IN THE ORLEANS PARISH Criminal District Court, the case of State of Louisiana v. Kenneth Bowen et al., was assigned to Criminal District Court judge Raymond Bigelow. Three days after the police officers were hailed as heroes in the streets, Judge Bigelow was filing a report in the courthouse disclosing the many ties between his office, the officers, and their counsel. Suddenly the criminal justice system in Orleans Parish was feeling very much like a family affair, according to the January 5, 2007, report the judge prepared.
“In an effort to apprize the prosecutors in the captioned matter of relationships which exist between members of my staff and individuals identified with defense, the Court files this notice into the record,” Judge Bigelow declared.
Sergeant Bowen, the judge noted, was represented by the law firm DeSalvo, DeSalvo, and Blackburn. “These attorneys are the father, brother and husband, respectively, of one of my minute clerks, Emily DeSalvo Blackburn,” Judge Bigelow reported. A minute clerk helps keep the court’s official records.
The spokesman for the Fraternal Order of Police, Sergeant Donovan Livaccari, “is the husband of my other minute clerk, Claire Livaccari.” The FOP was a major source of support and fund-raising for the officers facing charges.
The lawyer for Officer Ignatius Hills, Bruce Whittaker, “was the longtime law partner of my law clerk, Michael Riehlmann, until August, 2005.”
The judge said these tentacle-like ties would not impede his handling of the “Danziger Bridge 7 Indictments,” among the most closely watched police corruption cases in New Orleans history. “Notwithstanding these relationships, the Court, confidently assures all parties in this matter that it can conduct all necessary proceedings in an entirely fair and impartial manner,” the judge wrote, signing his name, Raymond Bigelow, at the bottom of the one-page report.
Bigelow was not overjoyed when the case landed on his desk through the random allotment of cases on the criminal docket. “I wasn’t real thrilled. I knew it was going to be a headache of a case,” he said. Bigelow felt it unfair to simply recuse himself and shuffle the case over to another judge. So, he disclosed the ties between his office and the defense team and would have stepped aside if either side asked him to.
The defense was not likely to make the request. DA Eddie Jordan’s office, the side far more likely to object to ties between the judge’s office and the defense team, didn’t file a motion either, at least not right away. “I felt I was elected to handle the easy cases as well as the tough cases, so I didn’t want to dump this on any other judge. It wasn’t like I tried to hide anything from anyone in the public,” Bigelow explained. “If any one person had made the motion I would have recused myself from the case.”
The case stayed with him.
That same Friday afternoon Bigelow issued a first important ruling. After each of the seven officers pleaded not guilty, the judge granted bond to all the accused, including the four facing first degree murder charges, setting them free from spending time behind bars while their case traveled through the system. Bond in a murder case is highly unusual, but Bigelow granted it to all of them.
The district attorney’s office did not challenge the bond ruling, just as the office of DA Jordan had not filed a motion requesting Judge Bigelow step aside and allow another judge to hear the case—another judge without three clerks with ties to the law firm for one accused officer, the lawyer for another, and the FOP union that had lambasted the charges now before the bench.
“Everyone is entitled to a bond, you don’t automatically get a bond, but the defense had filed a motion for bond in the case,” the judge said. “And I met with the DA and the defense attorneys. Mr. Jordan, do you wish to agree to have a bond set? And he agreed to have a bond set in the case.”
His bond ruling was welcome news to the police association. “The officers were released and reunited with their families. There are some restrictions and court imposed requisites relative to the bond, which will not interfere with the officers’ ability to return to work in administrative capacities, pending final resolution of the matter,” wrote Glasser, the association president. “The officers wish to thank everyone for their support and I would like to remind everyone that the fight is just beginning and continued support will be crucial.”
EVEN AS THE CASE sprung to life with the state court charges, the Madison family did not sit idly by and watch the Orleans Parish legal system unfold. The family was troubled that the judge granted bond, troubled by his office’s ties to the defense team, and troubled that the DA was doing nothing about it, at least not yet.
By February 2007, a month after Judge Bigelow’s disclosures, Romell Madison and his supporters were pressing for a federal civil rights investigation into the shootings on the bridge. They didn’t trust the local DA’s office to right the wrong.
One of Madison’s phone calls was placed to Marc H. Morial, the former New Orleans mayor who had risen to become president and chief executive officer of the National Urban League in New York. Morial was twice elected mayor of New Orleans, following the path cleared by his father, Ernest “Dutch” Morial, the first black man to hold the office. The younger Morial entered city hall in 1994 vowing to clean out corruption “with a shovel not a broom,” and eyeing the police department in particular. He had hired Pennington to help clean the mess and, on Pennington’s first day as superintendent, introduced him to FBI investigators embedded in the department’s Public Integrity Bureau.
Morial was outraged by what happened on the bridge, by the shootings of innocents trying to survive the hurricane. What most troubled him was the cover-up.
“It’s almost as though a bad police department has an instinct and a culture of covering up misconduct,” he said. “When a department is covering up corruption they are operating like a criminal enterprise. Because that’s how the Mafia operates.”
Morial knew the justice system in New Orleans had a spotty record of convicting rogue officers. Convictions in the Algiers 7 case, when officers responded to the death of a white colleague by killing four black residents, came only when the case moved out of New Orleans and was held in Dallas. Algiers 7 unfolded while Morial’s father ran the city.
“In order to convict a police officer, you don’t have to convict him beyond a reasonable doubt. You have to convict him beyond all doubt,” the younger Morial said. “The history of New Orleans in police corruption is you have to have the Justice Department in order to have a just outcome. History teaches us that.”
A police brutality case that came to light shortly after he took office showed how outlaw officers had been allowed to wear the badge and rule with impunity. In December 1994, in a corruption case touted as the largest in the city’s history, nine police officers were charged in federal court with pocketing nearly $100,000 in bribes to protect a vast cocaine operation. The problem, for police: the cocaine center was actually run by undercover FBI agents. The investigation began a year earlier when two officers, one named Len Davis, began extorting bribes and offering protection to a drug dealer. That dealer then turned federal informant, and the sting was hatched. As the undercover operation unspooled, even federal agents were taken aback by the brazen police tactics. Davis, his partner, and seven other friendly officers they recruited stood guard over the supposed cocaine center, sometimes while on duty and in uniform. The federal sting prosecution was led by the same Eddie Jordan now serving as the city’s DA.
The undercover probe was abruptly halted after federal investigators discovered that Davis, in October 1994, had ordered the execution of a thirty-two-year-old woman who had filed a battery complaint against him. The woman, seeing Davis and other officers manhandling a neighborhood boy, had tried to come to the teen’s rescue when, she said, Davis roughed her up. Kim Groves filed a complaint against him. Seething, Davis turned to one of his criminal informants. “Get that whore!” he told the triggerman, who killed the young black woman in front of her home in the city’s Ninth Ward, firing a bullet into her head.
When the victim was killed, Davis uttered words Sergeant Kaufman had replicated on the bridge. “NAT,” Davis said. Necessary action taken. Before the shooting, Davis had been the subject of at least twenty brutality complaints over five years; nearly all were dismissed by police. “He’s got an internal affairs jacket as thick as a telephone book,” an officer told a reporter covering the case, “but supervisors have swept his dirt under the rug.”
After the hit on Kim Groves, victims of police brutality were wise not to complain about abusing officers. The execution of Groves made sure of that. The police-ordered hit may never have come to light had the FBI not been monitoring Len Davis and his troupe of badge-wearing cocaine protectors.
Davis, who had already come to be called Robocop, was sentenced to death for the murder, but that sentence became entangled in appeals and legal wrangling for decades. Sentencing for the gunman had not even been finalized thirteen years later in 2007 as Morial set his sights on the newest police scandal in New Orleans after receiving a call for help from the Madison family.
Morial had staked his two terms on uprooting corruption—winning widespread voter support and minimal political opposition. His handpicked police superintendent, Pennington, tried to rise to the mayor’s office. Pennington lost to Ray Nagin, and Morial contends that moment set back efforts for lasting reform within the department. “There were incidents before Katrina involving black men and excessive force by police that I would not have tolerated. So the seeds for Danziger were planted before Katrina,” Morial said.
“Danziger is a symptom. The cancer is police corruption,” agrees Rafael Goyeneche III, a former prosecutor who is president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission, a nonprofit watchdog group focused on spotlighting corruption and that operates directly across from the Mercedes-Benz Superdome. “You look at fifteen years before Danziger and the pattern is clear. The culture predicted Danziger.”
City watchdogs say there’s no question police discipline improved under Morial. Goyeneche believes the department celebrated success too soon, saying widespread change requires lasting commitment.
During Morial’s tenure, the Department of Justice threatened to step in with a lawsuit that would demand change. Morial convinced the DOJ not to take that formal step. He said his reforms were more sweeping than any the federal government could adopt. The department won accreditation, stressed community policing, and took, for New Orleans, a hard line on police wrongdoing. But by not allowing the Justice Department to formally stake a role in the city, Morial left office without any guarantee of permanent change. “Had I had any inkling that Nagin would have engaged in a systematic dismissal of police reforms, I would have taken any step necessary to try to lock in the reforms on a more permanent basis,” he said. “In hindsight I would have taken any step, any step to lock in those reforms had I had any sense that the retrenchment and the reversal would have been so massive and swift.”
Morial knew Nagin’s new superintendent, Eddie Compass, as a talented and respected district commander. Compass’s tenure atop the force lasted only past Hurricane Katrina, and he left with the department under fire. Today Compass said he doesn’t want to dwell on the past. When I asked him to talk about what happened, he replied tersely, “I really don’t discuss Danziger, I had nothing to do with it.” Compass said his attention during Katrina was focused on the human suffering at the Superdome. “Once Ray Nagin fired me from the police department, I don’t discuss the police department. I’ve gone on with my life, thank you.” Then he hung up. Nagin is now in federal prison serving a ten-year sentence for corruption for selling out his office for personal perks.
Out of the mayor’s office for five years when Romell Madison reached out to him, Morial maintained a keen interest in police abuse cases in New Orleans. He knew the culture crossed racial lines among members of the force. When the Madison family contacted him, the New Orleans Police Department’s racial makeup nearly mirrored that of the city. In 2007, in a city where 60 percent of residents were black, 57 percent of the force was black. Forty percent of NOPD’s officers were white. But the bond between officers was based on the color of their uniform, not their skin.
“They call it the blue code. When the blue code becomes an operating principle in the department, it affects all the officers,” Morial said.
And now the state judge overseeing the Danziger case was acknowledging his office’s ties to the defense and granting bond for men accused of killing unarmed victims. Morial pushed for federal intervention. “I’m very, very proud and just respectful of the way [the Madisons] have refused to let this go. They have done it very intelligently, they have done it very forcefully. The fact they have suffered a tragedy beyond their control . . . It’s clear you can’t bring [Ronald] back, but they can get justice for him,” Morial said.
On February 20, 2007, he wrote to the Congressional Black Caucus of the US House of Representatives, “to solicit your support for a federal civil rights investigation by the Justice Department of the circumstances surrounding the police killing of two unarmed African American men and the wounding of four others in an incident on Danziger Bridge in New Orleans on September 4, 2005, in those horrible days following the wrath of Hurricane Katrina. I am especially calling for congressional oversight into the subsequent handling of this case by the New Orleans Police Department and the court.”
Morial told how a “forty-year-old mentally handicapped African American man named Ronald Madison was shot in the back seven times by police. . . . Mr. Madison died of his wounds, as also did James Brissette, another man who was shot by the police that day on the same bridge. According to witness testimonies, the men and women shot by the police were hurricane survivors merely trying to run away from unidentified men who were shooting at them.” Morial described how, as Ronald lay dead on the pavement, Lance Madison was handcuffed and jailed.
He referred Congress to a lengthy accounting of events by the National Dental Association, a group once led by Romell Madison. Like the police family that stood up for the accused officers, the Dental Association was putting its might behind Romell Madison. “Their outrage stems from the additional injustice perpetuated by the court by allowing the police officers charged with first-degree murder to be released on bond, and the police department’s decision to allow the officers charged to return to work.”
Morial wanted action. “As you already know, there is so much pain and tragedy still being experienced by the thousands who were impacted by Hurricane Katrina. So much still needs to be done to restore the many institutions that affect every day life, including the criminal justice system.”
On March 27, 2007, the National Dental Association sent its own plea for help to US attorney general Alberto R. Gonzales, speaking on behalf of twenty thousand dentists and calling for a federal civil rights investigation into the killing of Ronald Madison. The group detailed the massacre on the bridge and documented concern over Judge Bigelow’s staff ties to the defense and his ruling allowing accused murderers to be released on bond.
“The tragedy of rogue police officers shooting unarmed citizens, mishandling their investigation of the incident, having a court that allows men charged with first degree murder to go free on bail and even back to work as police officers, and having a judge that has several serious conflicts of interest in this case yet refuses to recuse himself—all of this causes the victims, their families and the community to completely lose faith in the justice system in New Orleans,” the association wrote.
“Clearly, it is time for federal intervention and oversight in this case. Clearly, the local authorities are not committed to seeking full and complete justice,” wrote Robin R. Daniel, president of the National Dental Association, the position Romell had left just four years earlier.
Others joined the fight for a federal review, Daniel told the attorney general, from the New Orleans Chapter of the NAACP to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. “I ask you to heed these calls for justice. I ask you to take action today to ensure that there is no miscarriage of justice in these horrible murders and shootings.”
In Louisiana, yet other groups were seeking to get Judge Bigelow removed from the case even as the DA didn’t. On February 22, 2007, a group calling itself Safe Streets/Strong Communities wrote to members of the Louisiana Supreme Court, asking the state’s highest court to recuse Bigelow from the Danziger 7 prosecution.
“At a time when the national, if not global, spotlight is on New Orleans, it is imperative that the system function in a fair and transparent manner, without a hint of impropriety,” the group wrote. “We take no position as to the guilt or innocence of the officers charged. Our interest is in seeing justice done, in seeing that, the victims, their families and the defendants are treated fairly by the criminal justice system. It is our belief that as long as this case remains under Judge Bigelow’s control, any disposition of the case will remain forever tainted for the majority of New Orleanians.”
In June, five months after Judge Bigelow’s disclosures and three months after this group’s plea to have him removed from hearing the case, the district attorney sought a new judge to oversee the biggest case of his career. Dustin Davis, the assistant district attorney prosecuting the officers, said he had begun developing concerns, particularly over the law clerk who previously partnered with one of the defense attorneys. Bigelow had removed that clerk from involvement in the case, yet Davis said that move came only after the clerk took part in one meeting on the case and conducted research for the judge. Bigelow had already offered to step aside, but by this time he was deep in the case.
That September 2007, Orleans Parish judge Julian Parker denied the motion to remove Bigelow, ruling that prosecutors failed to provide evidence showing he shouldn’t preside over the case. The judge blocked Davis from asking another of Bigelow’s clerks—the one married to the FOP spokesman—whether she had contributed to a legal defense fund for the officers. Attending fund-raisers or making donations are constitutionally protected rights, Judge Parker said, cutting off the questioning.
“You have not put any meat on the bones of your application to recuse Judge Bigelow,” Parker told the prosecutor.
Soon after, DA Jordan called it quits, resigning his office amid problem cases and the sting of the discrimination verdict.
ELEVEN MONTHS LATER, on August 13, 2008, Judge Bigelow dismissed the entire case, ruling that prosecutor Davis tainted the grand jury process by showing a sliver of testimony to a supervisor of the officers under review.
“The violation is clear, and indeed, uncontroverted,” Bigelow said. “The state improperly disclosed grand jury testimony to another police officer.”
Further, Judge Bigelow said, prosecutor Davis improperly gave immunity to three officers for their testimony before the grand jury—only to have those same officers indicted. One of them was Kenneth Bowen, the officer pursuing his own legal career. And, the judge ruled, the prosecution gave flawed instructions to the grand jurors about the second degree murder charges.
Judge Bigelow read his ruling from the bench, gutting the state’s case and seemingly setting the police officers completely free. As he read from his ruling, the Times-Picayune told its readers, the accused officers sat silently in the front row of the courtroom, betraying little emotion. Behind them, wives and supporters wiped away tears.
Moments later, one of the police defense lawyers patted another on the back, beaming widely, as they left the courthouse surrounded by television microphones and cameras.
Ronald Madison’s family sat in the courtroom, soaking in the latest legal setback. “Our family today still feels that the ruling just proves again that the justice system here in New Orleans is still flawed,” Romell Madison told reporters, after walking down the courthouse steps wearing his blue dentist’s garb, his family trailing behind him. Romell said he would ask the US Department of Justice to take over the case. To the Madison family, the ruling was confirmation of their quest to convince the federal government to become involved. The family never trusted the New Orleans criminal justice system to mete out a fair punishment against its own. Instead, the officers who gunned down Ronald Madison and JJ Brissette were set free.
The local newspaper’s coverage of Bigelow’s ruling cited the police defense, suggesting to readers not intimately familiar with what happened on the bridge that the facts were in dispute. While noting that the families had brought lawsuits alleging a murder and cover-up, and citing questions about the police department’s fifty-four-page report, the Times-Picayune reported:
Police officials have acknowledged the officers shot people on two separate sides of the bridge, but said they did so only after first being shot at. A police report said they arrived at the scene that morning in response to calls over the police radio about people shooting at other officers and rescue workers.
Judge Bigelow’s ruling meant the law and order story held together, and police celebrated their colleagues as free men, not accused criminals. While the case had remained active, the accused had been required to wear tracking devices to follow their every move. Now those tracking devices were removed, and the officers went back to work, unshackled from the justice system.
Four months after tossing the case, Judge Bigelow would quietly work his last day on the bench. The onetime prosecutor, who began his career working for Orleans Parish district attorney Harry Connick, hung up his judicial robes. He went to work as a federal public defender and defense attorney handling capital murder cases.
As the judge stepped aside, some feared the case would fade too. Many in New Orleans believed the book had closed on that bloody Sunday, that there were two sides to the story, as the local newspaper reported, and the answers might never be fully revealed.
Three years after the Danziger Bridge shootings, truth remained elusive. From the moment the gunfire ceased, only a tiny cluster of people knew the full truth of what had happened that morning: The NOPD officers and phony cop who raced to the bridge, four supervisors in on the cover-up, and the eight city residents captured in their fire. With Bigelow’s ruling dismissing the case, the larger community remained in the dark.
Behind the scenes, in another wing of the justice system, momentum was building for a deeper look into the events of September 4, 2005.
On September 30, 2008, nearly two months after Judge Bigelow dismissed the state case, Jim Letten, the US attorney based in New Orleans, announced federal authorities were studying whether any foundation existed for a federal prosecution.
Even a member of the state district attorney’s office, Keva Landrum-Johnson, had sent a letter urging the federal Department of Justice to become involved. “More likely than not, the court will quash the indictments and the State will be left with no viable option other than to recharge some or all of the defendants on lesser offenses,” Landrum-Johnson wrote presciently on August 8, 2008, five days before Judge Bigelow did just that. “Admittedly, my office bears much of the responsibility for the position we are in now.”
Landrum-Johnson, who would later become a state court judge, was right on two fronts. She correctly predicted the collapse of the DA’s case, and she correctly called for the federal government to get involved, which it did. “We’re very happy,” Romell Madison told reporters. The families, he said, “have a better playing field now, with a chance of justice being reached more quickly now that we will be without the politics of the local system.”
For the time being, Letten remained tight-lipped about where any case might lead. “In order to insure the integrity of the process, no additional comments regarding this matter will be made until the review is complete,” the New Orleans US attorney said.
Soon, an aggressive civil rights prosecutor who put away racists and gang members, and a mechanical engineer turned rookie FBI agent, would begin digging into the events of that Sunday morning. They would be startled by what they found.