TheAgitator.com
“Professionalism” Fails in Boston
Sunday, February 10th, 2008The Boston Phoenix investigates the sad case of Stephan Cowans, wrongfully imprisoned for killing a Boston police officer. Cowans was exonerated in 2003, then murdered in 2004 by someone with designs on his $3.2 million settlement. The paper digs into Cowans’ conviction, and finds evidence that police knew Cowans was innocent, yet forged ahead with his prosecution anyway. Regular readers of this site will recognize this language:
What disturbs some political critics, as well as some defense attorneys, is that an unusually high number of botched police cases have not resulted in significant internal reform or any disciplinary action. This despite police conduct that a judge called “a fraud upon the court,” in Christopher Harding’s conviction, and that another judge, presiding over Donnell Johnson’s appeal, said “suggests either serious misconduct or negligence.”
In other cases of wrongful conviction, there was no effort made to answer tough questions about what went wrong. A feeble attempt was made in the wake of Cowans’s exoneration. But its inadequacy only underscores the rottenness of the system. And of all these cases, it is the Cowans conviction that raises the biggest questions about local law-enforcement officials’ ability to police themselves.
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After examining 15 wrongful convictions — all but four in Boston — Reilly and the state’s DAs concluded that they “did not suggest a present systems failure,” and laid most of the blame vaguely on “erroneous eyewitness identifications.”
In the only specific reference to Cowans, the report said that “the Commonwealth’s fingerprint evidence was flawed.”
Such comments fail to acknowledge what the BPD itself concluded more than two years earlier — that the fingerprint evidence was not flawed, but deliberately manipulated and lied about in court.
Defense attorneys who have fought wrongful-conviction cases say that without a more honest and thorough explanation, the public and law-enforcement officials alike cannot know whether a “present systems failure” exists.
It’s a damning article. But if history is any indication, it’s unlikely to bring any real reform.
And just how many of those “erroneous eyewitness identifications” were the result of a police officer threatening the witness?
It’s long past time that qualified immunity be removed from all government employees. The only way that this will end is if those involved are hurt in the wallet, and in the anus as they are introduced to the joys of being a “prison bitch.”
And if cops/prosecutors don’t want to function under those conditions, there’s always McDonalds.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that if I wish to continue reading this blog, I will need to find some better drugs. Something effective at subduing the outrage. Something that would induce a coma perhaps…
As a resident of a Boston suburb I have on occasion had the misfortune to interact with the Boston PD, usually when they are doing traffic control.
Most of the ones that I have interacted with are arrogant bullies. I don’t know if it’s the fact that they operate a monopoly and thus don’t have to worry about customer service, or if it is something peculiar to their organizations culture that’s responsible. However, I consistently have witnessed despotic behavior, including one cop screaming at me for obeying the orders of his friend standing 5 paces away, watching one guy wave pedestrians into oncoming traffic etc. All of it really petty, but adding up to a pattern of intimidation and nasty behavior.
Personally, if I lived in Boston, the Boston PD would be the last organization I would call to my home in an emergency, and things would have to be very bad indeed for me to risk inviting them into my home.
BTW, I am convinced that an episode of Cops which aired about 5 years ago that was focused on the Boston PD and which contained a cop busting a couple of drug dealers, calling their boss on the phone in order to taunt him was actually showing the cop issuing a warning that the guy had better star paying his protection money. Perhaps I misread the situation, but as I watched, I was pretty amazed how easily the cop found the guys, how he already new their organization’s structure, etc. The fact that the cop had the chuzpah to do that on national television made the whole thing comedy gold.
To think that this is going on in UT.
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Keeping police misconduct a secret proposed Advocates of open government records are taken aback by the limiting proposal
Article Last Updated: 02/09/2008 02:10:17 AM MST
Proposed amendments to the state’s Government Records Access and Management Act would make information on police misconduct off limits to the public.
SB260, sponsored by Sen. Chris Buttars, R-West Jordan, would among other things, classify information about charges or disciplinary action taken against police officers as private, unless officers grant written consent to make the data public. The bill was introduced in the Senate Rules Committee meeting on Friday and is already raising eyebrows among those who support liberal open records laws.
http://www.sltrib.com/utahpolitics/ci_8215010
NOTE; Chris Buttars could be a shoe in for pick any dictator you desire. I would not be surprised if he sponsored a bill that would force couples to apply for permission to have sex!
I was thinking the same thing as #2 Dave while reading the article.