New Orleans Settles With Katrina Victims Of Police Brutality
New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu announced Monday the city would spend $13.3 million to settle three lawsuits, including two fatal police shootings in the days following Hurricane Katrina and a deadly beating that occurred days just before the 2005 storm.
Landrieu said the settlements with 17 plaintiffs laid to rest all civil litigation against the city concerning those cases.
"I am hoping that in some sense the strength of these families will help the city find peace in our future," Landrieu said during a news conference Monday following a prayer service attended by family members of the victims
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Landrieu offered condolences to the families of the victims and said he hoped the settlements would provide closure to both the victims' loved ones and the New Orleans Police Department, the Independent reported Monday.
Twenty current or former New Orleans Police officers were charged with civil rights violations after a Justice Department investigation in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina found 19 cases of police misconduct amid the ensuing pandemonium from the storm.
Eleven officers have pleaded guilty to charges associated with the two fatal shootings that occurred less than week after the hurricane. Subsequently, Landrieu said the police force has amended the protocols used to hire, manage and instruct officers to avoid future fatalities.
Sherrel Johnson, the mother of James Brisette, 17. who died in a Sept. 4, 2005, police shooting, said she “wholeheartedly” accepted the mayor’s apology, the Guardian reported Monday.
Brisette and Ronald Madison, 40, who were both unarmed, were fatally shot after police officers falsely accused the two men of opening fire. The five officers involved in the incident were convicted in 2011 of killing Brisette and Madison, wounding four others and trying to cover the incident up by planting a gun at the scene.
U.S. District Judge Kurt Engelhardt, who presided over the case, overturned their convictions in 2013 because of alleged misconduct by federal prosecutors. Engelhardt ordered a new trial and the officers pleaded guilty in April of 2016. Engelhardt subsequently reduced the sentences of four of the officers to three to 12 years in prison, down from six to 65 years. The fifth officer was sentenced to three years and is currently free.
“Since that time, it has been an awful long and rough road. But me and my family got through it,” Johnson said, “Now this is closure for me, and I can go forward ... because I know the old New Orleans does not exist anymore.”
A man clings to the top of a vehicle before being rescued by the U.S. Coast Guard from the flooded streets of New Orleans, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Sept. 4, 2005. Photo: Reuters
In another case, five former officers were tried on charges related to the death of Henry Glover, 31, on Sept. 2, 2005. Glover was shot and killed in a shopping center before his body was set on fire. Former New Orleans Police Officer Gregory McRae, who fatally shot Glover before burning his body in a car, was the only one of them convicted of manslaughter and is serving an 11-year sentence. The other four officers were acquitted of charges they tried to cover up for McRae.
In the third case, former officer Melvin Williams was sentenced to more than 21 years in prison for the beating death of handyman Raymond Robair, 48, less than a month before the storm, reports said. Former Officer Matthew Dean Moore was sentenced to more than five years in prison for submitting a false report and lying to the FBI.
There were 1,577 fatalities in Louisiana because of Hurricane Katrina, CNN reported. Eighty percent of New Orleans flooded after levees failed throughout the city. Due to the storm, the New Orleans’ population was decimated, going from 484,678 residents in April 2000 to 230,172 in July 2006.
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