Courthouse Files

A Texas cop remains on the job after the department he works for settled the third excessive force lawsuit against him Thursday.
Austin police officer Eric Copeland was sued three times for using excessive force between April of 2011 to April of 2015.
Austin City Council members approved the latest $150,000 settlement November 9 for unnecessarily tasering Adrian Aguado, 20, after removing him from handcuffs and telling him to exit the police cruiser.
Video from inside the patrol car shows Copeland tasering Aguado immediately as he slowly exits the vehicle.

A federal judge in Virginia’s Eastern district court has ruled that a Loudon County elected official censored a citizen by blocking them on Facebook in a First Amendment protected public forum.
Brian Davison is trying to keep the Loudoun County School Board accountable but has faced a prolonged campaign of censorship and retaliatory claims by Board Members with serious financial conflicts of interest in the charter school industry and who have voted on issues that impact pay for family members.

A Florida man won the right to surreptitiously record police officers while making internal affairs complaints without the threat of prosecution when he defeated the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office (SAO) in a federal appeals court ruling.
Prosecutors tried to censor the citizen, who published his incriminating recording of a police chief.

The City of Homestead has a torrid reputation and a pattern of willfully refusing to comply with the public records law. Homestead is a little town at the southern end of Miami-Dade County, rarely receiving the scrutiny it deserves as a cesspool of public corruption and maleficence.
I have used the records request process, as a pre-discovery method for investigating my civil rights claims. Homestead has failed to comply with the public records law on the majority of the nearly one hundred requests I have filed.

A Maryland jury awarded a family $1.26 million Tuesday after deciding a cop wrongly shot and killed their dog, Vernon, on February 1, 2014 – the largest award in American history for such a case.
“The verdict sends a strong message to the police about community expectations,” attorney Carl J. Hansel said after the verdict, according to the Capital Gazette.
“The duty to serve and protect extends to our animal family members as well.”

A good cop who decided to negotiate with a suicidal man with an unloaded gun instead of killing him filed a lawsuit against the West Virginia city that fired him over it.
The Weirton police officers who did shoot and kill the suicidal man kept their jobs.
According to the suit, officer Ryan Kuzma, who fired the fatal shot that killed 21-year-old Ronald William, sent text messages to the fired officer, Stephen Mader, calling him a “coward” who “didn’t have the balls to save his own life.”

Aaron Hernandez’s attorney is questioning whether or not the former NFL star committed suicide or was murdered after prison officials said he was found hanging in his cell earlier this morning.
Attorney Jose Baez said Hernandez not only showed no signs of being suicidal, but was optimistic about winning an upcoming appeal for the 2015 murder conviction of Odin Lloyd in Bristol County, Massachusetts

President Donald Trump’s executive order to crack down on sanctuary cities is cracking after a Florida judge issued a 15-page ruling Friday stating that it is unconstitutional for local jails to hold undocumented immigrants for federal deportation after they have been cleared of local charges.

The U.S. Court of  Appeals Court for the Fifth Circuit has ruled in a 2-1 decision that the public has the First Amendment right to record activities of law enforcement because it ensures cops “are not abusing their power.”

A Ohio sheriff’s department once again has been exposed on video pepper spraying a detainee strapped in a restraint chair, a disturbing incident that took place a month after an almost identical video surfaced that was written off as an “isolated” incident by the sheriff who runs the jail.
The practice does not seem very isolated considering the victim in the latest attack expressed fear about getting strapped to the chair before he even saw the chair.