Lt. John Clary, the ranking trooper at the scene of Ronald Greene’s deadly 2019 arrest, will return to active duty this week, a state police spokesman said.
The Louisiana State Police have reinstated a veteran trooper who had been accused of withholding graphic body-camera video showing another officer dragging Black motorist
Clary’s video is the only clip of the arrest that shows the moment a handcuffed, bloody Greene moans under the weight of two troopers, twitches and then goes still. The footage was withheld from prosecutors, detectives and even medical examiners for months amid a cloak of secrecy that surrounded Greene’s death.
Clary, who had been suspended without pay, is the first of the officers to return to the job. He faced no internal discipline after Col. Lamar Davis said the agency “could not say for sure whether” the lieutenant “purposefully withheld” the footage in question.
Davis said Monday there were no grounds for Clary’s termination after he was cleared in the state case.
“We can’t just terminate someone like other organizations. We have to operate by the law and our state police rules,” Davis told AP. “As a superintendent, I have to put my personal feelings aside. Our job is to operate under the color of the law.”
Former Detective Albert Paxton wrote in an internal report that, on the morning of Greene’s death, “Clary told me he did not have body camera video of the incident.” Clary also greatly exaggerated Greene’s resistance, saying he was “still trying to get away and was not cooperating.” Those statements were contradicted by Clary’s body camera footage and were apparently intended to justify force against Greene while he was prone. He had already been hit in the head with a flashlight, punched and repeatedly stunned.
“The video evidence in this case does not show Greene screaming, resisting or trying to get away,” Paxton wrote. “Lt. Clary’s video clearly shows Greene to be suffering.”
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