Not guilty, not blameless
Ajudge may have found former Rensselaer County District Attorney Joel Abelove not guilty, but his trial did result in a conviction — of the system that allowed Mr. Abelove to think his conduct was fair and just.
One has only to look at the evidence, to hear Mr. Abelove’s own words, and to put themselves in the shoes of the family of Edson Thevenin, to see why we need independent reviews when police kill unarmed citizens. And why local prosecutors are just too close to police to be trusted to be objective in such cases.
Troy police Sgt. Randall French had stopped Mr. Thevenin for suspected drunken driving on April 17, 2016. Mr. Thevenin, 37, of Watervliet, fled the scene and smashed his car against a barricade on the Collar City Bridge, next to Sgt. French’s patrol vehicle. By Sgt. French’s account, Mr. Thevenin then used his vehicle to pin the officer, who shot to defend himself.
Even before police finished their investigation, Mr. Abelove accepted Sgt. French’s story. He rushed the case
to a grand jury, even though the killing of an unarmed person by police was supposed to be investigated by the attorney general, under an executive order from Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Mr. Abelove reasoned that Mr. Thevenin’s car was a weapon, so he wasn’t unarmed.
Evidence and analysis would later suggest inconsistencies in the account from Sgt. French, who died earlier this year from COVID -19. Yet Mr. Abelove in his trial still maintained it was so clear-cut that “I didn't even have to put it in front of a grand jury.”
Mr. Abelove was charged with lying to the grand jury about another case in which an officer was granted immunity; he says it was an honest error. He was also charged with official misconduct for failing to present certain evidence; the judge found no crime.
But what’s perhaps most conspicuous in the case are the charges that Mr. Abelove didn’t face: nothing for letting Sgt. French slide or for doing an end run around the attorney general.
Imagine if a loved one of yours had been shot and that rather than wait for police to finish their investigation, a district attorney gave the person who pulled the trigger immunity from prosecution in exchange for telling their side of the story. That’s what Mr. Abelove did. And then, sure of his judgment in the matter, though with no objective evidence to support it, he rushed the case through a grand jury, sealing the immunity.
There are those who don’t like the changes that have been made in New York’s criminal justice system in recent years, including the independent review that takes investigations into the killing of unarmed people by police away from prosecutors who, as this case shows, are far too cozy with the cops they work with every day.
We may never know the full story of what happened the night Mr. Thevenin died, but we do know this: A system in which police officers and district attorneys decide to be judge, jury and executioner cannot be called just. And the same goes for a system that says Mr. Abelove did nothing wrong.