NY Law Enforcement Caught Doctoring Video of RNC Arrests

Thursday, April 14th, 2005
NY Law Enforcement Caught Doctoring Video of RNC Arrests

During last year's Republican National Convention, the city of New York witnessed some of the largest mass arrests in the city's history. 1800 people were arrested.

But now the cases against the vast majority of the arrested have fallen apart. Of the nearly 1700 cases that have run their full course, 91 percent ended with charges dismissed or with a verdict of not guilty.

The New York Times reported earlier this week that in some 400 cases charges were dropped because video recordings emerged showing that the arrested had not committed a crime or that the charges against them could not be proved.

In at least one case video evidence was doctored. During court proceedings, the police presented a video of the arrest of a man named Alexander Dunlop. It turned out that the video presented by the police was edited in two spots - images that showed Dunlop acting peacefully were removed.

We interviewed Alexander Dunlop and his lawyer Michael Conroy in our New York Studio as well as Eileen Clancy, a member of I-Witness Video. She helped find the footage that eventually vindicated Alexander

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AMY GOODMAN: Is other police footage that you’ve gotten in other cases, is it edited?

EILEEN CLANCY: We don't know. It really hadn't occurred to us that they were making these kinds of edits. It was really shocking. I mean, when we had to put these two tapes on monitors next to each other and run them at the same time, and we sat there and you saw the -- when we saw the cut, I think -- I mean, I was astonished that this happened. This is -- I mean, it’s just absolutely outrageous. They took out the parts that basically prove he's innocent. So, I mean, it was -- it's quite extraordinary this happened. So, what we're going to have to do now is we're going to have to take police tapes that we had things that we knew that were duplicates, copies -- you know, what we assumed were copies -- and we’re going to have to set them all up and laboriously put them up against each other and review them and see if there were other edits in other tapes that were provided to lawyers. I mean, these are tapes that came from the state, from the government, that are handed over to defense attorneys and they are supposed to be for a particular case. So, does that mean that the tapes then are going to be tailored in such a way for each defendant? That they're looking for each defendant and they're just going to give you certain bits that they deem useful to their side? And that's really not how it's supposed to work.

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SOURCE - http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/14/1349256

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TARIQ ALI!!!

"In Camiri, where -- not far from where Che was captured. We were there in 1967 to observe the trial of Regis Debray, who had been arrested, and I got picked up because I had long moustaches and long hair. They accused me of being a Cuban guerrilla. So I said, “If you torture me the whole night and I can speak Spanish in the morning, I’ll be grateful to you for the rest of my life.

And then there's a lot about Vietnam, which is the event which really shaped me and moved me. I went to North Vietnam, you know, suffered heavy U.S. bombing, saw what was going on in the country, and then when we came back, Bertrand Russell, the philosopher, and Jean-Paul Sartre, his French colleague, decided to launch an unofficial war crimes tribunal, where we brought evidence from Vietnam at a time when no one was admitting in officialdom that atrocities were taking place. This was prior to the My Lai Massacre and Sey Hersh's reports. So when we came out with this, it was impossible to find space for the tribunal. And the Swedish prime minister said come and have it in Sweden. So that's where we did it."

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SOURCE - http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/14/1349244