New Orleans' Best Criminal Lawyer

2007 (CBS/AP) The Big Easy is distinctly uneasy as locals and others debate the case of seven police officers met by hundreds of cheering supporters Tuesday as they turned themselves in to face charges in a deadly shooting while on the job on a bridge in the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Each of the officers faces at least one charge of murder or attempted murder in the Sept. 4, 2005, shootings on the Danziger Bridge, less than a week after the hurricane hit New Orleans. Two people died and four people were wounded in the incident, which threatens to taken on racial overtones in a city where the black population was arguably hardest hit by the hurricane.

CBS News correspondent Lee Cowan says the officers who had remained on the job while many others fled their beats had been called to the bridge to investigate reports of gunfire.

The officers say they shot the men only after being fired upon themselves.

As the officers arrived at the jail Tuesday, supporters lined the street, stepping forward to embrace the seven men and shake their hands. One sign in the crowd read “Support the Danziger 7.” Another read “Thanks for protecting our city.”

One protester shouted “Police killings must stop” and “Racism must go” but was shouted down by the crowd yelling: “Heroes, Heroes.”
An internal probe of the Danziger Bridge incident, in which seven police officers fired on civilians, killing two, in post-Katrina chaos, relied almost solely on accounts by the officers themselves, with scant backing from physical evidence or statements from bystanders.

Attorneys for the officers have cited the 53-page investigative report, a copy of which was obtained by The Times-Picayune, in arguing that they are innocent, but the officers were indicted on charges of murder and attempted murder by a state grand jury hearing evidence presented by District Attorney Eddie Jordan.

Though police Superintendent Warren Riley had vowed that the probe would be “thorough,” a close examination of the document reveals profound failings, according to an outside law enforcement expert and attorneys for the people shot by police. The officers, who say they fired back only after meeting a barrage of unprovoked gunfire, produced only one handgun from the scene, which the report does not directly connect to anyone suspected of shooting at police.

Moreover, the report’s witness accounts from bystanders or victims have since been disputed, discredited or come from people purportedly interviewed that day but who now cannot be found. To critics, the failure of the police to interview a wide range of witnesses is perhaps the gravest flaw, as it meant that valuable observations — including some possibly favorable to the police — were lost.

One of the witness accounts obtained that day came from a man the report identifies as a St. Landry Parish sheriff’s deputy; that person later was found to be impersonating an officer and to have a criminal record, a fact the report never mentions.

In another glaring omission, the report never mentions that Ronald Madison, who the accused officers say shot at police before one officer shot and killed him, is a mentally handicapped man whom family describe as having the intellectual abilities of a child. Rather, the report repeatedly refers to him as “unknown, black male” until he is later identified solely by name.

Anthony Radosti, a former police detective and vice president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission, a nonprofit watchdog group, called the investigation a “miscarriage of justice.”

Neglecting to pursue all leads failed not only the people who were shot, Radosti said, but the officers who now face murder and attempted murder charges and who might have benefited from that evidence.

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