Video: Louisiana man dies after officers put him in choke hold

[Origanalist]

Video: Louisiana man dies after officers put him in choke hold; experts disagree on excessive force or not

BY BEN MYERS | BMYERS@THEADVOCATE.COM
Ben Myers
Ben Myers

AUG 2, 2018 - 12:45 PM




A criminal justice expert says Avoyelles Parish law officers who wrestled a Marksville man off a tractor while serving an arrest warrant last year used too much force, needlessly escalating a confrontation that ended with the man's death. A second expert said he doesn't agree the officers used excessive force, but said they may have acted negligently by failing to administer aid once Armando Frank was unconscious.

A video recording of the arrest, obtained by The Advocate, shows officers growing frustrated with Frank, 44, after he refuses to step down from a tractor near a Walmart store along La. 1. A use-of-force expert who reviewed the 10-minute recording at the newspaper's request says the law officers escalated the exchange by placing Frank in a choke hold and attempting to yank him off the tractor.

Editor's note: Video contains graphic language and content.

“His level of resistance starts out as passive. It doesn’t go to active and aggressive until he’s physically assaulted by these deputies," Gregory Gilbertson, director of the criminal justice program at Centralia College in Centralia, Washington, said Thursday.

Last Oct. 20, two sheriff’s deputies, Brandon Spillman and Alexander Daniel, along with Marksville Police officer Kenneth Parnell, tried to force Frank from his tractor. Spillman, Daniel and Parnell are named defendants in a civil rights lawsuit. There were other law enforcement personnel on the scene, according to the Sheriff's Office.

A forensic pathologist hired by the parish had said in a report that manual strangulation was the primary cause of Frank’s death. The video shows Spillman mount the tractor behind Frank and apply a choke hold while another officer tries to pull him down. For a time, Frank is doubled-over while resisting. Officers had to carry Frank to a patrol car after his body went limp.

Gilbertson said Frank’s questions as to what he was being arrested for, and who signed the warrant, were reasonable.

“There’s no exigent circumstance here,” Gilbertson said Thursday. “He’s not attempting to flee, he’s not assaulting anybody, he’s sitting on a tractor and he’s asking reasonable questions they are refusing to answer.”

The hold that Spillman used, known as a lateral vascular neck restraint, is typically a last resort, given the potential to restrict airflow, Gilbertson said.

video at link https://www.theadvocate.com/acadiana...1746e0adc.html

[Origanalist]

Philip Stinson, an associate professor of criminal justice at Bowling Green State University, disagreed that the officers were to blame for escalating the conflict. Officers are entitled to use as much force as necessary while making an arrest, Stinson said.

“When a police officer says that they have a warrant for you, you need to get off the tractor and come with us, that’s not negotiable. You can’t negotiate that, even if it turns out there wasn’t a warrant or it was an invalid warrant,” Stinson said

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[Schifference]

Black vicim, White cop = public outrage!

[jkr]

overdo library book from 20 years ago???

[phill4paul]

District Attorney Charles Riddle said in an interview the grand jury heard Tape’s report “line by line,” but he seemed to dispute Tape’s conclusion that the officers’ intervention was to blame for Frank’s death.

He said Frank would probably still be alive if "had he not resisted" and not suffered from other health problems.

Riddle said the grand jury that declined to indict anyone saw the entire body cam video at least once and "saw certain portions of it on several occasions."

So the DA presenting this case to the grand jury has a preconceived bias and followed it up by replaying particular portions of the tape that reinforced his bias. Shocking!