National Roundup

Louisiana
Coroner says serial killer died of heart disease
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Convicted serial killer Derrick Todd Lee, who was linked to the deaths of seven women in south Louisiana, died of heart disease, officials said.

Chaillie Daniel, a representative for West Feliciana Parish Coroner, told The Advocate of Lee’s cause of death on Tuesday.

Lee died Jan. 21, days after being taken to a hospital outside the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, where he was being held on death row. Nearly two months passed without any official information one the cause of his death.

East Baton Rouge Parish Coroner William Clark says his office performed the autopsy as part of an agreement with Daniel, the custodian of the autopsy records.

Kim Hodgin, an assistant to Daniel, said Daniel does not plan to release Lee’s autopsy report, citing patient privacy laws. She said she couldn’t provide more details about Lee’s death.

Lee had been sentenced to life in connection with the killing of 21-year-year Geralyn DeSoto in January 2002, and to death in the killing of 22-year-old Charlotte Murray Pace four months later. Both women’s throats were cut.

Authorities also suspect Lee killed five other women in south Louisiana between 1998 and 2003. He was linked by DNA to those slayings, but wasn’t tried in those cases.

Texas
Attorney: Officer who killed teen feared for life
ADDISON, Texas (AP) — The attorney for an off-duty suburban Dallas police officer who fatally shot a 16-year-old and wounded another juvenile said Tuesday that his client fired his gun because the officer feared for his life, but the attorney would not say whether either boy was armed.

Attorney Chris Livingston said Farmers Branch police officer Ken Johnson “fired his weapon because he felt in fear of his life and he felt that fear was justified.” But Livingston would not provide specifics about what prompted the shooting Sunday evening.

Officials say after Johnson saw a vehicle being burglarized in his Farmers Branch apartment complex parking lot, he chased suspects as they fled. After the suspects’ vehicle spun out about a half-mile away in Addison, an altercation led to the shooting.

Jose Raul Cruz was killed and the other juvenile, who also was shot, was hospitalized.

The Farmers Branch and Addison police chiefs said at a news conference Tuesday that many details won’t be revealed until their investigations are complete, including whether either juvenile had a weapon. Addison police are investigating the shooting, while Farmers Branch police are investigating the initial encounter as well as personnel issues. The police chiefs met earlier in the day with the family of the teen who was killed.

“We will not rush this investigation,” Farmers Branch police Chief Sid Fuller said, adding, “We’re not being secretive, we’re being thorough.”

Addison police Chief Paul Spencer said officials believe there are witnesses who haven’t come forward.

Johnson, who was not injured, is on paid administrative leave pending the completion of the investigations. Fuller said Johnson had no disciplinary record. He noted department policies do not allow off-duty officers to chase suspects in their own vehicles.

According to the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement, Johnson has worked for Farmers Branch police for a year. He worked as a peace officer for Dallas Area Rapid Transit for almost eight years before that.


Pennsylvania
Paper: Civil rights cases against officers are rare
PITTSBURGH (AP) — Federal prosecutors declined to pursue civil rights allegations against law enforcement officers 96 percent of the time since 1995, a newspaper found, with most experts blaming the low prosecution rate on the difficulty of winning such cases.

The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review said the 12,703 potential civil rights violations turned down nationwide out of 13,233 total complaints from 1995-2015 include high-profile incidents in Chicago, New York and Ferguson, Missouri, but also thousands of incidents the public knows little about.

It said the most frequent reasons cited for declining civil rights complaints involving officers were weak or insufficient evidence, high standards of proof established by Supreme Court rulings, and policies set by the Justice Department.

Many legal and civil rights experts told the newspaper that convicting a police officer of a civil rights violation is one of the toughest challenges a prosecutor can face. But some criminal justice experts also said the Justice Department needs to put more resources into the cases, and suggested that the typical partnering of police and prosecutors affects decision-making.

“The standard is high and challenging,” said Alan Vinegrad, a former federal prosecutor in Brooklyn, New York, who oversaw criminal civil rights cases.

“It’s got to be a willful deprivation of rights, meaning the police officer intended and wanted to either kill or injure the person,” said Vinegrad, now a partner at the law firm of Covington & Burling LLP in New York. “Not just ‘it was reckless or negligent’ or anything like that.”

The U.S. attorney’s office in Pittsburgh will open files for even minor accusations that the FBI investigates against a police officer, said Steve Kaufman, chief of the office’s criminal division. But, he said, “it’s one of the most difficult cases to gather sufficient evidence to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt at trial.”

The Justice Department, responding to the newspaper’s findings, published Sunday, said it takes any allegation of law enforcement misconduct seriously and will review them when brought to the agency’s attention.

Craig Futterman, a law professor who founded the Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project at the University of Chicago, said he believes federal prosecutors need to be bolder and use more resources to pursue cases.

He said federal authorities are not being aggressive enough, allowing “too many abusive officers to believe that they can operate without fear of punishment.”

Tim Lynch, director of the Washington-based Project on Criminal Justice at Cato Institute, which advocates for smaller government, said prosecutors are generally reluctant to go after people in law enforcement because “they consider themselves all working on the same team.”

Mel Johnson, assistant U.S. attorney for civil rights cases in Milwaukee, said that federal and state governments have not succeeded in deterring police misconduct, and “the legal system has a way to go.”
The national Fraternal Order of Police said another explanation for the low prosecution rate is that prosecutors are rejecting bad evidence.

“Maybe they’re not taking the cases because they’re not good cases,” said Jim Pasco said, the executive director. “It could be 96 percent of the time. Do you know how many false complaints are made against police officers?”