Photo via Thomas Frampton/YouTube
June 14, 2021, 11:14 am
An East Baton Rouge attorney’s office has petitioned for University of Virginia Associate Professor of Law Thomas Frampton to be arrested for contempt of court after he posted video of Louisiana police strip-searching a minor in the middle of a public street online.
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Prosecutors are claiming that Frampton violated a law against sharing information relevant to an juvenile delinquency case, but the child that the police were caught on tape abusing was never charged of a crime.
“The notion that they are in any shape or form concerned about the privacy interest of a 16-year-old is not only laughable, it’s also insulting,” said the professor to VICE. “It’s unquestionably an effort to try and deter victims of police misconduct from speaking up and that’s reprehensible. It reflects their efforts to continue supporting impunity for officers who engage in wrongdoing.”
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If the contempt charge holds, Frampton could face up to six months in prison.
The footage shared by the professor was posted to YouTube in late May, six months after the Louisiana government made the same footage available to the public. The video shows multiple police officers engaging in an illegal strip search in the middle of a street after one spotted a car in front of what they called a “known drug house” and ordered everyone out, including 23-year-old Clarence Green and his 16-year-old brother, who are both Black.
Both were strip-searched, with the older Green accused of having a firearm in his underwear, though how that happened considering what you can see in the footage is a mystery, and the minor was accused of possessing cannabis that the officers claimed to “smell” in the car. The claim of smelling marijuana by cops as a pretext for otherwise illegal searches is so common in the U.S. it’s become something of a running joke.
What isn’t a joke is that Clarence spent five months in jail waiting for trial because the supposed weapon found on him violated his probation. After that, the case was suddenly dropped — possibly due to the public footage of the illegal strip search and the warrantless search of the Green home that followed.
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The video also shows officers threatening physical violence on Clarence for trying to tell his mother and younger brother to call a lawyer as they attempted to get them to consent to a DNA swab from the teen.
“If you don’t shut the f— up, I’m going to come in and f— you up,” one officer says on camera.
The Green family, with the help of Frampton, sued the city for this treatment and won a $35,000 settlement in exchange for dropping the case against the officers who sexually assaulted Clarence and his brother.
The footage posted by Frampton on YouTube went viral, and public outrage resulted in a press conference by the Baton Rouge Police Department in which they defended the outdoor strip searches of the young man and underage child and announced that the officers responsible would not face any consequences. On the same day, the professor was notified of the contempt charge, which was condemned by the ACLU as an attack on his right to free speech.
“By seeking to jail a law professor who lawfully shared video of police misconduct, your actions directly implicate the First Amendment,” said legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana Nora Ahmed in a letter to the parish attorney. “Your office moved for contempt less than 24 hours after CBS Evening News broadcast a story about the BRPD officers’ actions.”
*First Published: June 14, 2021, 11:14 am
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