or meth. Burton wonders if humans may have an “addiction to the pleasure of the feeling of knowing.” Burton thinks neuroscience should “let go of the myth of the autonomous, rational mind” able to overcome its own subconscious prejudices, insisting that “The feeling that a decision is right is not the same thing as providing evidence that it is right.” Indeed, when the beliefs in question are memories, as evidenced by the Challenger experiment, they may be simultaneously quite mutable and firmly believed.

The feeling of knowing cannot be dismissed, says Campbell, just because it occurs in parts of the brain where its functions are obscured. However, Burton’s findings dictate that a feeling of certainty should not be considered a substitute for corroboration. “In real life we constantly make decisions with incomplete information,” she says in conclusion, “but we also seem to have a tendency to feel certain about these choices.”

What are the implications of these findings for the raft of DNA exonerations that followed erroneous eyewitness identifications? For starters, perhaps juries would be less swayed by a witness testifying with “certainty” if it were widely understood that that’s really an emotion instead of a conclusion? What’s more, when a person feels “certain” they’re more likely to overlook alternative explanations and less likely to question their own assumptions.

I’m sure there are many other implications for this research in the criminal justice arena – what else comes to mind?

Dr. Campbell’s podcast was a bit on the long side (about an hour) but well worth listening to in its entirety. She does a great job of breaking the subject down for the non-expert listener, and Burton’s book sounds interesting as well. I can’t help but believe some of these ideas will percolate up from the hard sciences into the law and the courts before too very long.

This CNN story aired last night on Anderson Cooper’s 360 and is now the most frequently viewed item on their website. The story pasted below is largely a re-reporting of Howard Witt’s story but new details are emerging all the time. The Coroner in Winn Parish was certainly right to rule Baron Pikes’ death a homicide. A poorly trained but well-connected police officer used his new toy to torture a helpless defendant to death. Not surprisingly, Winnfield law enforcement is claiming that officer Scott Nugent followed accepted procedures. That is the sort of thing people say when they are facing a lawsuit.

I am still not sure if CNN learned about the Pikes story independently or if they were alerted by Howard Witt’s reporting. CNN contacted me yesterday looking for a picture of Baron Pikes and I sent them to Howard. One thing is certain, both the Chicago Tribune and CNN picked up on this story because the Jena 6 saga sensitized them to the plight of poor people in central Louisiana.

Is this a story about race, or could a big white guy have suffered the same fate as Baron Pikes? I will leave you to ponder that question, but there can be no doubt that officer Nugent had no intention of either protecting or serving Mr. Pikes. The defendant in Nugent’s custody was not seen as a citizen or even, in any meaningful sense, a human being.

You will be hearing more on this story in the near future.

Ex-cop may be charged in case of man Tasered to death

* Story Highlights
* Suspect died after police officer Tasered him nine times; investigation launched
* Coroner rules death homicide, says man might’ve been dead after seventh shock
* Family outraged it has taken months for any action: “The family wants justice”
* Prosecutor is expected to decide soon whether to file charges

From Drew Griffin and David Fitzpatrick
CNN

WINNFIELD, Louisiana (CNN) – A police officer shocked a handcuffed Baron “Scooter” Pikes nine times with a Taser after arresting him on a cocaine charge.

He stopped twitching after seven, according to a coroner’s report. Soon afterward, Pikes was dead.

Now the officer, since fired, could end up facing criminal charges in Pikes’ January death after medical examiners ruled it a homicide.

Dr. Randolph Williams, the Winn Parish coroner, told CNN the 21-year-old sawmill worker was jolted so many times by the 50,000-volt Taser that he might have been dead before the last two shocks were delivered.

Williams ruled Pikes’ death a homicide in June after extensive study.

Winn Parish District Attorney Christopher Nevils said he will decide on any charges against the ex-officer, Scott Nugent, once a Louisiana State Police report on the case is complete. VideoWatch coroner describe how cop might’ve Tasered a dead man »

“It’s taken several months for this case to even be properly addressed, so one has to wonder, why did it take so long?” said Carol Powell Lexing, a lawyer for the Pikes family. “Obviously, a wrongful death occurred.”

Nugent’s lawyer, Phillip Terrell, said his client followed proper procedure to subdue a man who outweighed him by 100 pounds. But Williams said Pikes was already handcuffed and on the ground when first hit with the Taser, after the 247-pound suspect was slow to follow police orders to get up.

Winnfield, a sleepy lumber town about 100 miles southeast of Shreveport, Louisiana, is best known as the birthplace of legendary Louisiana governors Huey and Earl Long. It’s also about 45 miles northwest of Jena, Louisiana, where a racially charged assault case sparked a September 2007 demonstration by an estimated 15,000 people.

One of the teenage defendants in that case, Mychal Bell, is Pikes’ first cousin – and his lawyer was Powell Lexing.

Nugent is white; Pikes was black. His death led to demonstrations that drew several dozen people in Winnfield, where the population of about 15,000 is roughly half African-American.

“The family wants justice,” Lexing said. “This is just another example of why it’s very important to stay vigilant with these types of cases, on the injustice that’s been perpetrated on the disadvantaged.”

But Winnfield police Lt. Chuck Curry said race “isn’t an issue at all” in the matter.

“This has come down to a police officer that was trying to apprehend a suspect that they had warrants for,” he said. “He done what he thought he was trained to do to bring that subject into custody. At some point, something happened with his body that caused him to go into cardiac arrest or whatever.”

According to police, Pikes was wanted on a charge of possession of cocaine when police tried to arrest him outside a shopping center January 12.

“He would not stop for the officer,” Curry said. “At some point in there, he was Tased to bring him under control, and several hours later, died at the emergency room.”

Terrell said Pikes was fighting Nugent “on uneven ground” amid obstructions such as concrete blocks and barbed wire.

“He’s fighting, wrestling with an individual who weighs 100 pounds more than him,” he said. “His partner had just come back to the police department from triple bypass surgery and could not assist Officer Nugent.”

Terrell said his client “used every means possible” to take Pikes into custody before pulling out his Taser, a weapon Winnfield police purchased in 2007.

“The only thing he could have done other than to say, ‘OK, we’re going to let you go’ is to beat him or Tase him. He did the right thing,” Terrell said.

Williams, who ruled Pikes’ death a homicide in June after extensive study, said Nugent fired his Taser at Pikes six times in less than three minutes – shots recorded by a computer chip in the weapon’s handle. Then officers put Pikes in the back of a cruiser and drove him to their police station – where Nugent fired a seventh shot, directly against Pikes’ chest.

“After he was given that drive stun to the chest, he was pulled out of the car onto the concrete, ” Williams told CNN. “He was electroshocked two more times, which two officers noted that he had no neuromuscular response to those last two 50,000-volt electroshocks.”

Williams said he had two nationally known forensic pathologists, including former New York city medical examiner Michael Baden, review the case before issuing his conclusions. He said it’s possible Nugent was shocking a dead man the last two times he pulled the trigger.

“This fellow was talking in the back seat of the car prior to shot number seven,” he said. “From that point on, it becomes questionable [if Pikes was still alive].”

Curry said Pikes told officers he suffered from asthma and had been using PCP and crack cocaine. But Williams said he found no sign of drug use in the autopsy, and no record of asthma in Pikes’ medical history.

In the year since Winnfield police received Tasers, officers have used them 14 times, according to police records – with 12 of the instances involving black suspects. Ten of the 14 incidents involved Nugent, who has no public disciplinary record.

Nugent was suspended after Pikes’ death, and Winnfield’s City Council voted 3-2 to fire him in May. He is appealing his dismissal, and his lawyer says he followed proper procedures in Pikes’ case. He was trained in the use of the Taser by a senior police officer who was present during the incident that led to Pikes’ death, Terrell said.

Curry said Taser International, the device’s manufacturer, indicates that “multiple Tasings do not affect a person.” But he said he could not explain why Pikes was shocked so many times, and said whether Nugent followed proper procedure was “yet to be determined.”

But a copy of the Winnfield Police Department’s Taser training manual, obtained by CNN, says the device “shall only be deployed in circumstances where it is deemed reasonably necessary to control a dangerous or violent subject.” And Williams said regulations regarding the use of Tasers were not followed.

“It violated every aspect – every single aspect – of the department’s policy about its use,” the coroner said.

Winnfield has seen a spate of high-profile corruption cases in recent years. One of Nevils’ predecessors as district attorney, Terry Reeves, killed himself amid allegations of embezzlement and extortion. The town’s current police chief, Johnny Ray Carpenter, is a convicted drug offender who received a pardon from former Louisiana Gov. Edwin Edwards who himself is now serving a federal prison term for racketeering.

And Carpenter’s predecessor, Gleason Nugent – the father of Pikes’ arresting officer – committed suicide in 2005, after allegations of fraud and vote buying in the race for police chief, an elected position in Winnfield.

Now Nevils is awaiting the state police report on Pikes’ death, which will be presented to a grand jury for possible charges against Nugent – a possibility Curry said would be a blow to the department.

“It’s one of these no-win situations,” he said. “No matter the outcome, nobody’s going to win in this case.”

The Taser attack on Baron Pikes in Winfield Louisiana has horrified readers across the nation.  CNN tells me they will doing a story this evening (10 Eastern) as part of the Anderson Cooper show.  We will be posting a link to the program as soon as it is available.

There will always be people who are attracted to law enforcement because they like having power over helpless people.  Scott Nugent of Winnfield, La. appears to have been that kind of person.

I first learned about this story from Alexandria, La. radio personality Tony Brown, the first person to give serious attention to the noose incident in Jena, Louisiana.  I told Brown to contact Howard Witt, the Chicago Tribune reporter who understands the complicated racial dynamics in small southern towns.  Baron “Scooter” Pikes, the victim of an unauthorized taser attack, is related to Mychal Bell of Jena 6 fame.

As Witt notes, there is a strong suggestion that local officials initially attempted to cover-up the true facts of the case.  If there is any indication that justice isn’t being served, there needs to be an organized response.  Thanks to Howard Witt for bringing outside scrutiny to a tragic story.

chicagotribune.com
TRIBUNE SPECIAL REPORT
Taser death ignites racial tensions
Not far from Jena, La., suspicions rise of a cover-up mount
By Howard Witt

Tribune correspondent

7:52 PM CDT, July 19, 2008

WINNFIELD, La. – At 1:28 p.m. last Jan. 17, Baron “Scooter” Pikes was a healthy 21-year-old man. By 2:07 p.m., he was dead.

What happened in the 39 minutes in between – during which Pikes was handcuffed by local police and shocked nine times with a Taser, while reportedly pleading for mercy -is now spawning fears of a political coverup in this backwoods Louisiana lumber town infamous for backroom dealings.

Even more ominously, because Pikes was black and the officer who repeatedly Tasered him is white, racial tensions over the case are mounting in a place that’s just 40 miles from Jena, La.—site of the racially explosive prosecution of six black teenagers charged with beating a white youth that last year triggered one of the largest American civil rights demonstrations in decades. And in a bizarre coincidence, Pikes turns out to have been a first cousin of Mychal Bell, the lead defendant in the Jena 6 case.
No novelist could have invented Winnfield, a place so steeped in corruption that they built a local museum to try to sanitize it all.

Here in the birthplace of two of Louisiana’s most colorful and notorious governors – Huey and Earl Long-the police chief committed suicide three years ago after losing a close election marred by allegations of fraud and vote-buying.

Four months later, the district attorney killed himself after allegedly skimming $200,000 from his office budget and extorting payments from criminal defendants to make their cases go away.

The current police chief is a convicted drug offender who got a pardon from Edwin Edwards, the former Louisiana governor who is serving time in federal prison for corruption convictions.

All of that tangled history is now wrapped up in the Pikes case, because Scott Nugent, the officer who Tasered him, is the well-connected son of the former police chief who killed himself-and the protege of the current chief, who hired him onto the force.

“A lot happens in this town, and it just gets swept under the rug,” said Kayshon Collins, Pikes’ stepmother, who has participated in several local protests over the case. “What the police did to Scooter just isn’t right. They would never have Tasered a white kid like that.”

The official police version of what happened to Pikes on that brisk January afternoon reads like a sad but familiar story in Winnfield’s local newspaper.

Nugent spotted Pikes walking along the street and attempted to arrest him on an outstanding warrant for drug possession, according to Police Chief Johnny Ray Carpenter. Pikes took off running, but another officer cornered him outside a nearby grocery store. Pikes resisted arrest and Nugent subdued him with a shock from a Taser.

Then on the way to the police station, Carpenter told the newspaper, Pikes fell ill and told the officers he suffered from asthma and was high on crack cocaine and PCP. The officers called for an ambulance, but Pikes later died at the hospital.

Six months later, the Winnfield police are standing by that story. Meanwhile, the Louisiana State Police are investigating the case, and no charges have been filed against Nugent or two other Winnfield police officers who assisted him in arresting Pikes, although the City Council did decide to fire Nugent from the force in May.

Winn Parish District Atty. Chris Nevils says he expects to present the case to a grand jury after he receives the results of the state police investigation.

Evidence contradicts report
But there is already abundant evidence contradicting the official police version of the incident.

An autopsy determined there were no drugs in Pikes’ system and that he did not have asthma, according to Dr. Randolph Williams, the Winn Parish coroner.

Moreover, Pikes did not resist arrest, and he was handcuffed while lying on the ground, according to Nugent’s police report of the incident. It was only after Pikes refused Nugent’s command to stand up that the officer applied the first Taser shock in the middle of his back, Nugent wrote.

Several more Taser shocks followed quickly, Nugent stated, because Pikes kept falling down and refusing to get back up. Grocery shoppers who witnessed the incident later told Pikes’ family that he had pleaded with Nugent: “Please, you all got me. Please don’t Tase me again.”

Williams said police records showed Nugent administered nine Taser shocks to Pikes over a 14-minute period. The last two jolts, delivered as police pulled Pikes from a patrol car at the police station, elicited no reaction because the suspect was unconscious, Williams said.

After consulting about the case with Dr. Michael Baden, a nationally prominent forensic pathologist, Williams ruled last month that Pikes’ death was a homicide. On the death certificate, he listed the cause of death as “cardiac arrest following nine 50,000-volt electroshock applications from a conductive electrical weapon.”

“God did not just call this young man home,” said Williams, who has served as parish coroner for the past 33 years. “If somebody can tell me anything else that killed this otherwise perfectly healthy young man … I’d like to know it.”

Williams is no stranger to controversy in Winnfield. Back in 2004, his garage was firebombed, and he says he’s been shot at 19 times by people upset with the independence of his investigations. He wears a gun holstered at his waist.

“This case may be the most unnecessary death I have ever had to investigate,” Williams said. “[Pikes] put up no fuss, no fighting, no physical aggression. … He just didn’t respond quickly enough to the officer’s commands.”

Nugent, 21, declined to be interviewed for this story. But his attorney, Phillip Terrell, said that Nugent acted according to his training-an opinion seconded by police spokesman Lt. Charles Curry.

Taser safety guidelines
Yet the official Winnfield Police Department Taser policy appears to prohibit the weapon’s use against a non-violent, handcuffed suspect.

“The Taser shall only be deployed in circumstances where it is deemed reasonably necessary to control a dangerous or violent subject,” the policy states. It also requires that a suspect who has been Tasered should immediately be checked out at a hospital.

What’s more, safety guidelines issued by Taser International Inc., the manufacturer of the device that is now used by more than 12,700 law-enforcement and military agencies worldwide, warn officers to “minimize repeated, continuous, and/or simultaneous exposures.”

Company officials, citing dozens of medical studies, insist Tasers are safe when used properly. But few of those studies examined the effect of multiple Taser applications over a short period of time. The U.S. Department of Justice, in a study released in June, concluded that “the medical risks of repeated or continuous [Taser] exposure are unknown.”

In less than two years on Winnfield’s 20-officer police force, police records show, Nugent ranked as the department’s most aggressive Taser user. Among the recipients were a 15-year-old African-American runaway who was not charged with any crime and Pikes’ father, currently serving a prison sentence for a drug offense, who was Tasered by Nugent last year, according to Kayshon Collins.

hwitt@tribune.com

Copyright © 2008, Chicago Tribune

Scott Henson at Grits for Breakfast comments on the results of a recent investigation into the Houston crime lab.  “Forensic labs should be more like referees than team players,” Henson says, “neutral arbiters on which both sides can rely – but that’s not how things operate in the real world.”

According to researcher William Thompson, the errors at the Houston lab almost always favored law enforcement and the prosecution.  “It’s like team spirit. They see the defense counsel as their enemy and tend to be kind of secretive and not want to disclose things outside of the family.”

Here is an important update to this post from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

‘Jena Six’ athlete to play at Columbus’ Shaw High
GHSA grants eligibility to Robert Bailey Jr., who awaits trial for battery charge

By S. THOMAS COLEMAN

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Monday, August 25, 2008

Robert Bailey Jr., one of the “Jena Six,” will be allowed to play for Shaw High in Columbus this season.

The Georgia High School Association approved Bailey’s hardship appeal to be granted eligibility for the 2008-09 school year today at its fall executive committee meeting. Bailey’s appeal was the only one of five requests to be approved.

Bailey is one of six black teenagers from Jena, La., who came to be known as the “Jena Six,” after they originally were charged with attempted murder after allegedly attacking a white student at Jena High School in December of 2006. The charges were eventually reduced to aggravated second-degree battery. Five of the six, including Bailey, are awaiting trial.

The alleged attack was one of several racially charged incidents that occurred in the rural town that year, and the case brought worldwide attention to Jena. An estimated 20,000 protesters marched through Jena last summer in a show of support for Bailey and his co-defendants.

The Raiders are ranked No. 5 in Class AAA in the AJC’s preseason Top 10 poll. They are a combined 71-12 since 2002.

Here is the originbal post:

This message of concern was forwarded to Friends of Justice by Organizing in the Trenches, a Jena-based advocacy group led by Robert Bailey’s mother, Caseptla Bailey, and his half-sister, Catrina wallace.  In Jena, Robert was considered a bad apple; in Georgia Robert is considered a model student.

Hello, my name is Brandon Wood, I am the Defensive Coordinator at Shaw High School in Columbus, Georgia where Robert Bailey Jr now attends high School.  First and foremost let me tell all who read this letter what a privilege it has been to have the opportunity to get to know Robert. Since I have known him he has been the model student athlete. Everything he has done has been done the right way.
 
With that said, it would be an injustice to Robert for the GHSA to declare him ineligble to play football this year. Robert has the oportunity and the ability to sign a major college football scholarship. However, if he is
declared ineligble that will not be the case! What we need is as many friends, family, celebrities, media, etc. as we can have present at his hardship hearing.
I am asking you to please help get this information out to as many people as possible. If anyone needs further information about the event they can call or email me and I will be glad to help in any way possible. My number is 706.575.5400 and my email is bwood@mcsdga.net.
 
We will meet the full 33 members of the State Executive Committee on Monday, August 25, 2008 at the Holiday Inn located in Forsyth Georgia. We have not been informed as of yet what time the meeting will begin but as soon as I get that information I will be sure to let everyone know.
 
Let me thank all of you in advance for your hard work pertaining to this matter. Please remember that Robert needs all of our help in this matter.
Please let me know if I can be of any assistance to you!
 
Brandon Wood
bwood@mcsdga.net
Shaw High School
7579 Raider Way
Columbus, Georgia
706.575.5400
http://shaw.mcsdga.net/

There will be more publicity concerning this important ruling in the next few days, but this AP article will give you the particulars.  The state of Louisiana may decide to re-try Albert Woodfox or he may be a free man in a matter of weeks.  We will keep you posted as developments develop.

La. judge overturns ex-Black Panther’s conviction

By DOUG SIMPSON – 18 hours ago

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) – A federal judge on Tuesday overturned the conviction of a former Black Panther in the 1972 stabbing death of a Louisiana prison guard.

Albert Woodfox, who was held in solitary confinement for over 30 years, is one of three former Panthers known as the “Angola Three.” He and two other black prisoners at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola were convicted in the killing of guard Brent Miller on April 17, 1972.

U.S. District Judge James Brady issued a ruling late Tuesday approving a federal magistrate’s June recommendation that Woodfox’s conviction be overturned because one of his former lawyers failed to object to a prosecutor’s testimony about a witness’ credibility. Brady also found that Woodfox’s trial lawyer failed to object to testimony from a witness who had died after the trial.

Woodfox’s decades in solitary confinement attracted worldwide attention from activists who called him a political prisoner.

Nick Trenticosta, the New Orleans-based defense lawyer who handled the appeal, said Woodfox’s immediate future lies in the hands of prosecutors, who could request a new trial. Trenticosta said he hoped Woodfox to be released without another trial.

“The man was convicted on false evidence, and he’s been held in solitary for almost 40 years. Let’s release him,” Trenticosta said.

A message left for prosecutors late Tuesday was not immediately returned.

Trenticosta said Woodfox had probably not yet heard about the ruling.

“I don’t believe he knows,” Trenticosta said. “But I’ll talk to him in the morning and he’ll probably find out about it in the newspaper.”

Woodfox and Herman Wallace were kept in solitary confinement from 1972 until March, when they were moved to a maximum-security dormitory with other prisoners. Woodfox was serving 50 years for armed robbery when the 1972 killing occurred.

Wallace has been appealing his conviction based on arguments similar to Woodfox’s.

The third member of the “Angola Three” spent 29 years in isolation before his conviction was overturned in 2001. Robert King, known as Robert King Wilkerson in the 1970s, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder and was freed.