LOUISVILLE — The four young black men who collected a $1.5 million settlement this week from Metro Louisville for their wrongful arrests say they accept Mayor Greg Fischer’s apology.
But they reject Fischer and Police Chief Steve Conrad’s claims that race had nothing to do with the arrests.
And at a news conference Thursday in the Jefferson County Judicial Center, they said they believe they were victims of racial profiling, and that settlement has not restored their trust in the department.
“We feel like we still need to look over our shoulders,” said Tyrone Booker Jr., 20, who spent 70 days in jail.
Lawyers for the four men, dubbed the “Misidentified 4,” said the city deserves credit for settling the case quickly, without a lawsuit. “They did seek an honorable way to resolve it and we are going to give them credit for that,” said Al Gerhardstein, a Cincinnati civil-rights lawyer.
But he said Conrad should have sanctioned the officers involved, rather than just order them to undergo further training.
“When you have officers who do things totally opposite the way they are supposed to … and are not disciplined, it suggests a systemic problem,” he said.
Conrad has said an internal investigation found that that Officers Cordell Allen, Timothy Lanham, Michael Torres and Jeremy Boehnlein violated six department policies when they presented the suspects to two witnesses on a sidewalk in the glare of a police spotlight.
A grand jury exonerated all four defendants — Booker, Shaquazz Allen, 19, Jerron Bush, 22, and Craig Dean — on charges that they robbed a woman at gunpoint on March 22, the night of mob violence in downtown Louisville; Allen and Booker also were cleared on separate charges of assault and unlawful imprisonment when the victims of another crime earlier the same evening saw their pictures on a local newscast about the robbery and then identified them as their assailants.
Gerhardstein declined to say how the settlement will be divided among the four men and their lawyers.
Dressed in suits and ties, the men talked to reporters for about 60 minutes about how they were affected by their incarceration. Booker and Allen were locked up for 70 days, while Bush and Dean each served five days, plus time on home incarceration.
They were cleared in part by cellphone records that showed they couldn’t have been at the crime scene.
Booker said he feared he’d never be freed. “I almost gave up,” he said.
Allen said he will have to return to high school to graduate and that he now has trouble sleeping.
All four said they thought they had been victims of racial profiling, despite Conrad’s assertion in a statement that the officers’ mistakes were based on inexperience rather than “based solely on their race.”
“We were the first black people they seen,” Booker said.
The four men said the money will help them pay their bills and further their education, but that it doesn’t make them whole.
“They slandered me and made us look like animals,” Booker said
Louisville lawyer Larry Simon said police “blew it on this case” and noted that it was the third case in 10 years he has worked on in which the city has paid millions of dollars for wrongful prosecutions based on misidentification.
“We are available to work with police to get it right,” Simon said.
A third lawyer, Jan Waddell of Louisville, who won the exoneration of the defendants in their criminal cases, said the settlement shows the city is “sincere about holding police accountable.” He also praised Commonwealth’s Attorney Tom Wine and his prosecutors for “thwarting this injustice” by recommending that the grand jury return no indictment.
“We are not Ferguson,” he said.
The defendants were arrested after a woman reported that she was robbed at gunpoint of her cellphone and purse. She and her boyfriend could only describe the perpetrators as black, ages 16 to 20, and wearing black hoodies.
But the officers confronted the first four black men they found two blocks away, sitting on Bush’s porch, even though only two of the men were wearing hoodies. And they allowed the victim and her boyfriend to remain together as they identified the men, in violation of department policy.
Conrad also found that the officers violated rules by failing to document the description of the suspects before conducting the show-up; failing to record it on video; failing to take statements from the suspects; and failing to conduct a thorough search for additional evidence.
Simon noted they never bothered to get the number of the victim’s stolen cellphone, for example, to see if it was used by someone else after the robbery.
Simon told reporters the real perpetrators of the crimes — the robbery and the assault — likely never will be identified or convicted.
The four young men said that the settlement has not repaired their distrust of the police.
“We feel like we still need to look over our shoulders,” Booker said.
Dean said, “We feel like we should be able to trust police, not have to protect ourselves from them.”
Source: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/03/12/4-wrongfully-arrested-men-blame-profiling/70245960/