Jackson Announces Lawsuit Against Inglewood Police
NEVILLE: Now Meesha (ph), what were you telling us during the break?</s>MEESHA (ph): If U.S. citizens are bound by certain laws that if we attack or assault someone, we are punished with jail time and excessive fines, why can someone say that a police officer is any different than the rest of us? They should be bound by the same laws and rights that the rest of the American citizens live by.</s>NEVILLE: Thank you very much. And welcome back everybody. We are talking about the police beating caught on tape of 16-year-old Donovan Jackson, and I wanted to let you know that we had to let Congresswoman Waters and Congressman Barr go vote, and also Lieutenant Deeley from Los Angeles had to leave us as well. But Joe (ph) is still with us on the phone from Ohio and you have what to say Joe (ph)?</s>JOE (ph): Thank you. One, two comments real quick. Obviously I don't condone any type of brutality like that. It's very bad, but the other comment I have to make is if this young 16-year-old boy had been a white boy, would the networks do this much showing and showing over and over again of his brutality if he was white, and I can see the Congress people already jumping on the bandwagon. This is going to become a political ticket as well, and that's the part that bothers me more. We're making it one person, only this poor black boy that got beat up, but if he was white, I don't think we would have received 10 seconds of this on television.</s>NEVILLE: I think the reason being, Joe (ph), that a lot of times, apparently we don't see that happening to ...</s>JOE (ph): Well I hope we never do.</s>NEVILLE: Exactly. I certainly don't want to, you know, advocate that happening to any kind, anyone, young ...</s>JOE (ph): I don't either.</s>NEVILLE: ... white males or black males ...</s>JOE (ph): I don't either.</s>NEVILLE: ... but I think that is why it does stand out. But thank you for calling in Joe (ph).</s>JOE (ph): Well, thank you for taking my call.</s>NEVILLE: Of course, and Tonya (ph) you were shaking your head when Joe (ph) was talking.</s>TONYA (ph): Yes. He was black, right? And I would think that maybe he, the police officer had something against African-Americans.</s>NEVILLE: We don't know that at this point, but that's your opinion?</s>TONYA (ph): Yes, that's a good possibility.</s>NEVILLE: OK, thank you for standing up. Now in the meantime the Inglewood Police Department has received a second complaint and here to talk about it, CNN's Thelma Gutierrez. She joins us live from outside the federal courthouse in downtown Los Angeles. Now, Thelma, is this latest allegation against the Inglewood Police Department or Officer Jeremy Morse?</s>THELMA GUTIERREZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Arthel, attorneys for 32- year-old Neilson Williams, this the second person who is making those allegations. His name is Neilson Williams. He is 32 years old. He is a resident of Inglewood. He did name Officer Jeremy Morse in a complaint that was filed with the Inglewood Police Department, but again, they have not detailed Officer Morse's involvement in that particular beating. They claim that it happened two weeks before the Chavis incident. Now Neilson Williams, the person who's making that allegation said yesterday, at a news conference, that he only had a gut feeling that it was Officer Morse that was involved in his beating, but he couldn't identify him outright. He just said a gut feeling after he saw the Jackson tape. Now Williams says that Inglewood police beat him up when he was walking home from a community gathering at a local park. He says that it happened two weeks before the Jackson incident. He says the beating put him in a coma and here's how he described it.</s>NEILSON WILLIAMS, ALLEGED BEATING VICTIM: I was pretty much encountered by a fleet of Inglewood police officers who pretty much had no respect for me, anything I was trying to tell them, and they just basically beat me to a pulp and almost beat me to death.</s>GUTIERREZ: Now Inglewood police have released a statement. I'm going to read some of it to you for their side of the story. They say that Williams was drunk, that he was belligerent, that he appeared to be under the influence of drugs and alcohol, that he resisted and he began to fight with officers, that he was put in some kind of a neck hold and in handcuffs and that it was at that point that the officers realized that Williams was unconscious and later he was taken to a hospital. Now, again, Williams claims that he was just walking home. He did nothing to provoke the officers and that the officers attacked him - Arthel.</s>NEVILLE: OK, Thelma, thank you very much for that update on this story. And joining me now to talk about the lawsuit and this second police beating complaint are criminal defense attorney Geoffrey Fieger, former New York prosecutor and criminal defense attorney Pamela Hayes, and Lawrence County, Pennsylvania District Attorney Matthew Mangino. I want to welcome all of you to the show.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Thank you very much.</s>NEVILLE: Absolutely.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Good to be here.</s>NEVILLE: Now, Matthew, does this latest allegation have any impact on your disposition towards this story?</s>MATTHEW MANGINO, DISTRICT ATTORNEY, LAWRENCE COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA: No it doesn't because I believe that a prosecutor's responsibility is to look at the specific facts in a given case. Now what we know right now is what we've observed on a videotape -- a videotape that is only part of an entire incident. I don't think that we can rush to judgment. I don't think that we should, as far as a criminal prosecution, be looking at other instances of possible brutality or anything else or assault of behavior by a police officer. I think as a prosecutor you've got to focus on this specific incident and what you can learn about what happened.</s>NEVILLE: Pam Hayes, how do you see it?</s>PAMELA HAYES, FORMER STATE PROSECUTOR: Well I see it as a starting point. When you start looking at the entire scenario, they had a witness who saw this entire event. She was able to get the man who did the camera work to videotape it. What I would want to do is I would want to talk to her. I would want to talk to the police officers, and I would want to talk to the victims. But just looking at what happened is the shades of Rodney King whereas we're still in a culture where police have not learned how to effectively be professional.</s>NEVILLE: Geoffrey Fieger.</s>GEOFFREY FIEGER, DEFENSE ATTORNEY: This shouldn't be a surprise to anybody. These incidents happen repeatedly across the country every single day. The only unique thing about this incident is that it was videotaped and thankfully the injury isn't very serious.</s>NEVILLE: OK, I have Charlie (ph) here in the audience from Florida. What do you say Charlie (ph)?</s>CHARLIE (ph): Well there's no doubt that these policemen should be tried in full extent of the law. I'm just a little concerned about another aspect of our existence here in America, and that is the fact that we're -- the world here, with Afghan, the Middle East, the stock market, we've got so much trouble in this word and we're just highlighting something that could be taken care of perhaps with one showing, but this is constantly being shown, and I feel for the young man, I really do, and I just feel that that's my opinion.</s>NEVILLE: So you feel that because of everything that's going on in the world, that we shouldn't repeat this videotape on the air?</s>NEVILLE: Repeat showing it?</s>CHARLIE (ph): I would show it. There's no question about it, but we can overkill, and that's my problem.</s>FIEGER: Can I respond to that?</s>NEVILLE: Absolutely.</s>FIEGER: I think you're wrong for another reason. The purpose of showing this videotape over and over again is to deter other police officers from engaging in this type of behavior, and that's a good thing. While we've got everything else going on in the world, we're out there in the rest of the world holding ourselves up in our society as an example. Well if this is the example we show the rest of the world, then we're not sending a very good example. So it's a good thing to show this as much as possible so that every police officer who even would think of engaging in this behavior, would be deterred from doing it in the future for fear that they might get caught on tape or even better yet, for fear that they might get caught at all, and that they shouldn't do it in the first place.</s>NEVILLE: In the first place. Shirley (ph) from Illinois.</s>SHIRLEY (ph): I have a question concerning code of ethics. I know when policemen are trained, they're also trained in integrity and character. This was not displayed with this particular police officer. He was acting more like a thug on the street. I really have a concern about the integrity of the individuals who are representing the police department across this country.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well ...</s>NEVILLE: Pam Hayes.</s>HAYES: That ...</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: If I could respond to that.</s>HAYES: ... was one of the things I was talking about. You have to be able to train police officers how to respond professionally, even though we know what that officer did was wrong, it was not professional. So we have a lot of talk about OK, we're going to prosecute him. We're going to put him away. The culture is still alive because we haven't changed it, and therefore, the other young officers or old officers, they still think they can do this. This guy has been on the force three years. This is 10 years after Rodney King, 10 years after riots where people got killed, and he still thinks he can act out. Jail is not the answer. It might be one of the solutions, but we have to change the thinking process.</s>NEVILLE: OK, Pam Hayes ...</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We also ...</s>NEVILLE: ... hang on for me guys. I need to switch gears. I'm going to take a break here, but when we come back, we're going to talk about another legal case that is just heartbreaking. We'll be back. Still ahead, fatal error, bad judgment or felony murder? What do you call it when a mother leaves her children locked inside a hot car for three hours?</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They probably sweated and sweated until eventually, unfortunately probably lost consciousness, and as their body temperature climbed even higher, they eventually just succumbed and died.</s>NEVILLE: A tragedy or a crime? You decide right after this.