AFTER MASS PROTESTS
Jury finds cops in
Louima case guilty
By
Greg Dunkel
New York
Brooklyn
is not Albany. That was the feeling running around New York after the conviction
of the three cops charged with conspiring to cover up the role of one of
them, Charles Schwarz, in the torture of Abner Louima.
On
the third day of deliberations, thousands of New York City students had marched
to the federal courthouse in Brooklyn where the jury was deliberating in the
Louima case. They had walked out of their schools to protest the acquittal of
the cops in the Diallo shooting by an Albany jury.
It
was just another sign of the anger over police brutality in this city.
Officer
Schwarz is already facing a possible life sentence after being convicted of
holding down Louima as fellow officer Justin Volpe rammed a broken-off broom
handle into his rectum. With this conspiracy conviction, he now faces an
additional five
years.
A
Brooklyn federal court jury took four days to reach a verdict in this second
trial stemming from the Aug. 9, 1997, incident that brought tens of thousands of
Haitians and their supporters out into the streets demanding
justice.
Louima,
a Haitian immigrant, suffered severe internal injuries, including a ruptured
bladder and colon, and spent two months in the
hospital.
Cops
Thomas Wiese and Thomas Bruder were found guilty of conspiracy to obstruct
justice because they claimed Schwarz was not present during the attack. They
could get five years in prison. They had been acquitted in the first trial of
charges they assaulted Abner Louima in the squad car taking him to the precinct
house.
Assistant
U.S. Attorney Alan Vinegrad accused the three defendants of telling "lie after
lie" to save Schwarz. He offered phone records as evidence that the cops, who
rarely spoke prior to the incident, had scores of conversations in the weeks
afterward.
Maude
LeBlanc, editor of the progressive Haitian newspaper Haïti-Progrés,
commented: "After the indecent results in Albany [in the Amadou Diallo case],
they might be trying to calm feelings down with so-called justice. An acquittal
in this case, especially given what happened upstate, would have made me and
many other people in New York very, very angry."
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