At 9am, three NYPD officers will hear their fate in the fatal shooting of Sean Bell in November 2006. Bell died in a hail of 50 bullets after leaving a bachelor party at a strip club.

Police say that Bell and his friend got into an altercation with another group of men outside the club and, believing one of Bell’s friends had a gun, a plainclothes officer followed them and called in for backup.

Bell’s friends say that detectives drew their guns on them but, never identified themselves as police. Fearing that some unknown men were about to fire on them, Bell sped off in his vechicle.

Police say they thought Bell was trying to run them down and began shooting. Now, this runs counter to the earlier version of their story in which officers where saying that they thought there was a person wielding a gun inside the vehicle and began firing on the vehicle.

The verdict is minutes away but, I fear the fix is in on this one. This is a bench trial (no jury) and, given what has happened in cases like that of Amadou Diallo, I have my doubts that there will be any real accountability for these officers.

UPDATE: The three officers have been acquitted on all charges related to the killing of Sean Bell.  There may be some hope for justice, still.  Federal prosecutors have been monitoring this trial to determine if civil rights charges can be brought forward.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Imagine being a black police officer in the segregated South. You have to risk life and limb while simultaneously dealing with the racism and discrimination against you.

Now, imagine doing that for 20 years and, merely because you are black, you don’t get the same pension as white retired officers.

This is the fight of some nearly 200 retired police officers in Georgia. Because of racism, these officers were denied access to a state-supported supplemental police retirement fund until 1976.

Had many of these officers been allowed to buy in earlier in their careers, they would have hundreds of dollars more a month in retirement benefits. Instead, some like J.L. Booker spend what should be their retirement years working to make ends meet. Booker says he could have had as much as $770 extra dollars per month had he been allowed to participate earlier.

Georgia is the only state that has such a pension crisis for black officers. I guess, at least when it comes to police officers, these other states’ legislatures have recognized that racially discriminating against those who served on the ranks of their police forces was wrong or, at least, sent a very bad message about their states.

The fight is not over. If the state legislatures do refuse to act, the next stop is court.

Georgia, stop being shameful. Protect those who protected you all these years.

Popularity: 15% [?]

Four Chicago men will receive a settlement of nearly $20 million for the alleged torture at the hands of Chicago Police. In July 2006, a report revealed that at least 5 Chicago police officers used torture to get confessions out of suspects. These officers utilized tactics as extreme as electric shock and Russian roulette to force confessions. As a result, the men — Leroy Orange, Stanley Howard, Madison Hobley and Aaron Patterson — ended up on death row.

These men were released after each spending more than a decade on death row while the ringleader for this torture, police commander Jon Burge finished out his career and retired in Florida.

These were not the first or the last instances of such tactics by police. However, with settlements such as this, let’s hope that more cities give a long, hard look at how their officers are behaving.

Popularity: 30% [?]

They said it was to teach him a lesson.

On Halloween, two Staten Island, NY cops said they saw Rayshawn Moreno throwing eggs at a car. So, rather than than taking him home to his parents for discipline or taking him to a police precinct to have him picked up by parents, Officers Thomas Elliassen and Richard Danese had a different punishment in mind. They took 14-year-old Rayshawn to a swampy area in a nearby city, made him strip down to his underwear and socks and left him.

Fortunately, Rayshawn made it home safely after walking to a nearby store and having a security guard call his parents.

Now, Rayshawn’s parents want more substantial charges for the cops involved. Telisa and James Hezel say the charges of unlawful imprisonment and endangering the welfare of a child, both punishable by up to a year in jail, are not enough. They are calling on the district attorney to also charge the cops with kidnapping, unlawful imprisonment, assault and endangering the welfare of a child. They also want the D.A. to determine if there are grounds to try to cops on hate crimes charges, as well.

The latter caused me to raise an eyebrow but, I had to ask myself if the cops felt comfortable doing this to a 14-year-old boy only because he was black.

The truth is that anything could have happened to Rayshawn and his parents would not have known until it was too late. Furthermore, cops are expected to enforce the law and the law clearly does not allow for dropping a child off in another town, forcing him to strip and leaving him in a potentially dangerous situation. So, I hope that they get the book thrown at them but, given that cops get slaps on the wrist for killing unarmed black citizens, I don’t hold out a lot of hope for justice on this one.

Popularity: 48% [?]

Yesterday, the trial began for seven former boot camp guards and a nurse in the killing of Martin Lee Anderson.

Anderson was killed in an incident with the guards to kicked him, beat him and forced him to inhale ammonia tablets in the thirty-minute encounter.

Initially, a local Florida medical examiner reported that Martin died from an “undiagnosed sickle cell trait”.  The family, doubting such claims, called for a second autopsy.  The findings of that autopsy concluded that Martin was suffocated when “guards suffocated Anderson with their hands over his mouth and nose and by making him breathe ammonia.”

Each of the defendents face charges of the manslaughter of a child and could each receive up to 30 years in prison, if convicted.

Popularity: 41% [?]

Over the last several years, we have heard more and more about people (too many of them black) being released after decades in prison when it was discovered that they could not have committed the crimes for which they were convicted. Too often, this was do to crooked cops forcing confessions out of people in order to closes cases as opposed to actually solving crimes.

It appears that we should be seeing more overturned convictions in the near future after it has been revealed that Federal Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald will be investigating claims of the torture of suspects by Chicago police in the 1980s.

A four-year study by two special prosecutors appointed by a Cook County judge, released in July 2006, found that Chicago police beat, kicked and shocked scores of black suspects in the 1970s and 1980s to get confessions. The report said it was impossible to file charges because the incidents were so old that the statute of limitations had long since run out.

On Wednesday, however, U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald announced the federal government was stepping into the torture case, saying it would seek evidence of “perjury, false statements and obstruction of justice by members of the Chicago police department.”

“It’s political, it’s cultural, it’s systemic,” said attorney G. Flint Taylor, who represents several former death row inmates now suing Burge and city officials.

Attorney Richard Sikes, who represents Burge in the five civil suits, said after Fitzgerald’s announcement that allegations against his client “have been fairly investigated by the special prosecutors who found that charges were not appropriate.”

All this is being announced in the midst of other investigation of the Chicago special operations officer Jerome Finnigan, who federal prosecutors say plotted to kill another member of this unit to keep him from testifying about about a shakedown scheme in which this unit was allegedly involved.

Popularity: 40% [?]

Last month, 14-year-old DeOnte Rawlings died after being shot in a confrontation with two off-duty D.C. police officers. Now, the results of his autopsy are raising some very serious questions about police actions in this incident.

According to the police account, Officer James Haskel solicited the help fellow officer and friend Anthony Clay to help him find a minibike Haskel believed had been stolen from his home. So the two off-duty officers, out of uniform, went riding around looking for it. They came up DeOnte, who was riding the minibike.

The officers claim DeOnte shot at them and Officer Haskel exited his vehicle, pursued DeOnte on foot and shot him.

However, the recent autopsy report is somewhat disconcerting. First, it clearly indicates that DeOnte was shot in the back of the head. Secondly, there was no gunshot residue on his hands or fingers, which could very well have been there if he had indeed fired a gun. Thirdly, DeOnte’s family says that there was no gun recovered at the scene. Finally, there were serious traumatic injuries to the side and back of his body. These could have come from the fall or they could have come from him being hit.

Currently, this case is being investigated by the U.S. Attorney’s office, the FBI and DC police.

Personally, I believe something stinks here. Armed, off-duty police officers, out of uniform, tracking down stolen property and end up in an encounter killing a 14-year-old? Call me paranoid or conspiratorial but, I smell a cover-up.

Popularity: 35% [?]