Had the police officers told the truth from the start, Lance Madison would not have lost his freedom to phony charges. The cover-up Lehrmann took part in was “a disgrace of immense proportion” that would hurt those wearing the badge who set out to do the right thing. “As a result of such conduct, other law enforcement officers must now continually respond to public skepticism related to the manner in which they perform their duties.”
Lehrmann had already been rewarded enough with three years, the judge said. And though he may have faced tough decisions over whether to tell the truth from the start, implicating his fellow officers in the process, “his situation was not nearly as difficult as that faced by the victims and their families.”
“This court cannot in good conscience support the government’s view that any reward in addition to that already provided by the government is appropriate,” Africk closed. Motion denied.
HUNTER GOT EIGHT YEARS in prison at sentencing in December 2010. He too received the stiffest possible sentence, considering the crimes he pleaded guilty to. Two weeks after prosecutors tried, and failed, to reduce Lehrmann’s prison term, they tried the same tack with Hunter in September 2011. As in Lehrmann’s case, prosecutors sought to reduce Hunter’s prison term after he had taken the stand as a government witness when his former comrades stood trial.
“Mr. Hunter was the first and only officer to provide eyewitness testimony about the shootings of six civilians on the bridge,” prosecutors Bernstein, Chung, and Carter wrote. “Mr. Hunter’s horrific account of the shooting—in which he described police officers opening fire without cause on unarmed civilians—was consistent with the victims’ accounts and with the physical evidence. . . . Mr. Hunter’s account connected the other evidence in the case, and provided the key to proving that the shootings on the bridge constituted criminal acts.”
Once he agreed to cooperate, Hunter, a onetime Marine with a youthful face, “provided an unflinchingly honest account of the incident on the bridge, even admitting personal wrongdoing about which federal investigators previously had no knowledge.”
For one, he admitted he had been the first officer to fire his weapon. He was the officer-turned-witness who described how “Bowen stomped on a mortally-wounded civilian as the civilian lay dying in the street,” the prosecutors wrote.
“Mr. Hunter continued to honor his promise to provide truthful testimony, despite the personal risk involved in cooperating against other law enforcement officers in what amounted to the functional equivalent of a murder case.”
The DOJ prosecutors asked the judge to cut Hunter’s prison term to five years from eight. To the prosecution, such a reduction would “send a message to other officers that it is in their personal interest to cooperate with authorities investigating police misconduct.”
Bernstein pressed the issue before US district judge Sarah S. Vance in a hearing November 5, 2011. As with other officers turned witnesses, the government struggled as it sought a sentence for Hunter that punished his crime but rewarded his cooperation. “This is an unusual case and an extremely important case, with a lot of really powerful considerations, some of which work directly at odds with one another,” she told the judge.
Hunter helped reveal the truth, she said, as the only police eyewitness to the shootings on the east side of the bridge, where the Bartholomew family and James Brissette were fired upon.
“From that very beginning, he stopped us right away and he said . . . Ken Bowen did not fire the first shot, I did,” Bernstein said. Once he talked, Hunter never played games with the investigators, she said.
Bernstein told the judge that Lance Madison, his sister, and mother were in the courtroom that morning. “Lance was shot at for no reason. He watched his brother get shot and killed. He was falsely arrested. He was framed. He was put in jail. This family lost their brother, their son,” she said. “And they have every right to be sitting here angry and demanding justice. And yet, they’re here today supporting the government’s request for some sort of break for Mr. Hunter.”
Judge Vance heard Hunter’s bid for a lower term and shot it down. Hunter, serving time in a federal prison in Bastrop, Texas, was staying there. “Mr. Hunter got the benefit of his bargain upfront under a highly generous plea agreement and it would be injustice for me to reward him any more,” the judge ruled.
She questioned the extent of Hunter’s truthfulness. The officer had admitted firing in the direction of the Madison brothers as they raced up the bridge, but said he aimed over their heads.
From the bench, Judge Vance called that assertion “preposterous,” and she noted Hunter had fired shots toward the Bartholomew family as well. “I find it very telling that he’s going to try to minimize his own behavior when he’s testifying about when he’s doing his own shooting.”
Prosecutors said Hunter’s bullets hit no victims—a “critical distinction” between his actions and that of other officers. “Mike did not shoot anybody on the bridge,” Bernstein said. “And that might be the luck of him being a bad shot, but he did not shoot anybody on the bridge.”
The judge was not swayed. “I understand he’s important to you,” she told Bernstein. “I understand you need people like this. I truly do. But I’ve got to take into account what he did, the justice system and society at large. And, you know, you gave him a deal upfront. He got the benefit of his bargain.”
OFFICER IGNATIUS HILLS STOOD for sentencing October 5, 2011, after taking the stand in the federal prosecution of his fellow officers. Once more the government’s plea deal was in the spotlight.
In a federal court courtroom again filled with members of the Madison family, Hills shared his shame for the shooting and cover-up. He apologized to the families touched by his actions.
“It was very devastating,” Hills told US district judge Martin L. C. Feldman. “I’m ashamed to be a part of something so terrible in the history of New Orleans. I just wanted to offer my deepest apologies, and I keep you guys in my prayers every day.”
Bernstein said the government struggled with its recommended sentence for Hills too.
“When we started this investigation, we didn’t know what happened, and the truth would never have come out if it hadn’t been for the deals we made with cooperators and for cooperators coming forward and telling the truth about horrible things that happened on the bridge,” Bernstein told the judge. “But they are the ones that got us to the point we can stand here today and say everybody knows what happened on the bridge.”
The judge hearing her plea was a Reagan appointee. A year earlier Judge Feldman attracted public criticism for blocking a government six-month moratorium on deep-water drilling projects following the massive Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill. The judge said the moratorium would hurt the economy.
Now, he had questions for the prosecution. Should the witnesses get a “gold star” for cooperating, he wondered, once they knew the investigation was in full bloom? “Does the government give any consideration to the—well, to be polite, to the patently abusive nature of the crimes that were committed?” Judge Feldman asked.
Absolutely, Bernstein said. “I’m a civil rights prosecutor. This is what I do. I have dedicated three years of my life to this case because I am outraged by the conduct on the bridge and because it was incredibly important to me personally, as I realize it was to this entire community, to see justice done for what happened on the bridge,” she said.
“But justice for what happened on the bridge necessarily has to entail justice—it has to entail—the officers who stood at a barrier and fired into a mass of humanity cowered on the ground, justice has to include them being held accountable. The only way we could ever have made that happen, for them to be held accountable, was to have cooperation from officers.”
Jacquelyn Madison Brown, sister to Lance and Ronald, stood up at the sentencing hearing.
“As a family, we will never recover from the death of our brother Ronald,” she told the judge. “It has bee
n over six years since Ronald was killed and it is still difficult to speak about. Ronald was the light of our lives. Although he was forty years old, he had the mental capacity of a five- to six-year-old child. He was a loving, sweet, shy person who filled our lives with joy and playfulness.”
The loss of their brother, and the lies told about him to justify the killing, had taken a heartbreaking toll on the entire family, Jacquelyn Brown said. The pain for Lance, his brother’s protector, was unspeakable. “Lance, who was with him at the time and who was unable, despite his best efforts, to protect Ronald from deadly harm from these police officers who had taken the law into their own hands,” she said.
“The decision to frame Lance and to try to take Lance’s life away from him was especially cruel and still fills us with horror,” the sister said. “If the truth had not come out, Lance could have been wrongfully convicted and sent to prison for the rest of his life.”
Officer Hills, she said, “stood by and said nothing to prevent this injustice from taking place. Instead, in an effort to cover up his own wrongdoing and that of his fellow officers, he made a conscious decision to participate in an effort to frame Lance on false charges.”
But now, she said, the Madison family was thankful Hills came forward and helped puncture the police code of silence.
“We truly believe that the voice of a single individual telling the truth could have made a difference.” It wouldn’t have brought Ronald back, “but it might have prevented my brother Lance from being thrown in prison,” she said. “It would certainly have cast a cloud upon the falsehoods and lies that the other officers were telling about our brothers and the victims on the bridge. Perhaps had any of these officers spoke out, it would not have taken so many years for the truth to be known and for justice to prevail.”
The judge was sympathetic to the family’s suffering and plea, but not to Hills, who shot toward a teenager’s back as the boy ran away. “Hills has patently received leniency from the government by virtue of the generous charge to which he was permitted to plead guilty,” Judge Feldman said from the bench. Prosecutors sought a four-year sentence. The judge gave Hills the maximum, six and a half years.
THE OTHER OFFICERS WHO pleaded guilty were now behind bars too. Officer Barrios got five years in prison. Michael Lohman, the college-educated lieutenant who made a choice to stick with a cover-up he instantly knew was “bullshit,” was given a four-year prison sentence in November 2011. The Madison family, including Lance, Romell, and Jacquelyn Madison Brown, attended that sentencing, as they had for the other officers. They were there for brother Ronald. Sherrel Johnson was there, too, for JJ.
A few months before Lohman’s prison term was set, as the most significant civil rights case on the Department of Justice’s national docket readied to unfold inside the federal courthouse in New Orleans, another police domino tumbled. Sergeant Kaufman, who told Lohman “Everything’s cool, babe” after his chat with prosecutors and FBI agents, retired from the force the first day of June 2011.
Three weeks after he left the NOPD, Kaufman would join Bowen, Faulcon, Villavaso, and Gisevius at the defendants’ table for the federal trial for their crimes.
As that date loomed, a central question hovered. What legal fate awaited the band of brothers who refused to cooperate with the federal government, who continued to insist they were guilty of nothing more than responding to a call for help in time of unprecedented tragedy? In the six-story Hale Boggs federal courthouse downtown, a jury of their peers, soon to be impaneled, would consider their defense. In the summer of 2011, the events of September 4, 2005, would air for the first time; the victims, families, police, and city finally absorbing the full recounting of the shots on the bridge.
CHAPTER 19
IN THE COURTROOM
ON JUNE 27, 2011, day one of the trial for five of the six defendants who refused to plea, prosecutor Bobbi Bernstein rose and, in trademark fashion, spoke for more than an hour without a single note.
“Shoot first and ask questions later, that’s how this whole case got started,” Bernstein said, jumping instantly to the core of the government’s case. “These five defendants sitting here are current and former NOPD officers, four of whom gunned down, not one, not two, not three, but six innocent people on the Danziger Bridge.
“These defendants, Sergeant Ken Bowen, Sergeant Rob Gisevius, Officer Robert Faulcon, and Officer Anthony Villavaso, drove onto the Danziger Bridge and they opened fire. Without warning, without so much as yelling, ‘Police,’ they opened fire with assault rifles and a shotgun, mowing down an unarmed family as that family huddled behind a concrete barrier, wounded and confused, trying desperately to avoid the shots.
“And then that man, Officer Faulcon, traveled more than half a mile clear to the other side of the bridge, where he raised his shotgun one more time and he shot one more innocent person through the back. When all was said and done, two innocent people lay dead on the Danziger Bridge, four others seriously wounded.
“And as soon as the shooting stopped, these four defendants, guided by the fifth defendant back there, Sergeant Archie Kaufman, started lying to cover it up. They lied because they knew they had committed a crime, because they knew that officers are not allowed to shoot first and ask questions later.”
“Meanwhile, seventy-five miles away in Baton Rouge, Andrea Celestine tried every day to hold on to hope. She had evacuated before the storm, but she had been separated from her mother and her little brother, seventeen-year-old James, JJ, Brissette. And every day she hoped would be the day she’d get word from her mom and her brother.”
She continued, “When that shooting finally stopped, young JJ Brissette was lying face down on a pedestrian walkway on the bridge. He had bullets in his feet, in his knee, in his legs, in his arms, and in the back of his head. JJ was dead, and Andrea would never see her brother again.
“When that shooting finally stopped, Susan Bartholomew was lying on the same walkway unable to move her right arm, which had been blasted apart by an assault rifle.
“As Susan laid there wondering what had just happened, she heard the cries of her husband, her daughter, and her nephew, all of whom had been shot around her. When that shooting finally stopped, Ronald Madison was lying in a pool of blood, blasted through the back with a shotgun. As Ronald laid there and died in the street, his older brother Lance, his protector, was arrested and taken to jail. For twenty-five days, Lance Madison would sit in jail accused of something he didn’t do, wondering whether he would ever be free again.
“And when that shooting finally stopped, these four men had a very big problem,” Bernstein said. “And you’re going to hear that they decided to make it go away, and that’s where the fifth defendant, Sergeant Kaufman, comes in.”
The prosecution team backed up Bernstein’s precise words with more than three hundred trial exhibits, from the assault rifles, shotguns, and pistols the officers fired to the shotgun shells and pellets later discovered splayed atop the bridge. The prosecution submitted the NOPD course manual on “Use of Force” to describe how severely off course the police had veered that morning.
The federal exhibits portrayed the human toll of the police shootout. A picture of Jose Holmes, on the surgical table as his life lay in the balance, was entered into evidence. Prosecutors introduced a bullet, held in a plastic jar, recovered from Holmes’s temple and X-rays and photographs depicting the shredded limbs and bloodied skin of Leonard Bartholomew III, Lesha Bartholomew, and Susan Bartholomew.
The sole photograph Sherrel Johnson had to hold onto of JJ, taken when he was nine years old, was another trial exhibit. Another photo showed the young man’s dead body on a walkway. X-rays introduced at trial revealed bullets in JJ’s feet, pelvis, chest, shoulders, knees, elbow, and skull.
Photos of Ronald Madison with one of his dogs, at home in his living room, beaming at graduation, and with brother Lance before Hurricane Katrina were contrasted against photographs taken after the shootout: of Lance in
police custody and of Ronald’s limp body, slumped on the ground at the Friendly Inn.
The defense cast an entirely different light on the events of that morning. New Orleans was under water, literally and figuratively, after Katrina, and the officers who stayed behind did so for all the right reasons. When they raced to the bridge, the officers did so thinking a fellow officer was, once again, being gunned down by the enemy.
They knew they would face fire and stood ready to respond.
“These men are not guilty. They are not guilty,” Paul Fleming Jr., Faulcon’s lawyer, said the moment federal prosecutor Bernstein sat down. Speaking directly to jurors, Fleming told them they had to be convinced, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the police officers were guilty, and to come to that conclusion while considering their actions “in the context of the worst domestic disaster in the history of this country, Hurricane Katrina.”
“The other lawyers are going to tell you the personal stories of these five men, but I want you to remember that these five have one thing in common: They stayed. They stayed here and they did their jobs, and they did their jobs the best they could under these horrible, horrible circumstances. They didn’t desert, they didn’t go work other jobs,” Fleming continued.
“They rescued people. They pulled people off of rooftops, pulled people out of their attics. In fact, you’re going to learn that some of these men were rescued themselves; one off his own rooftop. And right after that, they jump right in and they get to work. They do their jobs. They go out and rescue people. And they do the best they could. They do the best they could without adequate leadership, without adequate food, without adequate shelter, without adequate clothing, without adequate rest, without adequate supplies, and without adequate support. These are the guys that stayed.
“These are the guys that did their job,” the lawyer said, hammering the point that the men sitting at the defendants’ table were, in fact, public servants.
Shots on the Bridge Page 17