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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Oct. 17, 1996
issue of Workers World newspaper
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No justice for Baez: Judge lets killer cop walk

By Carlos Rovira in New York

"Not guilty" was the verdict delivered by State Supreme Court Acting Justice Gerald Sheindlin in the Bronx, N.Y., on Oct. 7. Sheindlin exonerated Police Officer Francis X. Livoti even after saying, "I do not find that the defendant is innocent."

Livoti killed Anthony Baez on Dec. 22, 1994, when he applied a choke hold on the young Puerto Rican. The offense for which Livoti killed Baez? He was playing football and the ball accidentally hit Livoti's police car.

Before the verdict was announced, hundreds of Latino and African American people waited outside the courthouse hoping for some form of justice. But instead they were inflicted with further injury when Scheindlin said he would not deliver a guilty verdict because there was "no intent to kill."

Livoti's lawyers had opted not to have a jury hear the case. Bronx juries are usually made up mostly of Black and Latino people, and have tended to find for the oppressed in police-brutality cases. The judge didn't disappoint the cops.

After the verdict was announced, throngs marched through the streets of the South Bronx, demanding justice.

Many in the community commented on how this case, like many others, reveals the cops' role as agents of the capitalist state to keep poor people down while preserving this system of racist inequality.

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