U.S. Attorney’s Office Refuses to Talk About Ramarley Graham Investigation or About the Process of Investigating Deaths in Police Custody in General

This morning I called the U.S. Attorney for the
Southern District of New York, the office responsible for
investigating the death of Ramarley Graham, a teenager shot by an
NYPD officer who was chasing him over the alleged purchase of a
small amount of marijuana. Graham was killed in February 2012. A
grand jury indicted the officer, Richard Haste, but a judge threw
the indictment out because he said the prosecutor failed to tell
jurors about the cop’s claim that other cops told him Graham was
armed. A second grand jury
declined to indict.

Last August, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New
York announced they would be
reviewing the case. More than a year later, this September,
they confirmed an investigation was under way. Meanwhile, Attorney
General Eric Holder announced yesterday that the U.S. Attorney for
the Eastern District of New York would be looking into the death of
Eric Garner.  The general increase in the attention paid to
stories of police violence since Graham’s death in 2012 and the
earlier conclusion to the local prosecutorial process related to
Garner’s death means there’s not a year and a half pause between
the incident and the Department of Justice (DOJ) looking into
it.

These investigations take time and the DOJ is tight lipped about
them. A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney for the Southern
District refused to provide any comment about the Ramarley Graham
investigation or about investigations of deaths in police custody
in general. Each case may be different, and the kind of blanket
refusal to comment is almost certainly the standard here, but as
more and more people clue in to how systemic the problem of police
violence is, the DOJ ought to consider being more transparent about
these investigations. The department’s done a relatively good job
initiating pattern and practice and other civil rights
investigations into the actions of police departments around the
country, and Americans deserve to know more about how federal
oversight of local police actions looks and works.

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