A broken system

When someone dies at the hands of a Las Vegas police officer, the appropriateness of that death is reviewed in a coroner’s inquest at the county courthouse.

The involved officers testify, in uniform, being guided through their account by a local prosecutor.

The prosecutors work closely with police on a daily basis. It’s not far-fetched to call their treatment of the officers sympathetic. Nor is the coroner’s inquest an “adversarial” proceeding. Other attorneys — representing the decedent’s family or other interested parties — are not allowed to subject the officers to skeptical cross-examination, challenging assertions or asking for an explanation of discrepancies.

Family members may submit written questions through their gagged attorneys for consideration by the hearing officer. But many of those questions are discarded without ever being asked aloud. Hearing officers are not required to explain why such questions are ignored.

“This system invites lawsuits because families leave (the hearing) saying it was a sham,” asserts Gary Peck, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada.

That’s true. And it’s alarming how often those lawsuits result in large, tax-funded cash settlements.

Take the case of 32-year-old John Perrin, a pedestrian armed only with a basketball, who was shot six times (out of 14 rounds discharged) by Metro officer Bruce Gentner as he walked down a sidewalk in southwest Las Vegas in April 1999. John Perrin was not wanted for, fleeing from or previously suspected of any known crime. There were no eyewitnesses, though witnesses within earshot testified they heard no spoken warning from Gentner till after the shots were fired.

In allowing a civil suit to proceed in the death after Gentner was cleared in the coroner’s inquest, U.S. District Judge Roger Hunt wrote, “From the statements of those who worked with and came in contact with officer Gentner, it appears that officer Gentner has a tendency not only to use excessive force, but to misperceive potential safety threats. If officer Gentner’s own fellow officers were afraid to work with him, surely Metro was on constructive notice that Gentner was not only a potential threat to public safety, but that he regularly flaunted constitutional safeguards intended to protect citizens against the use of excessive force.”

As usual, Clark County taxpayers ended up paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to the estate of Mr. Perrin’s surviving daughter, in a shooting where the coroner’s inquest had ruled everything was just hunky-dory.

“The way the system is now, the cop always walks,” said Mark LePage, foreman of the coroner’s jury that exonerated Gentner, as they later said they believed they had to do under the hearing officer’s instructions. “I think you need to change the law” — so officers cannot shoot suspects until certain the individual poses a threat to their or an innocent party’s safety — “because it is wrong.”

Then there was the 1996 case of Officer George Pease, who killed homeless man Henry Rowe in the dark of a moonless night at the hobo’s makeshift shelter in a warehouse district not far from the Strip. Pease contended he had to cut Mr. Rowe’s throat and then shoot him in the head after Mr. Rowe seized the officer’s gun and fired four shots … all of which missed.

After saying chemical tests on both men’s clothing would confirm or refute officer Pease’s story, Metro announced at the coroner’s inquest they’d decided not to perform those tests, citing “cost concerns.”

That doesn’t even pass the smell test.

The Clark County Commission is now considering a set of proposed reforms to the inquest process, which Mr. Peck dismisses as “nothing but window dressing.”

Commissioners agreed Tuesday that elected justices of the peace should replace the current, unelected “hearing officers” who are not judges.

Representatives of the state attorney general’s office will also be asked to step in and replace local prosecutors in presenting the government case.

Mr. Peck suggested that hearing officers read family members’ written questions aloud to the jury, including those they intend to discard. But commissioners sided with Sheriff Doug Gillespie, who favored such rejected questions being read to the public outside the jury’s hearing.

In the end, Mr. Peck called for a much more substantial revamping of the process. But Commission Chairman Rory Reid replied that to make the proceedings any more adversarial would invite police officers to “take the Fifth” and refuse to offer testimony, which is now voluntary.

Clark County’s inquest system is superior to that which still prevails in many jurisdictions, where police simply announce whether an officer has been exonerated, with no public sifting of the evidence at all.

But Mr. Peck is also correct, that the present system is deeply flawed.

To pretend that the current inquest system thoroughly probed the deaths of Henry Rowe, John Perrin, Orlando Barlow, and 17-year-old Swauve Lopez — that all questions were satisfactorily resolved — would be absurd.

The justice system should truly presume innocence. It should not evoke fear of job loss or imprisonment in anyone who shoots justifiably in defense of himself or other innocent parties, whether the shooter be a police officer or not.

But public support and confidence demand something more probing than a scripted dog-and-pony show.