On the morning of May 13, 2006, Swuave Lopez was shot and killed by the police. Any death at the hands of law enforcement, by nature, is a contentious affair, but this case even more so; for not only was Lopez 17 years old and unarmed, but he was handcuffed and running away when he was shot twice in the back by two Metro officers. The public, of course, wanted answers. But the police department had none. And further, they have yet to mollify the public's anxiety with a thorough answer, stating instead that the entire matter will be resolved in a corner's inquest.
I found this to be an alarming statement. At the time I had, by chance, just been looking into the coroner's inquest—that process by which the reproachability of police officers in Clark County is judged whenever they kill someone—and had come to understand why 149 out of 150 law-enforcement officers in the past three decades have been absolved of their mortal actions without resistance.
It started on a whim. I went to a coroner's inquest on May 10 and 11—not with the suspicions of a journalist but with a citizen's curiosity. For I, like many people here in our town, had been under the belief that the coroner's inquest was definitive, it's verdict an accepted conclusion to death-by-police cases I had earlier watched unfold in the news.
The inquest I observed dealt with one of the most dynamic standoffs in our Valley's short history, and it involved one hopeless man who by himself tried to take on an army of police officers on February 9. His name was Christopher Scott Hawkins. Out of the 600 shots the police fired toward him that day, 20 struck his body.
I watched both days of the inquest—some 10 hours of what by all means appeared to be the norm and not an anomaly—and during that time I was struck by blatant flaws in the process, magnified by the fact that I chose this particular case entirely at random, and, moreover, by the fact that Hawkins' case was an easy one to justify. Meaning that I could have gone to any one of the previous 149 coroner's inquests and seen the same problems in the process.
No hard questions are asked, contradictions and discrepancies are left unresolved and the process of the inquest, like its composition, is one insurmountable advocacy for the police.
The coroner's inquest typically occurs 30 to 60 days after the fatal incident, but there is no law governing that, and so Christopher Hawkins' case didn't take place until three months after his death. A small congregation of media members, law apprentices and indiscernible note-takers sat in a gallery on the 16th floor of the Regional Justice Center Downtown to watch the open hearing. In front of them were the traditional two tables of a trial courtroom: At the left stood two lawyers from the district attorney's office, including Assistant DA Christopher Lalli; and at the right stood the coroner himself, Michael Murphy, with his brilliant bald head, his sharp navy blue suit and gold tie and white breast handkerchief, and his ineluctable air of authority, facilitating the entire process. It was he who escorted the jury of seven (plus two honorary members), selected randomly from the normal Clark County jury pool, to their seats adjacent to the witness stand, and it was he who would attend to them for the remainder of the inquest. On the judge's bench sat the hearing master, Frank Cremen, who has sat on that bench presiding over these hearings for more than 20 years now, and who is campaigning to become the next district attorney.
Cremen initiated the proceedings by offering a quick lesson on the objectives of a coroner's inquest, and the means by which they are attained. This is not an adversarial hearing, he said. The police officers are not on trial here. This is an investigatory hearing. Furthermore, he said that evidence, facts and witness testimonies in relation to the case would be presented by the DA, and the jurors would be expected to consider and deliberate it all, and then, at the hearing's end, to answer these questions: Who died? When and where was the death, and by what means? Who caused the death? And—the most important one—was the death justifiable, excusable or criminal? (That is: either homicide with intent, but justified; homicide without intent, but excused; or neither.)
Here in Clark County, Cremen continued, we allow the jurors to participate in the investigation, so they can ask questions during the process. Also permitted to ask questions at the end of witness testimony, along with the hearing master, are interested parties, who by the language of the law are people related to either the deceased or the police officers. Yet, interested parties can only submit questions in writing, through the hearing master, whose power it is to censor any question he does not deem pertinent. By the end of this particular inquest, however, there would not be a single question from interested parties, and the jurors, by and large, would decline their privilege.
Speaking later with Cremen, Lalli and Murphy, I would discover that the actual investigation is private and takes place before the coroner's inquest begins. The DA merely takes facts given to him by the police's homicide department (or other internal investigators), the involved officers and the coroner's medical examiner, and then meets with the one who has the power to subpoena witnesses and edit evidence—the hearing master—and the one who coordinates the actual inquest—the coroner. (It must here be stated that even though the inquest bears his name, the coroner and his office play only a minor part in the process—in essence, that of a facilitator. Murphy is quick to point this out not just in explicit terms, but also in the way he often defers matters to those who are in all truth responsible for the process: the Legislature, which enacted it; the district attorneys, who present it; and the hearing masters, who conduct it.) The coroner's inquest hearing, thus, is in reality just a public display during which the DA showcases material that only he, the hearing master and the police department have reviewed.
After Cremen's preamble, the district attorney took the stage, weaving about the courtroom as he spoke with conviction and confidence, leaving in his trail a narrative thread of the events that led to Hawkins' death.
On February 9, at about 11:30 a.m, four Metro officers responded to a call from the Woodridge Villas apartment complex at Eastern and Owens avenues. The office manager had reported a strong marijuana odor spilling from Apartment 265. Twenty minutes later, Hawkins was spreading bullets from his semiautomatic Glock with a maniac's resolve, and while one of the officers hid, the other three were pinned down. Backup arrived, freed the pinned officers with a mass repressive fire toward Hawkins, but then were held at bay by his sniper's advantage: Hawkins had made a fort out of his upstairs apartment, while the officers were forced to take cover on the ground.
Then S.W.A.T. came. They assumed command over the situation, plotted out a strategic plan and tried to end the warfare by diplomacy. Hawkins was having none of it. After five hours of abortive negotiations, S.W.A.T. officers smoked out Hawkins' apartment with tear gas, and when he stormed into sight through his bedroom window, shooting, S.W.A.T. officers put multiple bullets into his body.
The first problem with the inquest came during the DA's synopsis. He said that the police received word that there was not only a strong smell of marijuana coming from Apartment 265, but that there was potentially an endangered child, as well. And that there was confusion as to where the child was. Yet, not during any one of the officers' subsequent testimonies was an endangered child acknowledged. They spoke only of marijuana—or, in their terms, "narcotics"—as their reason for being there. The woman who had in fact reported the odor, and a consequent worry for her small niece, testified that she called the apartment complex's assistant manager, specifically, because the two spoke the same language and understood one another well. At no point in her testimony, or anyone else's, was a miscommunication over the child's whereabouts referenced, let alone pinpointed. Nevertheless, no one during the entire inquest would call out these inconsistencies.
I am a man of average intelligence, untrained in legal matters, and yet I caught discrepancies like these throughout the hearing. Not because I was cynical from the start or prying for even the most discreet flaws, but because they were blatant and so obvious that there is no doubt any lawyer worthy of his title, like Frank Cremen or Christopher Lalli, would have attacked them had they been inclined to.
At the very least they would have attacked the discrepancy between the testimonies of the four responding officers and that of Vernett Harris, a short, black man with jaundiced eyes and a conciliatory nature who had been smoking a blunt with Hawkins, his childhood friend, when the police knocked on Hawkins' door that fatal February morning. Harris testified that he, against Hawkins' wishes, answered the knocks, and when the officers said they had received a call from that apartment claiming domestic disturbance, Harris told them that that was false, had to be, because there wasn't even a land line in the apartment. No one would follow up on this. Not the DA, not the hearing master and certainly not the jurors. Harris went on to testify that the police asked if they could enter the apartment, and after Harris said no, this is a private residence, you have no right to come in, they asked him to come outside. He obliged. The officers said we know you've been smoking weed in there, we can smell it. Harris said, yes, it's true, but we were smoking in our own apartment, not in public, not bothering nobody. Harris said an officer then told him to stop being a smartass, and handcuffed him under the pretext that it was for everyone's safety, including Harris' own. (Which turned out to be a perilous irony, for when the shooting started soon thereafter, the officer yelled at Harris to run, which Harris quickly learned was difficult to do in handcuffs. It's also an eerie foreshadowing of the Lopez incident.) They asked Harris who else was in the apartment, and he told them my girlfriend, Yvonne, and "Malik" (the name those close to Christopher Hawkins called him). The officers made no mention of a child, in Harris' testimony, and they made no mention of domestic disturbance in their own.
"After that day was over I talked to a lady from S.W.A.T., and she told me everything that happened, and a guy from the DA interviewed me before this [hearing]," I was later told by Harris. "I mean, Malik was my right-hand man, you know, but I understand why they shot him. What I don't get, though, is what domestic disturbance call were they talkin' 'bout. And why they had to handcuff me, make me look like a damn fool. No one's ever answered those two questions for me."
Later, a crime-scene analyst, after taking an oath like the other 23 witnesses who would testify before the hearing's end, approached the stand with a bag of evidence in hand. Every question with which he was presented had an overt slant, in favor of the police. (He was asked about the 25 bullet shells from Hawkins' gun, but not the 600 shots fired by police.) Of course, it could have been that the facts in this particular case were so imbalanced against Hawkins that all of the questions just appeared slanted—for this was a very justifiable shooting—but that was not the point. My concern was with the DA, who for the entire two days of the inquest exercised the temperament of a defense attorney, never once acted as a prosecutor and didn't demonstrate an investigator's neutral toughness. It was so subjective, in fact, that the bagged evidence the crime-scene analyst brought was never even opened. The DA merely submitted it into evidence under the label dictated by the witness, and neither the hearing master nor the jurors raised an eyebrow.
"The coroner's inquest is very flawed," says Allen Lichtenstein, general counsel for the ACLU of Nevada. "The district attorney is supposed to be conducting an investigative inquiry, but the DA is not neutral. Just the opposite: They are advocates for the police because they usually work together with them."
And further: "They present selected facts. They don't ask the hard, necessary questions. And there is no advocate for the deceased. Whitewashing is what it is."
Lalli used his succession of witnesses to recount the harrowing events of that day, and though he indeed moved through the tragedy at a novelist's pace, it would have taken twice as long had an advocate for the deceased been present during the testimony of Metro Officer Robert Schmidt. For he, the first officer to arrive at Hawkins' apartment that February 9, had so many vulnerable statements that a prudent lawyer would have attacked.
Schmidt expounded with authority about how familiar he, a veteran of the department, had become with marijuana during his time with Metro, and thus he knew that felonious activities were going on in the apartment. But smoking marijuana in Nevada is only a misdemeanor, not a felony. And though Schmidt gave mention of a neighbor who was afraid for her niece's health, he apparently did not consider the girl, secured in a separate apartment, to be in any imminent danger or he would have secured her safety first. Instead, he went straight for Hawkins' apartment.
The jurors remained silent. (And if they were not going to ask questions on those particulars, they definitely would not ask the larger, underlying questions. Like why did Christopher Hawkins—a black man who during his negotiations with police said, "I know how this will turn out," after alluding to the infamous gun battle between Amir Crump and Metro a week earlier, in which Crump took the life of an officer before he himself was shot dead—consider law enforcement to be his natural enemy? What instigated his rage, that he was so singular and unwavering in his determination to take out at least one cop? The police insinuated it was the marijuana; the DA said he was suicidal, deranged; and Sheriff Bill Young has said this kind of mentality is embedded by gangster rap.)
Moreover, Schmidt, on several instances, referred to Metro's reason for being there as "a narcotics call," and thus one which presented a high-alert situation. But he and several others would also testify that his partner, Janeen Walsh, yelled out to Hawkins at one point, before Metro entered the apartment with guns drawn, before the shooting commenced: "It's just a little bit of weed: no big deal, you can come out." Why then, if it was just weed and no big deal, did they enter a man's apartment with guns drawn, while Vernett Harris sat in handcuffs?
Of Harris and his girlfriend, Schmidt said: "They gave me no problems, no challenges. [People in that neighborhood] are usually not like that. This gave me reason to believe something was going on."
And so what if they had been combative—giving officer Schmidt problems and challenges? What then? Would he have had his worries quelled, and therefore rounded up his colleagues, packed up his squad car and left Harris and Christopher Hawkins alone?
In this case Harris put it best when he told me: "Man, no matter what, you can't win against them."
Lalli says that the DA, if he recognizes holes in Metro's investigations, can point them out and further investigate. Moreover, coroner Murphy says that the DA, who is a prosecutor by trade, has the power to scrutinize witness fallacies and contradictions in front of the jurors if he catches them. And if he does not, then the hearing officer—randomly selected by the corner from a pool of six, each chosen by the Clark County Commission and each a defense attorney by profession—can ask witnesses questions that balance out the system.
All of which might be true in theory; but in the coroner's inquest I observed, where no one questioned or cross-examined or objected to Schmidt's statements, the practice of balance was a desert mirage.
The next day:
The gallery filled with the same people, except now the witnesses from yesterday watched the inquest play out sitting in street clothes with the audience. Although the inquest is a public hearing, it is fortunate for the county that not many showed, for in that small and sterile courtroom there are about 75 seats, tops, and most are assumed by the media. Cremen says that Clark County is one of the few jurisdictions that provides the public with an open hearing in these investigative matters, and that those involved go out of their way to do this public service. (By comparison, the Los Angeles Police Department—an institution of 9,300 police officers who serve some 3.8 million people—do not hold coroner's inquests. They, like Clark County, investigate a homicide by police through internal and private means, and then, unlike Clark County, make public their findings in press releases, opting against ostentatious displays financed by taxpayer dollars, an LAPD public information official told me).
At any rate, law enforcement, as part and parcel of the government, is obliged to make public the evidence surrounding the case through some medium or another, lest suspicions from the community they profess to serve run rampant, and trust, desiccate. In other words, so that they would be accountable. And that's exactly what we're talking about here: accountability.
The police cannot expect to be held accountable by themselves and their peers. Last year, Metro Deputy Chief Mike Ault, in a war of words fought over the battlegrounds of the Review-Journal's op-ed page, berated fellow officer Dan Evans for writing that the current system was inherently flawed, and that an objective party was needed to investigate coroner's inquest issues. (Everyone knew what Evans meant: The police should not be policing themselves.) Ault attacked, stating that the Internal Affairs Bureau had a fine record, and including a third party would only increase problems, not solve them. Lichtenstein says this idea—that the police should be answerable only to themselves—is utterly dangerous, and not harmonious with a cornerstone of our country's foundation: checks and balances. Moreover, Lichtenstein says it's misleading to say that the process of the coroner's inquest keeps cops honest, for all it takes is one observation of an inquest to see that those seven jurors, representing the citizenry, do a little less than nothing to hold the police accountable. Not only are they unprepared to substitute as investigators (or advocates for the deceased), but they are not even given all the facts with which to investigate.
Which is what happened on the second day of witness statements. A train of S.W.A.T. officers took the stand and carried on the detailed story of the day Christopher Hawkins was killed. Through it all, however, only two officers—both snipers—explicitly admitted to striking Hawkins, even though the medical examiner had testified the day before that Hawkins had been shot 20 times, and many of those bullets could have been the clincher. The other 18 bullets went unaccounted for. And so, had the jury deemed the police's actions criminal at the end of the inquest, would no single officer, or officers, be implicated?
The taciturn jury asked no questions, and if the hearing master did, it was only to clarify a given statement.
After hearing master Cremen reminded the jurors of their responsibility—the rote questions and their verdict—they headed off to deliberate.
Meanwhile, the ambiance in the courtroom's lobby was nothing like the heavy atmosphere that weighs on participants of trials that citizens face when they kill someone. I've been to many, and so I've seen, without fail, the icy sweat, the supernatural silences, the impermeable shells in which the subjects of the trial encapsulate themselves. In the lobby of the corner's inquest hearing, in contrast, I saw a crowd loose and jocular, socializing and patting one another on the back for giving good testimony. And that's because they, like everyone else, already knew what was coming: It was a verdict foretold.
Cremen is adamant about maintaining this nonadversarial environment. "What critics don't understand," says Cremen, "is that we rely heavily on police cooperation for these proceedings, and their cooperation would dissolve if the hearings were to become confrontational. Police in inquests have no Fifth Amendment privileges, no immunity. They do this freely and voluntarily."
Lichtenstein is just as adamant: "There is no good reason it shouldn't be adversarial. There was a death! Are [the police] scared to have their feathers ruffled? Would it ruin the good ol' boy system?!"
The quandary, of course, is that citizens do not wish to see the fear of prosecution supplant an officer's good instincts and training when he is in the field of duty. Nor do we want cops to feel invincible.
Less than 15 minutes later the jury returned with a verdict: Hawkins' death was justifiable.
So far this year seven people have died at the hands of Metro officers. Five have already had coroner's inquest hearings, and in all five the involved officers were exonerated.
In the past five years there have been 58 coroner's inquests. Officers have not been found to be reproachable in any of them.
Since Clark County began documenting coroner's inquests in 1976, only one officer has been judged criminal. He was later absolved in private by a grand jury.
The next morning the Review-Journal filed a cliché report on the inquest. But what is worse is that they, as ever, published the piece as if it were the final punctuation on the tragic story of February 9.
Coroner Murphy would later tell me, to my surprise, that the inquest is not, in fact, the final mark. For even though it cannot be appealed, the inquest does not preclude further legal action. Such as a lawsuit. Which is exactly what happened in 2003, after a coroner's inquest jury found the death of Orlando Barlow, a man who was on his knees surrendering at the time he was shot by an officer more than 40 feet away, to be excusable. Barlow's mother sued the police department, and they, with taxpayer money, settled out of court for $300,000, with the condition that they did not have to admit to wrongdoing.
Lichtenstein says that this is just one of the ramifications of the flawed system. The others are even more costly: the tarnished reputations of individual officers, no matter what the jury deems them; and a process, along with a body of government, in which the public loses all trust.
Now, don't get me wrong: the jurors got the Hawkins inquest right. It was a tragic case, and without equivocation the police did the correct thing in shooting him, for Hawkins had gone mad, proving to be relentless and uncompromising, and with his crazed shooting he endangered many lives, not just of police officers but also of nearby citizens. But that is not the point. The crux of the matter is, Clark County upholds an incomplete and absurd system, and even if it rendered the correct verdict in all of its other 149 cases, it can and will present major dangers to future cases—cases in which the irreproachability of police officers is not so obvious.
Such as the controversial death of Swuave Lopez, the teenager who was shot in the back twice by police while handcuffed and running away this past May 13.
It's time to reform the system. Make it a more genuine inquiry, conducted by an impartial party, and with representation for the deceased. Because, as Coroner Murphy says, any death is a serious thing, deserving of sensitivity and even a bit of sympathy.