Will anti-police sentiment change outcomes for Nucera, TPD cops charged in brutality cases?
For much of America, the coronavirus pandemic couldn’t be worse.
For Frank Nucera, Anthony Villanueva and Drew Inman — New Jersey cops facing federal police brutality cases in Trenton and Camden — COVID-19 has given them a reprieve.
Federal civil and criminal trials are suspended until at least Aug. 31 because of the public health crisis, meaning the trio won’t contend, for now, with the antipolice sentiment sweeping the nation over George Floyd’s death.
Still, their lawyers say unfavorable public opinion of officers complicates their clients’ ability to receive fair trials whenever they get their day in court. They fear those sentiments are unlikely to wane, heightening the importance of jury selection to weed out jurors with biases.
“I would be living with blinders on if I thought there wasn’t some potential impact on the trial and on potential jurors,” said Rocco Cipparone Jr., the attorney representing the white former Bordentown Township Police chief accused in the racially motivated beating of a Black Trenton man. “I know my concerns are amplified this time around.”
Already convicted and awaiting sentencing for lying to the feds, Nucera faces a retrial on counts of hatecrime assault and civilrights deprivation.
He’s accused of slamming then-18-year-old Timothy Stroye’s head into a door jamb at the Ramada Inn in September 2016.
Secret recordings made by a colleague captured Nucera using the N-word and making hateful and disparaging remarks about Stroye and other minorities.
In the Trenton case, city cops Villanueva and Inman were hit in a six-count indictment that charged civilrights deprivation and falsifying police records.
The capital city cops are accused of using excessive force against suspects
Chanzie Washington and Quaree Singletary, during separate arrests, in April and November 2017.
A judge ordered Villanueva stand trial separately on charges of pepper-spraying Singletary in police lockup.
Villanueva and Inman are being tried together for allegedly pummeling Washington following a foot chase through the city that began after a routine car stop on April 9, 2017.
Washington was heard on body camera footage obtained by The Trentonian screaming, “Stop hitting me in the face,” and “you’ve got my hands.”
The right to a fair trial isn’t unique to Nucera and the TPD cops. It’s something Hennepin County District Judge Peter Cahill is contemplating while presiding over the cases of the officers charged in Floyd’s death.
Minnesota officials have been criticized by officers’ attorneys for making public comments that inflamed passions in the region, according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
Some are pushing for a rare change of venue. And Cahill took the rare step of cautioning officials about the impact future comments could have on the cases.
“What they’re doing is endangering the right to a fair trial. They need to understand that,” he said.
Potential juror bias al
ready came up in the Nucera case as Cipparone attempted to get his client’s lying conviction tossed, saying three black jurors bullied four white jurors into finding the ex-top cop guilty for fear of being labeled racists.
He pointed to comments Pamela Richardson, 63, reportedly made during deliberations about her experiences as a Black woman and pointed to an old Facebook post, he claimed, showed anti-police bias.
The defense portrayed Richardson as a “stealth juror” who concealed her beliefs during jury selection so she could get on the panel.
A judge did not go along with it, saying there was no indication Nucera’s race or profession factored into the jury’s finding.
Alec Walen, a law professor and program director for criminal justice at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, said police have been viewed differently by the public throughout history, from the civil rights era, post9/11 to the current Black Lives Matter movement.
Those beliefs, in turn, impact policy-making, prosecutorial charging decisions and the jury pool.
As examples, he pointed to New York’s recent repeal of a law that shielded police misconduct records contrasting it with past deference for police shaped by a historical view of them as heroes.
And he also alluded to Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard’s decision to charge Atlanta cop Garrett Rolfe with felony murder in the death of 27-year-old Rayshard Brooks, who was killed outside a Wendy’s fast food joint after disarming an officer of a Taser during a drunk stop.
Those decisions likely wouldn’t have happened a few years ago, the law professor said, if not but for political pressure exerted by BLM and its allies.
“The pendulum really got a hard kick because of George Floyd, but it’s been swinging that way for a couple years, or five years,” Walen said. “Think back to 1968. The white majority has a lot more power in this country than the minority. It’s only recently that the white majority is shrinking towards nearplurality status.
“In ‘68, you have these minority riots that scared the sh*t out of the white majority. Who’s there to protect them? Oh, the cops.
[This shaped the view] that the cops are the good guys protecting us from the bad guys, so trust the cops to police themselves. It is the pendulum swinging. And it’s taken a long time to get that to happen.”
On the other hand, Jerome Ballarotto, a former federal prosecutor and the defense attorney for Villanueva, said that while Chauvin’s actions triggered visceral anti-police reactions, it also brought into sharp focus what a bad cop looks like.
Villanueva is no Chauvin, Ballarotto said, hoping jurors distinguish the two.
Beyond that, Ballarotto felt Villanueva’s use of force on Washington was justified.
“I would like to think that the anti-police sentiment is conduct-related, and that honest jurors will see that his conduct doesn’t rise to nearly other places in the country,” the defense attorney said. “He didn’t shoot anybody. He didn’t use a club . ... This was conduct that was almost required by the actions of the perpetrator and the circumstances. There was a fence between him and all the other police officers. Something had to be done, and Anthony did what his training told him to do.”