The outrageous case of Troy Davis peters toward an unjust end.:

The city of North Richland Hills won a five-year-legal battle Tuesday against a true-crime author whose son was shot and killed by police officers during a drug raid in 1999.

U.S. District Judge Terry Means dismissed the lawsuit brought by Barbara Davis, writing in his opinion that the city was not liable because the shooting was not caused by official policy and because a municipality is not responsible for the actions of its employees if they are not following policy.

Ah, sovereign immunity. The particularly galling thing about this case is that North Richland Hills was negligent — in properly overseeing its police department.

I wrote quite a bit about this case in November 2005. Have a look at that post to see just how deep the incompetence in that town is.

The behavior of the police department and North Richland Hills town officials has been absolutely appalling. The warrant was illegal (after the first judge actually turned him down, the officer who procured it merely took it a friendlier judge, who promptly signed it), the SWAT team was woefully inadequate and unprepared, and all of that bad behavior only got worse after the raid and–frankly–murder of Troy Davis.

And as of late 2005, anyway, the town still had done nothing to change its SWAT/no-knock procedures, despite repeated warnings from some police officers (who were fired or forced to resign), victims, and experts, and despite the fact that they’re done so frequently as to be unconstitutional.

Of course, there’s no reason to comply with the Constitution if the courts aren’t going to penalize you for violating it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 15th, 2007 at 6:45 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Police Militarization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.