There's not much mystery about how Henry Glover ended up a charred corpse in a burned-out car in the heart of New Orleans. One police officer has admitted to shooting the young black man. Another has confessed to throwing flares into the car where Glover lay covered in blood on the back seat. He then put a couple of shots through the window as the vehicle was consumed by fire. The officer has since called that "a very bad decision".
Glover's body was not recovered for weeks and proved so difficult to identify that it was nine months before his family could bury him. But it has taken five years to bring anyone to trial, and only then after the federal authorities waded in with accusations of an institutional cover up that continues to this day.
Glover died during the chaotic days after Hurricane Katrina breached the city's levees, flooding New Orleans and unleashing a wave of looting and violence. Five policemen are on trial over his death, but beside them in the dock is the city's police department and local judicial system as a jury is asked to consider whether the devastation wrought by the hurricane in 2005 also blew away the rule of law.
One police officer, David Warren, is accused of shooting Glover without legal cause. Greg McRae is charged over the burning of the car and the beating of men who tried to help the victim. A third policemen is also accused of the beatings, while two others face accusations of falsifying evidence to cover up the crimes.
"They believed that, after the storm, no one was watching," Tracey Knight, a prosecution lawyer, told the court. "They were convinced that no one cared about Henry Glover and how he died".
The accused are among 20 New Orleans police officers charged in recent months over killings, assaults and the fabrication of evidence during Katrina. They are being prosecuted by the federal government under civil rights legislation after local authorities proved unable or unwilling to act.
Among them are six officers who face trial after the police opened fire on local people as they crossed a bridge trying to flee the floodwaters. Two were killed and four others wounded.
Federal prosecutors and civil rights lawyers say that Katrina laid bare a culture of corruption, racist violence and a code of silence in the New Orleans police department (NOPD). They describe a force in chaos: while some officers were dedicated to saving lives, others armed themselves with their own automatic weapons and behaved like vigilantes; senior officers spread false assertions that martial law was declared and encouraged the shooting of looters.
At least 10 people died at the hands of the police. Some civil rights lawyers suspect the real figure is much higher. All the victims were African Americans.
The defendants claim that those were exceptional times in which officers feared for their lives and were under orders to bring an end to the anarchy that consumed the city.
Warren was assigned to guard a shopping centre from looters with Linda Howard, a fellow officer who told the court that Warren had armed himself with his personal semi-automatic rifle.
The Guardian
