Surveillance cameras have captured the faces of criminal suspects in banks, in elevators and on street corners. But they have also surfaced in an unexpected law enforcement role: as evidence against police officers accused of misconduct or of lying on the witness stand.
The latest such case emerged on Monday, when a New York City detective, Debra Eager, 41, was indicted on three felony perjury charges after her testimony before a grand jury about a 2007 drug arrest “starkly contradicted” video surveillance of the event, according to Robert T. Johnson, the Bronx district attorney.
Detective Eager pleaded not guilty to the charges, said her lawyer, Peter E. Brill, who pointed out that she had 15 years’ experience on the force and no disciplinary history. He explained the discrepancies between her testimony and the video as honest mistakes.
Mr. Johnson, commenting on the case, said in a statement that “untruthful testimony” from law enforcement officers “strikes at the very heart of our system of justice and seriously erodes public confidence in our courts.”
Detective Eager’s indictment is one of several in recent months in which video recordings played a role in establishing criminal cases against police officers or led prosecutors to drop charges against suspects the officers had arrested.
In September, the Manhattan district attorney’s office dropped charges of attempted assault, resisting arrest and disorderly conduct against a cyclist, Christopher Long, after videotape showed a police officer, Patrick Pogan, knocking him off his bicycle during a cycling event in Manhattan last summer. Mr. Pogan was indicted in December on charges of assault and filing false paperwork, and has since resigned.
In January, two undercover narcotics officers, Officer Henry Tavarez and Detective Stephen Anderson, were charged with official misconduct and conspiracy after prosecutors said they lied about a “buy and bust” operation at a bar in Queens. One of the men they had arrested, on charges of selling the officers drugs, produced video evidence showing that the officers had had no contact with him or three other suspects, prosecutors said. The charges against the men were dropped.
Last month, assault charges were dropped against a truck driver, Michael Cephus, after a video showed a police officer, Maurice Harrington, hitting him 10 times with a metal baton on Delancey Street in Manhattan, according to Brian Orlow, a lawyer for Mr. Cephus.
Alicia Maxey Greene, a spokeswoman for the Manhattan district attorney’s office, confirmed that the office was investigating Officer Harrington, but declined to comment further.
Also last month, Officer David London was indicted on charges of assault and filing false records after video from a surveillance camera at an Upper West Side building showed that he pulled a man he had accused of resisting arrest out of an elevator and beat him 18 to 20 times with a baton. Officer London has pleaded not guilty.
Detective Eager was released on a $15,000 personal recognizance bond, and her case was adjourned until May 12. Each of the three counts carries a maximum sentence of seven years in prison, prosecutors said.
Mr. Brill said Detective Eager had no incentive to lie. “What did she have invested in lying?” he said on Tuesday, recounting his remarks in court the day before. “She has made 1,300 arrests.”
The chief spokesman for the Police Department, Paul J. Browne, declined to comment on Detective Eager’s case other than to say that she had been suspended from the force. But when asked to comment about police officers accused of perjury, he said, “It does not happen often, but when it does, it is baffling why police officers would risk prosecution and their careers to advance a criminal case rather than let the chips fall where they may.”
The case against Detective Eager stems from her arrest of three people on drug charges in November 2007 at an apartment building on Holland Avenue in the Bronx.
In an excerpt from her grand jury testimony, released by Mr. Johnson’s office, Detective Eager says she and a partner left their van and entered the building through a broken door to follow two men who they believed had two boxes of marijuana. In another excerpt, she says she and her partner “went up to the fourth floor” and then “to the fifth floor” when they heard the suspects jingling keys to unlock Apartment 55N.
The third perjury count was based on her remarks that during the arrest she had recovered two boxes of marijuana, one 15 pounds and the other 18 pounds.
The district attorney’s statement does not say what the video showed, but claims that her testimony was “specific in detail” and contradicted by the video surveillance.
The felony and misdemeanor charges were dropped against the drug suspects last October, prosecutors said.
Mr. Brill said the surveillance video became part of the case when one or more of the defendants filed a complaint against Detective Eager with the Civilian Complaint Review Board.
Mr. Brill said that after Detective Eager saw the video, she realized that “some of the things she said in the grand jury were incorrect based upon not lying, but mistakes she had made in recalling this.”
Within days, he said, she went to the district attorney’s office and explained the situation.
Mr. Brill said the video showed that Detective Eager and her partner had gone up to the fifth floor separately, perhaps minutes apart, and that members of the police team she was with made the recovery of the boxes — she did not recover them on her own.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/25/nyregion/25perjury.html?_r=1
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