4th Circuit Strips Immunity From Cops Who Engaged In An Insane Amount Of Unconstitutional Fuckery

I apologize in advance for the non-specific nature of this headline. But there’s too much going on here to be summed up pithily in a few hundred words or less. No one here gets paid by the word, but we’re going to need a whole lot of them to get to the bottom of this one, which details exactly what’s promised by the headline: tons of cop fuckery. (h/t Gabriel Malor)

Here’s how the ball of fuckery got rolling, as recounted in the Fourth Circuit Appeals Court decision [PDF]:

In January 2020, Brandon Williams was detained by Norfolk, Virginia, police officer John D. McClanahan on a misdemeanor trespassing charge. Williams recorded his interaction with McClanahan. At trial on the trespassing charge, McClanahan testified falsely and Williams was convicted. Williams appealed his conviction and used his recording to show that McClanahan had lied under oath. The appeals court heard Williams’ argument and dismissed the charges against him on September 15, 2020, recognizing that he never should have been prosecuted.

Lesson one: always record cops, especially when you’re the subject of their attention. Cops can’t be trusted to record themselves, even if they’re carrying the gear to do so. When it’s “your word against ours,” a camera might be the only thing standing between you and falsified criminal charges.

That should have been enough to warn Norfolk, Virginia police officers from engaging in misconduct and/or lying about it while on the stand. But some cops can’t be taught — which always means there’s no one above them who wishes to see them learn anything from experiences like these.

So, it happened again. And the way it happened is so utterly insane, it’s impossible to encapsulate in the 10-12 words that lend themselves to eye-grabbing headlines.

See, the cops that worked with Officer John McClanahan were less concerned with his perjury and more concerned with punishing the person who outed McClanahan’s lies. So, when Brandon Williams’ car was struck by a drunk driver, this is how things went for the victim of this crime:

On September 30, 2020, Williams was seriously injured in a car accident in Norfolk, Virginia. Williams was operating his vehicle carefully when he was hit by Rex Aman, who was driving over seventy-five miles per hour and swerving outside his lane. When various Norfolk police officers including McClanahan arrived at the scene to investigate the accident, they pointed at and talked about Williams. Officer Rodney Van Faussien said, while pointing to Williams, “[t]his is the guy that gave McClanahan a ration of shit,” referring to Williams’ defense of his trespassing charge. Aman’s blood alcohol level was .30––well above the legal limit––and the officers learned of Aman’s high speed from eyewitnesses.

Despite information from eyewitnesses, a debris field showing a high-impact accident, and Aman’s blood alcohol level, police officers falsely stated on the accident report that Aman was driving the speed limit, had not been drinking, and that his car had suffered a steering defect. This was allegedly done with the intent to deny Williams his rights by minimizing the accident and deflecting blame from Aman.

Hey, cops? This is what people mean when they say All Cops Are Bastards (ACAB). It’s not that all cops are. It’s that so many of them are that it hardly makes sense to treat each cop as a wholly divisible part of the Bastard whole.

These cops rolled up on a crime scene and did whatever they could to prevent the victim from pressing charges or even suing the drunk driver in civil court solely because he had previously exposed one of their own for lying in court. In normal jobs, people ostracize co-workers who lie to save their own asses. In Cop World, it’s the reverse: cops lie to cover up lies told by other cops and engage in vindictive actions against citizens who’ve done nothing more than defend themselves against bogus criminal charges.

In other words: fuck all of these cops. Fortunately, the Fourth Circuit Appeals Court agrees. Somehow, the lower court allowed this lawsuit to be dismissed, but the Appeals Court isn’t quite as willing to give this pack of lying cops a free ride.

Here’s how the Fourth sums up most of the pertinent allegations (emphasis in the original):

Here, there is a significant power imbalance in Williams’ relationship with the police, as he is a Black man who had recently exposed an officer’s perjury. We must also account for the additional context. The police had previously lied to charge and convict Williams with misdemeanor trespassing, and then at the accident scene, the officers allegedly pointed at him, talked about him, and lied again with the intent of depriving him of his rights, despite his being severely injured and traumatized in the immediate aftermath of a high-speed crash. Finally, we must also consider the nature of the retaliatory acts. The adverse action here is not the mere misrepresentation of facts on an accident report. It is the officers’ intentional misrepresentation––the falsity of the report plus the animus motivating it.

The key here is — beyond all the lying — the power imbalance. Any citizen getting railroaded by cops is expected to suffer through the railroading and sue after everything else in their lives disintegrates because a bunch of lying cops conspired to deprive them of their rights. At no point in this interaction are citizens free to grab lying cops and drag them into the station to be booked for violating constitutional rights. The consequences of their actions are so remote and so theoretical, cops feel extremely comfortable pulling this kind of shit, even while in front of other eyewitnesses.

What never should have happened in the lower court has now been undone. There’s enough in this pleading — especially when coupled with the plaintiff’s previous exposure of cop lies — to move this forward. Williams will hopefully be seeing a sizable settlement in the near future. If the state decides to appeal this, it’s basically arguing that cops should be able to lie with impunity, whether on the stand or in their accident reports. And if it goes to bat for these cops, it’s giving its explicit blessing of their multiple rights violations.

The end result is, at the very least, a win for Brandon Williams. All of his claims, ranging from First Amendment retaliation to intentional infliction of emotional distress, are back in play. With any luck, the settlement that’s almost inevitable will be followed by the Norfolk PD parting ways with the cops involved in this repeated violation of rights. No one involved in this deserves to be employed as a public servant, not when there are dozens of criminal enterprises seeking a goon or two completely devoid of a moral center.