After Thevenin shooting, a lingering stench
ItTroy is often a mistake to assess a verdict from a distance. If you’re not sitting in the courtroom for the day-by-daay of a trial, it is difficult to evaluaate whether the evidence warrranted a conviction.
SSO I’ll resist the temptatiion to decry the acquittal of former Rensselaer County District Attorney Joel Abelove on perjury and official misconduct charges related to the police shooting of Edson Thevenin four years ago. I didn’t attend the trial. I didn’t hear what the judge who exonerated Abelove heard.
But I’ll note that most everything about the handling of the shooting stinks to high heaven. It is evidence not only of a broken system, but of widespread rot.
It stinks, for example, that Abelove rushed the case to a grand jury just FIVE DAYS after the killing and granted the patrol sergeant who shot the Black DWI suspect immunity for his testimony. The
decision meant Abelove couldn’t have prosecuted Sgt. Randall French no matter what the grand jury decided.
It stinks that the grand jury was not shown photos of the bullet holes in Thevenin’s windshield, which revealed the central claim of the shooting false. If French’s life was endangered because Thevenin had pinned him with the car, as Troy police contended, the entry points of the gunshots could not have varied so widely. A forensic analysis would later show French was in motion.
It likewise stinks that, as a detailed report from former Attorney General Eric Schneiderman later found, officers on the scene ignored evidence and “grossly mishandled” witnesses who contradicted what quickly became the official narrative. “Get the f*** out of here,” witnesses were told.
It stinks that Abelove was acquitted by the very judge, Jonathan Nichols of Columbia County, who dismissed the same charges two years ago because he believed the attorney general’s office was overstepping its jurisdiction — a decision unanimously reversed on appeal, allowing the case against Abelove to continue.
If you were a defendant, wouldn’t it be nice to know your judge viewed the charges against
you so skeptically? Wouldn’t that lead you to conclude, as Abelove did, that you’d be better off putting the judge in charge of the verdict instead of a jury?
It stinks that Mayor Patrick Madden participated in this dishonesty from the start. Even now, Madden refuses to release findings by an outside investigator apparently hired by the city to contradict Schneiderman’s report and the police department’s own internal investigation, which was damning.
It stinks that voters ignored Madden’s disqualifying conduct and re-elected the Democrat anyway.
And yes, it is beyond inexcusable that Thevenin fled a traffic stop at 3 a.m. on a Sunday, leading officers on a chase that ended in a crash. That decision put this whole sordid mess into motion.
We can believe Thevenin didn’t deserve to die for that decision. But we can’t really know whether French feared for his life when he fired eight times at the DWI suspect. While most of us slept in comfort that April morning, Thevenin forced the officer into making an impossibly difficult split-second decision.
Maybe Abelove was right to believe the patrol sergeant deserved the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he was right that the evidence didn’t support criminal charges against French, who recently died of COVID-19. On that point, the Schneiderman report later concurred.
But Abelove should have presented his decision to the public after a thorough investigation and with a full and honest accounting of the facts. We deserved that. The truth is what the public always deserves.
Instead, we were fed a rushed investigation and a hurried exoneration based on an obvious falsehood that nobody contradicted — not former Chief James Tedesco, who immediately and forcefully declared the shooting warranted; not Madden, who bathes his cowardice in legalese; and certainly not Abelove, who wants us to believe he’s been victimized.
“This was a political hit job from the start,” the Republican Abelove, in private practice since losing a 2018 re-election bid, said Friday on WGDJ radio. “When they saw an opportunity to try to take me out, they took it.”
I’ve used this space to call out bald political bias in the attorney general’s office, including Letitia James’ attempt to shutter the NRA. But Abelove’s self-important grandiosity strikes me as laughable.
We’re to believe Schneiderman and James care so much about the DA’S office in a small, upstate county that they lusted to take down the mighty Abelove? With all due respect, he was never that important.
The trial is over now. Abelove’s acquittal means he can move on with his life. I wish him no ill will.
But this isn’t over for Troy, which faces a civil lawsuit filed by Thevenin’s family. This ugly tragedy waits for a resolution. The stench lingers.