Though the prosecution won a huge victory at trial with the jurors’ verdict, Engelhardt had subsequently handed the defense some noticeable victories. In October 2011, two months after the guilty verdicts, Engelhardt tossed one major charge from the case—the jury’s conviction of Kenneth Bowen for stomping on a dying, wheezing Ronald Madison. In Engelhardt’s eyes, jurors didn’t hear enough evidence to convict Bowen of that charge, which was based on the eyewitness testimony of Michael Hunter, the officer who faced a battery of defense questions on the stand. With his judicial order, Engelhardt struck that charge from among the convictions agreed to by jurors.
The judge also tossed a conviction against Bowen and three others for falsely prosecuting Jose Holmes Jr.; though police planned to arrest Holmes on attempted murder charges, they never took him into custody. They couldn’t. Holmes was in a hospital bed fighting for his life.
Engelhardt did leave most of the verdict intact, but his dismissing of the jurors’ verdict on two important counts was a rare victory for the defense. The police attorneys hoped those dismissals would help shave at least some time off the prison sentences when their clients stood for sentencing. “Nobody is going free,” said Frank DeSalvo, Bowen’s lawyer. “How much it helps us at sentencing, only time will tell.”
That decision would rest with a judge who admits he sometimes loses sleep during big cases. At those times, Judge Engelhardt told the reporter interviewing him for his Catholic high school profile, he strives for balance through reflection and prayer. “The morality instilled in me by my parents and my Catholic education helps me keep things in perspective. Prayer is an important part of my job. I couldn’t do the job without it,” he said.
Several times a week the bow-tied judge treks from the federal courthouse to the historic, hallowed St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church in downtown New Orleans, a fifteen-minute walk that helps free his thoughts, helps clear his internal docket. There, he steps inside the building of Gothic architecture with its 185-foot-tall bell tower. Paintings above the altar depict the transfiguration of Jesus, and Jesus Christ pulling Saint Peter from the sea. In this setting the judge attends a late morning Mass.
“It’s good to get away to see the big picture.”
CHAPTER 22
JUDGMENT DAY
A Mother and Brother Confront the Convicted
ON A BLACK MORNING of torrential rain, April 4, 2012, the five convicted officers stepped into a packed federal courtroom in downtown New Orleans. One side of the courtroom, filled with relatives of the shooters, stood in respect. The other side, filled with families of the victims and their attorneys, stayed in their seats. Seven years after Katrina and the shots on the bridge, New Orleans remained divided, the horrific day unsettled.
Judge Engelhardt’s gavel tapped, the sentencing hearing began. Lance Madison rose first, and, turning to each officer, named them by name and called them out for their crimes.
“Mr. Faulcon, when I look at you my pain becomes unbearable. It feels like I have been stabbed in my heart. When you shot down my brother, Ronald, you took the life of an angel and basically ripped my heart out. I still have nightmares about my brother being killed and myself running to get help, to no avail.
“Mr. Bowen, to this day, I am still stunned by your cowardly acts of shooting innocent, unarmed people. You shot down a whole family and I will always believe that you kicked my brother as he lay dying on the ground. In the years since you devastated my family and so many others, I wonder if you have ever thought about how you would feel if someone committed these same crimes against your own family.”
He called out Robert Gisevius Jr., Anthony Villavaso, and Archie Kaufman. “Mr. Kaufman, I have to be frank and say that when I think of you, what I feel is disgust,” he said. “You tried to frame me, a man who you knew was innocent, and send me to prison for the rest of my life. You tried to protect these officers, who you knew had shot and killed innocent people. I will never forget when you took the witness stand in state court and lied and told the judge that I had a gun on the bridge.”
Sherrel Johnson stood next.
“If I had been there on the scene, I would have begged and crawled on my knees and asked them, ‘Please don’t kill my child. He is so young. Let him live. If you have to shoot someone, then let it be me,’” she said, her normally fervent diction delivered this day in a low tone. “You just shot him all up and just tore him to pieces. And then you stood there with your guns and gave him a shotgun blast to the back of his head, and there his brains lay on the concrete walk of the Danziger Bridge.
“So why should you be free and walk around?” Sherrel asked the police officers. “You just stood there, and shot round after round after round. . . . My child never got to even start his life. He will never live to be an old man. You stopped him right in his tracks. James Jr., your mama can’t never get you back,” she said.
The courtroom also heard the voices of Lesha Bartholomew and Jose Holmes Jr., but not directly. The two young adults each testified at trial to help bring the prosecution’s case to the fore. Now at the sentencing hearing, the pair had messages to share, but asked their lawyers to read the words for them.
Lesha’s words—entitled “Why Is This Happening to Us?”—were read aloud by the family’s New Orleans lawyer, Edwin M. Shorty Jr. Her mother had suffered the most, Lesha said, and spent each day in pain. She could still hear her father’s screams.
Jose Holmes’s words, read by his attorney Gary Bizal, filled the courtroom. As the attorney read his statement, Jose buried his face in his arms.
“For you to have shot an unarmed innocent person should make you feel guilty and ashamed,” he said. “I have you to blame for all of my scars, depression, and the embarrassment of having to wear a colostomy bag, the hurt and the way that I can’t do things as well with my left hand. Things like playing basketball, drawing, having trouble picking things up and playing the piano.
“It hurts to see my auntie missing her arm and the pain that you caused my family,” Jose added. “But when it’s all said and done I’m a loving person so I have to forgive you for what you’ve done to me because God forbids me to have hatred in my heart. Even though I have to forgive you, no evil deed should go unpunished. It took six years for me to finally have justice for what you did to me and my family. Now everyone finally sees that I’m a terrific human being and not what you tried to make them believe.
“I’m so happy to have closure.” Jose was “truly blessed to be here today,” he said.
Not a single officer spoke. Instead, they let their attorneys, their families, and their fellow officers speak for them.
“I think there was a lot of fear on top of the bridge that day,” said Eric Hessler, Gisevius’s lawyer.
“I think the evidence is overwhelming that it was out of fear . . . not malice,” said Bowen’s federal public defender, Robin E. Schulberg. “And I think that makes all the difference in the world.”
Schulberg, a former civil rights lawyer and “child of the sixties,” wasn’t thrilled when she got the assignment. “Look, I’m not the person to defend police who shot people,” she said later.
Then she met Bowen and saw the issue from a new vantage point. “I began to see things a lot more from the perspective of the police officer on the street. We expect the cops to face down the most dangerous people in society, but if they make a mistake or a bad judgment call, we are going to put them in jail for the rest of their lives? That doesn’t make sense to me.” She believes the cover-up amounted to officers who thought they saw guns in the civilians’ hands and stuck to their story.
Kenneth Bowen Sr., a former police officer who served in Internal Affairs for NOPD and then went on to practice law, said he taught his son at an early age, “You don’t lie and you don’t steal.” Like his father, the younger Bowen attended law school by night while working as an officer by day, and, after graduating from Loyola University College of Law, received his license to practice law in October
2005, one month after the shootings. He named his own son, born four and a half months after the hurricane, Kenneth.
With Katrina barreling toward the city, the elder Bowen said, his son told him he did not want to leave. “There’s too many people here that need our help,” Kenneth Bowen Sr. told the court, paraphrasing his son. And then he asked a question many other police supporters had pondered, from the moment word of the shootings on the bridge surfaced. “Why would a group of well-trained, well-educated police officers, who had been saving people day after day after day . . . all of the sudden wake up and say, ‘Let’s go shoot somebody,’ and do it in broad daylight?”
They wouldn’t, Bowen Sr. said. It was chaos, it was crazy, and the officers acted on instinct. “He had a few seconds to act . . . at a time of unprecedented—unprecedented—chaos and lawlessness in the city.” Weeks before the sentencing hearing, Bowen’s mother, Maria, wrote Engelhardt, “Despite the many dangers, the hardships and losses, the lack of manpower and lack of resources, my son stayed and he saved many lives.”
Faulcon’s father, the Reverend Robert L. Faulcon Sr., said his son also learned the difference between good and bad. “He hasn’t been one to go looking for trouble,” the father said in Judge Engelhardt’s courtroom. “Bobby is one that looks to help folk, not harm folk.” Faulcon’s brother, Anthony, a church minister, said his brother is a man of God. “There is no book, no video, no training, military or civilian-wise, that could have prepared you or anyone else for the situation that happened during Katrina,” he told the judge.
Other officers who also stayed behind described the challenge they faced once Katrina landed, sleeping with their guns at their side. Policing a city plagued by putrid water, dead bodies, and disorganized leadership, many officers found a way to surmount those horrors and save the desperate.
While not excusing the bloodletting that morning, several police officers told the court that, in such a frenzied time, what happened on the bridge could have happened to them too. “That could have been me,” one said.
They pointed out that a comrade, NOPD officer Kevin Thomas, was nearly murdered after apprehending looters.
Prosecutor Bernstein agreed that the officers did not wake up that morning intending to hurt people. But their actions on the bridge, and after the shooting stopped, were unconscionable. “These defendants are not evil men,” she said. “But on September Fourth 2005, that honor was nowhere to be found because every one of these defendants stood at that walkway and fired repeatedly. Over time, as seconds went by, they fired at unarmed people. Then after that, for the days and weeks and months and years that followed that shooting, honor played no role.”
“They lied to preserve themselves.”
THE DECISION NOW RESTED with Judge Engelhardt. Instead of rendering the sentences, the judge took a circuitous path. Just before noon, he closed the courtroom, barring anyone not already seated from coming in, and delivered a judicial sermon for more than two hours about the case he oversaw and the evidence he heard during the course of the trial.
While the five defendants were on trial and sat awaiting the precise terms of their prison sentences, Engelhardt turned his judicial gaze upon the federal prosecutors and FBI agents who broke the case. Families of the victims and relatives of the officers all sat tight, quietly, as the judge turned page after page from books and notes on his bench and held forth.
“Sentencing in this case is no longer and cannot be about sending a message because the government’s plea bargaining in this case has already severely undercut any message that could possibly be sent,” he told spectators.
The judge was “astonished and deeply troubled by the plea bargains,” and he ticked them off, one by one, careful to detail the respective crimes of every officer who had pleaded guilty and testified for the prosecution. Some, he said, benefited from sweetheart deals.
Lieutenant Lohman, he noted, was well respected and had an almost spotless record before Katrina. But then, “as far as ‘cover-ups’ go, Lohman was the ring leader, the Consigliere, the Chief Executive Officer when it comes to engineering the incident we refer to as Danziger.”
Lohman got four years, and now the government wanted to put Kaufman away for twenty, the judge noted.
He called Robert Barrios “the biggest winner in the plea bargain sweepstakes,” describing the officer as “one who simply lies to get out of trouble. . . . He was allowed to do so.” Barrios, who admitted going along with the cover story until his own guilty plea, was given five years in prison.
By cutting the deals, the judge said, the government was usurping the power of judges. Engelhardt called the plea agreements “an affront to the court and a disservice to this community.”
“It is, quite frankly, shocking that the government so grossly discounted such serious and grave criminal conduct,” Engelhardt said.
He cited a Tennessee Williams phrase, “air of mendacity.”
“Using liars lying to convict liars is no way to pursue justice,” Engelhardt said.
Suddenly, in the courtroom full of victims, it felt as though the prosecutors and FBI were on trial. The victims and relatives of those killed appeared taken aback by the judge’s focus, delivered as all awaited the final judgment seven years in coming.
In hearing after hearing, the prosecution said it had to cut those deals to expose the lies. There would have been no case without those officers pleading guilty and unmasking the cover-up. Yes, they helped themselves in the process; that’s how the system works, from coast to coast. More than 90 percent of criminal convictions spring from those very plea deals, the cases never going to trial. The Danziger victims supported this approach. Without it, judgment day for the convicted would never have arrived. “The only way we could ever have made that happen, for them to be held accountable, was to have cooperation from officers,” Bernstein had told one federal judge.
FINALLY THE JUDGE PUT down his speech and turned to the sentences.
He gave Bowen—who unloaded the AK-47 on Jose Holmes, James Brissette, and others, and who played a pivotal role in creating the police cover-up—forty years. Gisevius, who fired at the Madisons and toward Susan Bartholomew and Brissette, also received forty years. Villavaso, who unloaded his AK-47 at least nine times, got thirty-eight years. Kaufman, the supervisor who helped concoct a fiction, got six years, far fewer than prosecutors believed his actions warranted.
Robert Faulcon Jr., age forty-eight, who had never fired his police gun before that day and whose son was a Katrina baby, landed the stiffest term. He was sentenced to prison for sixty-five years.
Those sentences finally invoked, the courtroom breathed a collective sigh of relief and sorrow, not joy. No one could find happiness in this day. Not the kin of the officers now whisked away to serve their time, not the families of the men and women hunted down atop the bridge. Yet six years and seven months after the shootings on the bridge, closure, it appeared, had finally arrived.
As prosecutors spoke of the sentences, Susan Bartholomew listened to their words, her head down and eyes closed. She placed her left hand over her right shoulder and the shawl covering her amputated arm, a quiet, poignant reminder of the suffering.
That the sentences were rendered on a dark, foreboding morning seemed fitting. The April day felt like an exhausting end to a long road toward justice. Steep, surprising curves remained in the distance.
CHAPTER 23
THE CONSENT DECREE
A History of Police Abuse, Documented
FOR THE NEW ORLEANS POLICE Department, the shootings on the bridge were not an isolated incident. That the victims were all black was, for the NOPD, part of a larger pattern that had begun long before the events on the Danziger Bridge, and persisted even after those events, in a city whose murder rate often ranked as the highest in the country, earning it the distinction as “Murder Capital of the United States.”
In May 2010, two months before the city was jolted by news that six NOPD officers and sergeants we
re indicted for the killings and cover-up, the US Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division launched what would become its most significant review, ever, of a police department’s practices. For months, the DOJ dug into more than thirty-six thousand pages of NOPD internal documents, reviewing written practices and protocols for police training, use of force, stop and search procedures, recruitment, and supervision. The DOJ pulled the fine print on the subjects of police arrests and the targets of its fire. It explored deep-seated community allegations of discriminatory policing—allegations laid bare over the years and decades in light of police shootings of black subjects, some of them gunned down unarmed.
That the NOPD had a black eye was a long-running, pained story for residents.
There was the well-known case of Len Davis, “Robocop,” and the killing of Kim Groves in 1994. Groves had been a mother of three, with a soft face, alert eyes, and ready smile, whose only crime was to try to protect a neighborhood teen and then file a complaint that Robocop Davis abused her too. The night of the murder, Groves had sung “Happy Birthday” to daughter Jasmine, who was turning thirteen the next day.
Seventeen years after the shooting, the gunman who killed her at Robocop’s command, Paul “Cool” Hardy, finally received his sentence. He got life behind bars.
Groves’s son, sixteen at the time, said the murder sent him into deep despair, a life on drugs, and thoughts of suicide. “I desperately wanted to get stopped by an NOPD officer so that I could either kill one of them or force one of them to kill me. This is how angry, hurt, and confused I was after the murder of my mother,” the son, by then an adult, said at the sentencing hearing for the triggerman that, because of the long grind of justice, did not come until 2011.
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