After deadly police beating, witness cellphones confiscated

After deadly police beating, witness cellphones confiscated
David Sal Silva was reportedly seen and recorded being beaten to death by California police
By Natasha Lennard
Salon.com
May 13, 2013

Following the death of father of four David Sal Silva last week, his family’s attorneys are calling for police to release bystander video evidence that reportedly shows California’s Kern County officers brutally beating the 33-year-old. A video from a surveillance camera (which does not show the scene close-up) has been released and shows the man repeatedly struck with a baton. Local press have also reported on details from a 911 call made, in which witness Sulina Quair, 34, said “There is a man laying on the floor and your police officers beat the (expletive) out of him and killed him. I have it all on video camera. We videotaped the whole thing.” Officers say they were responding to a call about an intoxicated man and that Silva had fought them.

Attorneys representing the Silva family expressed concern that police may tamper with video evidence and demanded that they be given access to any recordings of the lethal incident. Details emerged, the Bakersfield Californian reported, that officers confiscated the phones of bystanders who had captured the event as it unfolded. Police reportedly arrived at Quair’s home to take his phone.

The local paper reported:

At a news conference at his downtown Bakersfield office, attorney David Cohn, representing the Silva family, said the videos were vital evidence. He expressed concern about tampering.

“Those videos that were taken are the most important piece to this case and another main concern is that those videos aren’t altered or destroyed by the Sheriff’s Department,” said Cohn, of the firm Chain, Cohn, Stiles.

Later in the day, Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood said he was asking the public to be patient and give his office the opportunity to conduct an investigation. He was critical of comments made by lawyers for the family and the witnesses.

“It appears that a couple attorneys are making statements based on I don’t know what because the investigation hasn’t been completed yet,” Youngblood said.

Cohn was flanked at the news conference by Silva’s mother, father and brother. They did not speak.

Cohn said he plans to file a civil rights lawsuit in federal District Court in Fresno next week.


Kelly Thomas' father 'totally disgusted' by Kern County beating
Kate Mather
Los Angeles Times
May 14, 2013

Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood said Monday that it was too early in the investigation to reach any conclusions about Silva's death. But he defended the decision to take custody of the phones as a way of preserving possible evidence. The sheriff said his office obtained a search warrant for the phones and asked the Bakersfield Police Department to analyze the videos to remove the appearance of any conflict.

Ron Thomas said he spoke to Cohn over the weekend and planned to talk to Silva's family Tuesday. He said he would offer to help in any way he can, including going with the family to talk to the Kern County sheriff.

He also had advice based on his own experience, recommending the family "immediately" get the investigation to the district attorney or state attorney general's office, reach out to potential witnesses, and ramp up public pressure.

"If there's no pressure, there's no result," Ron Thomas said. "They would not have done it in Fullerton -- look at all the changes in Fullerton. I was a thorn in the side constantly and made them do their job."

Kelly Thomas' death roiled the Orange County community, prompting protests, memorials and a recall election as the incident drew international attention.

Three former members of the Fullerton police now face criminal charges in the death, including one officer who is accused of second-degree murder. Police Chief Michael F. Sellers took a medical leave amid calls for his resignation. He eventually stepped down.

Three City Council members perceived as protecting the embattled Police Department were ousted in a recall, and at one point the City Council considered disbanding the department and handing over law-enforcement authority to the sheriff.

Ron Thomas said the Kern County incident brought up memories of his son's case.

"It's very tough," he said. "I just happen to be in a whirl right now -- if I slow down, I'll get choked up."

"We've got to stop this," he said later. "We the people have got to stop this."

Honors students guilty in murder to prevent witness from testifying

It seems that public entities, from schools to police forces, have a bad habit of firing employees who complain that murderers and child molesters are being protected or treated gingerly.

Here's a story of a school district that forced out a teacher who reported a child molester.

The final paragraph of the story below discusses an LAPD detective who was fired for revealing that a witness and her family had not been adequately protected.

After years of lying, ex-honors student admits her role in murder
Keeairra Dashiell is sentenced to life in prison for driving her then-boyfriend to the home of a crime witness, where he shot Pamela Lark, the witness' mother.
By Joel Rubin
Los Angeles Times
April 4, 2013

When Keeairra Dashiell graduated with honors from Crenshaw High School seven years ago, she seemed headed for success. Offered admission into several top colleges, she accepted a scholarship to UC San Diego, leaving behind the often rough, inner-city world of South Los Angeles.

But on Thursday, Dashiell's talent and promise were a distant, squandered memory as the 24-year-old sat handcuffed in a downtown Los Angeles courtroom. After years of lying, she fully confessed to her role in a 2007 murder and, in a deal with prosecutors, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and attempted robbery. Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Michael Pastor sentenced Dashiell to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 19 years.

After handing down the sentence, Pastor spoke to Dashiell at length as she sat quietly next to her attorney with her head bowed. "You made horrific decisions and caused incalculable pain and suffering to others," Pastor said in a somber tone. "You're not entitled to pity."

PHOTOS: Aftermath of a holdup

Dashiell confessed to having a hand in the Jan. 3, 2007, murder of Pamela Lark, who was shot to death by Dashiell's then-boyfriend, Tyquan Knox. Dashiell admitted to driving Knox to the Mid-City block where Lark lived with her teenage daughter Khristina Henry and, with several members of her family and Lark's listening in the courtroom, said she knew Knox was armed with a gun and that he planned to kill Henry. Dashiell waited for Knox and drove him away when he returned.

Months earlier, Knox, a one-time football star at Crenshaw High School, had robbed Henry and her boyfriend at gunpoint. Lark insisted that Henry report it to police, telling her that it was her duty to do so.

Over the next few months, Knox's mother and other acquaintances contacted Lark and Henry in an effort to dissuade the teenager from testifying at Knox's approaching trial. "You better watch your back," Henry remembered being told by a mutual acquaintance. "It's best that you guys not go to court."

Knox, who had ruined his best chance at earning a football scholarship when he was kicked off Crenshaw's team for hitting a girl, still harbored hopes of catching the eye of scouts. He feared that a conviction would ruin any chance of being recruited by a college, the prosecution contended at his murder trial.

Despite the threats against her, Henry still planned on taking the stand at Knox's preliminary hearing. Four days before the hearing, Knox strode up to Lark as she, a niece and two young grandchildren stood near her car. He demanded her purse and then opened fire without taking anything.

Dashiell said on Thursday that she and Knox went to the apartment before dawn with a plan to kill Henry, not Lark. The pair apparently did not see Henry when she emerged from the apartment in the morning and drove off to attend class at a nearby community college. It remains unknown why Knox targeted Lark. After two attempts at prosecuting Knox ended in mistrials when the juries could not reach verdicts, Knox was convicted of murder at a third trial in 2011 and sentenced to life in prison without parole.

In the first two trials, Danette Meyers, the assistant district attorney who prosecuted the cases, struck a deal with Dashiell: In exchange for her testimony against Knox, Dashiell would serve only seven years in prison. Dashiell, however, proved to be a reluctant and unconvincing witness, often contradicting herself and getting caught in lies. Meyers rescinded the offer and, until Thursday's agreement, had vowed to prosecute Dashiell on murder charges.

With more than six years having passed since the murder, Thursday's hearing brought an end to countless hours Lark's family has spent in courtrooms having to relive the horror of the killing. "I'm just happy it's finally over," Henry said after the hearing.

Lark's murder and its fallout was the subject of a two-part series in The Times.

In his comments, Pastor, a veteran judge who heard each of Knox's trials as well, said that of the thousands of cases he's handled as a judge and previously as a prosecutor, none "impacted me as much as this case." The strain was so great, Pastor said, it pushed him to request a transfer so he wouldn't have to hear such cases anymore.

"I couldn't handle it anymore because I saw the terrible pain this case has caused all of you," he said to the members of both Lark's and Dashiell's families. Pastor offered kind words to Dashiell's parents, saying they appeared to be good people. "Mrs. Dashiell asked where she went wrong. She didn't go wrong," he said. "Keeairra Dashiell did this herself."

After Dashiell had been led away, members of her family approached Henry and other relatives of Lark. Forming a line, they each tearfully embraced Henry and the others, whispering apologies.

Taking in the emotional scene was Michael Slider, Henry's uncle and a detective in the Los Angeles Police Department. Slider was fired by the department in 2010 for leaking confidential information about the case after he became convinced that his fellow LAPD detectives had not done enough to protect Henry and Lark from Knox. After an appeals court threw out one of the department's allegations against Slider and sent the case back to the LAPD for reconsideration, police officials relented and reinstated Slider.

The collapse of American justice

Sep 24, 2011
The collapse of American justice
Not long ago, we had a low incarceration rate and a system that worked. Then everything started to unravel
By William J. Stuntz


This article is an adapted excerpt from the new book "The Collapse of American Criminal Justice," from Harvard University Press.

Among the great untold stories of our time is this one: the last half of the twentieth century saw America's criminal justice system unravel. Signs of the unraveling are everywhere. The nation's record- shattering prison population has grown out of control. Still more so the African American portion of that prison population: for black males, a term in the nearest penitentiary has become an ordinary life experience, a horrifying truth that wasn't true a mere generation ago. Ordinary life experiences are poor deterrents, one reason why massive levels of criminal punishment coexist with historically high levels of urban violence.

Outside the South, most cities' murder rates are a multiple of the rates in those same cities sixty years ago -- notwithstanding a large drop in violent crime in the 1990s. Within cities, crime is low in safe neighborhoods but remains a huge problem in dangerous ones, and those dangerous neighborhoods are disproportionately poor and black. Last but not least, we have built a justice system that strikes many of its targets as wildly unjust. The feeling has some evidentiary support: criminal litigation regularly makes awful mistakes, as the frequent DNA-based exonerations of convicted defendants illustrate. Evidently, the criminal justice system is doing none of its jobs well: producing justice, avoiding discrimination, protecting those who most need the law's protection, keeping crime in check while maintaining reasonable limits on criminal punishment.

It was not always so. For much of American history -- again, outside the South -- criminal justice institutions punished sparingly, mostly avoided the worst forms of discrimination, controlled crime effectively, and, for the most part, treated those whom the system targets fairly. The justice system was always flawed, and injustices always happened. Nevertheless, one might fairly say that criminal justice worked. It doesn't anymore.

There are three keys to the system's dysfunction, each of which has deep historical roots but all of which took hold in the last sixty years. First, the rule of law collapsed. To a degree that had not been true in America's past, official discretion rather than legal doctrine or juries' judgments came to define criminal justice outcomes. Second, discrimination against both black suspects and black crime victims grew steadily worse -- oddly, in an age of rising legal protection for civil rights. Today, black drug offenders are punished in great numbers, even as white drug offenders are usually ignored. (As is usually the case with respect to American crime statistics, Latinos fall in between, but generally closer to the white population than to the black one.) At the same time, blacks victimized by violent felonies regularly see violence go unpunished; the story is different in most white neighborhoods. The third trend is the least familiar: a kind of pendulum justice took hold in the twentieth century's second half, as America's justice system first saw a sharp decline in the prison population -- in the midst of a record-setting crime wave -- then saw that population rise steeply. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the United States had one of the most lenient justice systems in the world. By century's end, that justice system was the harshest in the history of democratic government.