THE AMERICAN Civil Liberties
Union plans to file two federal lawsuits today against the Philadelphia Police
Department for wrongfully arresting a journalism student for photographing a
cop and a West Philly woman who was observing police action in 2011.
The latest filings will be the
ACLU's third this year in which citizens have been arrested for videotaping,
photographing or observing police activity. Another was filed in January. These
suits also come a week after a Philadelphia woman sued the city after a cop
allegedly beat and arrested her and a friend for videotaping an arrest two
years ago.
"Certainly the right to
observe police officers and their interaction with the public is at the core of
what the First Amendment is supposed to protect," ACLU attorney Molly
Tack-Hooper said, adding that the latest cases are not isolated. "The
Philadelphia Police Department has arrested numerous people for filming. These
are unconstitutional arrests."
District attorney revises
policy on police misconduct disclosure
The new directives require
prosecutors to disclose all evidence favorable to the defense and allow
information on officer misconduct to be added to a database.
Los Angeles County Dist. Atty.
Jackie Lacey announced Tuesday that she has issued new policies on when to
disclose information about police officer misconduct and other evidence in
criminal cases to defense attorneys.
The move drew praise from the
American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, which, along with other
civil rights lawyers, sued the county last year accusing prosecutors of
improperly withholding key evidence from defendants.
The new directives, issued last
week, make it clear that prosecutors must disclose all evidence favorable to
the defense and that they cannot rely solely on the contents of a district
attorney's database that tracks police misconduct when they determine what
evidence needs to be turned over.
ACLU attorneys said they
dropped their lawsuit earlier this year after Lacey's office gave assurances
that the policies would be revised. Lacey took office in December, replacing
retired Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley.
Hector Villagra, executive
director of the ACLU of Southern California, described the new policies as a
major improvement that more accurately explains the legal obligations of
prosecutors to disclose evidence to the defense.
"We're very appreciative
of Ms. Lacey and her leadership and commitment to the office's obligation to
ensure fair trials," Villagra said.
District attorney's officials
downplayed the significance of the changes, saying the new policies were
clarifications designed to accurately reflect the office's training and legal
manuals as well as the practices already being followed by prosecutors.
"If there was any
confusion about it at all ... we wanted to eliminate that confusion," said
Assistant Dist. Atty. Pamela Booth, who oversees the office's administration.
"We want our prosecutors to live up to the highest ethical
standards."
ACLU's lawsuit alleged that the
district attorney's office violated the rights of defendants by preventing
prosecutors from disclosing information about law enforcement misconduct
without "clear and convincing evidence" that the information is true.
That is a higher burden than the "preponderance of evidence" standard
required for police departments to discipline or fire officers.
The suit also claimed that the
district attorney's office improperly withheld evidence during ongoing
investigations into law enforcement officers, and that it only required
prosecutors to turn over evidence if they believed it would probably affect the
outcome of the case.
The district attorney's new
directives explicitly follows California law. It says that prosecutors must
turn over all evidence favorable to defendants and that information appearing
to help a defendant should not be withheld simply because the prosecutor
believes it might not affect the outcome of the case.
The new policies also tell
prosecutors that information on pending police misconduct investigations can,
in some cases, be put into the office's database.
Booth said the office has never
prevented prosecutors from fulfilling their legal requirements to disclose
information to the defense. She said that adding information about pending
investigations to the police misconduct database is also nothing new, even
though the previous policy appeared to prohibit it.
Despite objections from some
civil rights attorneys, Booth said the office continues to use the "clear
and convincing evidence" standard for including officers in its misconduct
database, known as the Brady Alert System.
Last year's lawsuit filed by
the ACLU, civil rights attorneys and legal scholars also accused the Sheriff's
Department of failing to keep inmate complaints in the personnel files of the
deputies accused of misconduct, requiring officials to hand-search thousands of
documents to find complaints against specific jailers.
The ACLU dropped that part
of the lawsuit last year after sheriff's officials announced the department had
implemented a new system for tracking inmate complaints by deputy name and had
also manually classified inmate complaints for the last five years