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| NEWS > 23 September 2007 |
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Judge chastises LAPD for conse
LOS ANGELES - A federal judge scolded city officials for failing to meet key provisions of a 2001 court consent decree to reform the Police Department.
The decree was the result of a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department and was designed to correct conditions that led to police corruption scandals involving officers beating and framing suspects and stealing evidence.
U.S. District Judge Gary A. Feess said city officials were trying to "gut" a key provision and warned Tuesday that he would likely extend the decree beyond its June 15 expiration date.
The judge chastised the LAP... Read more
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New York Times - United States
23 September 2007
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Officer Jailed for 32 Years Wi
William R. Phillips, a former New York City police officer who was a star witness before a commission investigating police corruption in the 1970s, and who has since served 32 years in prison for murder, has been paroled, the authorities said yesterday. He is to be released on Nov. 9 from the Fishkill Correctional Facility.
Mr. Phillips, 77, who appeared before a three-member state parole board on Wednesday, was informed on Friday that his application for parole had been approved in a 2-to-1 vote, according to Mark E. Johnson, a spokesman for the state’s Division of Parole.
As is its usual practice, the board did not comment on its rationale for approving parole, but it did release comments from the dissenting member, who said Mr. Phillips’s crimes “fly in the face of dedicated police officers who risk their lives on a daily basis to protect society.”
The parole decision was reported on Friday on the Web site of New York magazine.
Mr. Phillips provided testimony to the Knapp Commission, which found that police corruption was pervasive and influenced police policy in New York and across the nation.
He was recruited by the commission after it caught him taking payoffs from Xaviera Hollander, the madam who wrote the best seller “The Happy Hooker.”
A police officer for 17 years, he was sentenced in 1975 to 25 years to life for the 1968 murders of James Smith, a pimp, and Sharon Stango, a prostitute.
Prosecutors said Mr. Phillips had killed Mr. Smith for failing to make a protection payment, and Ms. Stango because she witnessed the crime. But Mr. Phillips, whose televised testimony about police corruption provoked enmity among some members of the department, asserted that he was framed on the murder charges by a detective in retaliation for his testimony before the Knapp Commission.
While in prison, Mr. Phillips studied the law and fought his case, and those of fellow inmates, tenaciously over three decades. His health fell into decline: He lost an eye to cancer and had prostate cancer and a stroke.
He appealed his murder conviction to the United States Supreme Court, where it was upheld. He later took his case repeatedly to the state courts, challenging the denial of his applications for parole.
His case provoked criticism of the state’s Parole Board by the State Supreme Court in Manhattan, which in 2005 called the denial of Mr. Phillips’s application “arbitrary and capricious.” The appellate division of the State Supreme Court twice ruled that Mr. Phillips did not deserve parole, reversing lower court rulings.
“Bill Phillips is an example of why there should be a parole system,” Daniel Perez, a lawyer for Mr. Phillips, said in an interview yesterday. “He taught legal writing to generations of prisoners. He spent the last three decades atoning for his crimes. He is somebody who really belongs on the outside.”
But Lisa Beth Elovich, who issued the dissent to the board’s decision to parole Mr. Phillips, said his release from prison would be “incompatible with the welfare of society and would so deprecate the serious nature of the offense as to undermine respect for the law.”
Despite Mr. Phillips’s “accomplishments in prison, which have been many,” Ms. Elovich said, “I find more compelling the especially heinous nature” of his crimes.
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