The four young black men who collected a $1.5 million settlement this week from Metro Louisville for their wrongful arrests say they accept Mayor Greg Fischer’s apology.
But they reject Fischer and Police Chief Steve Conrad’s claims that race had nothing to do with the arrests.
And at a news conference Thursday in the Jefferson County Judicial Center, they said they believe they were victims of racial profiling, and that settlement has not restored their trust in the department.
“We feel like we still need to look over our shoulders,” said Tyrone Booker Jr., 20, who spent 70 days in jail.
Lawyers for the four men, dubbed the “Misidentified 4,” said the city deserves credit for settling the case quickly, without a lawsuit. “They did seek an honorable way to resolve it and we are going to give them credit for that,” said Al Gerhardstein, a Cincinnati civil-rights lawyer.
But he said Conrad should have sanctioned the officers involved, rather than just order them to undergo further training.
“When you have officers who do things totally opposite the way they are supposed to … and are not disciplined, it suggests a systemic problem,” he said.
Conrad has said an internal investigation found that that Officers Cordell Allen, Timothy Lanham, Michael Torres and Jeremy Boehnlein violated six department policies when they presented the suspects to two witnesses on a sidewalk in the glare of a police spotlight.
A grand jury exonerated all four defendants — Booker, Shaquazz Allen, 19, Jerron Bush, 22, and Craig Dean — on charges that they robbed a woman at gunpoint on March 22, the night of mob violence in downtown Louisville; Allen and Booker also were cleared on separate charges of assault and unlawful imprisonment when the victims of another crime earlier the same evening saw their pictures on a local newscast about the robbery and then identified them as their assailants.
Gerhardstein declined to say how the settlement will be divided among the four men and their lawyers.
Dressed in suits and ties, the men talked to reporters for about 60 minutes about how they were affected by their incarceration. Booker and Allen were locked up for 70 days, while Bush and Dean each served five days, plus time on home incarceration.
They were cleared in part by cellphone records that showed they couldn’t have been at the crime scene.
Booker said he feared he’d never be freed. “I almost gave up,” he said.
Allen said he will have to return to high school to graduate and that he now has trouble sleeping.
All four said they thought they had been victims of racial profiling, despite Conrad’s assertion in a statement that the officers’ mistakes were based on inexperience rather than “based solely on their race.”
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