Jury Sent A Strong Message In Rights Violation Case, Will A Judge Reduce The Verdict?

You sim­ply have to see this sto­ry. The details are so far-fetched that it tram­ples every façade America has as a free soci­ety where black peo­ple can go about their busi­ness with­out fear of the government.
I have said this before and will con­tin­ue to state this fact. The great­est threat to any Black per­son in the United States is the police.
A black per­son walk­ing or dri­ving down any road or high­way faces the great­est dan­ger from America’s race sol­diers, the police.
The behav­ior of these cops if allowed to stand, would cre­ate a prece­dent that would make it a crime for any per­son to pull up to any place and sit in their car. There was absolute­ly no rea­son that the cop did not walk away except that he saw a black woman and her two daugh­ters, and he decid­ed that he would uni­lat­er­al­ly vio­late their rights and strip them of their dignity.
But the tragedy is not just with their out­ra­geous actions, which should have got­ten them fired and crim­i­nal­ly charged; it is that they were pro­mot­ed and kept on the job to com­mit more rights vio­la­tions cost­ing the tax­pay­ers count­less mil­lions and poten­tial­ly killing inno­cent peo­ple. This should send a chill down the spine of every black man who calls him­self a man and has a wife and chil­dren; I know I do. Do you watch your wife being vio­lat­ed for absolute­ly no reason?
To top it all, they inves­ti­gat­ed them­selves and found they had done noth­ing wrong.
Watch the video below.

Jury awards Black family $8.25 million in wrongful detention by deputies at California Starbucks

A fed­er­al jury award­ed a moth­er and her two daugh­ters $8.25 mil­lion after they were unlaw­ful­ly searched and hand­cuffed by Alameda County sher­if­f’s deputies at a Castro Valley Starbucks on their way to tak­ing one of the young women to a col­lege math test in Berkeley. The women were not phys­i­cal­ly harmed by law enforce­ment, but the dol­lar amount of the award sig­nals that the jurors felt the fam­i­ly’s con­sti­tu­tion­al rights had been stripped because of their skin color. 

“I think that every­body rec­og­nizes we all have implic­it bias,” their attor­ney, Craig Peters of San Francisco, said in an inter­view on Monday. “I have it. You have it. We’ve all got it. These offi­cers are no dif­fer­ent. And so, sub­con­scious­ly, there was some­thing going on that made them unrea­son­ably sus­pi­cious of this fam­i­ly. I think that if this same sce­nario hap­pened and these were white women, it would have played out very dif­fer­ent­ly.” The ver­dict was reached on March 1 fol­low­ing a two-day civ­il tri­al before U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup in San Francisco. A jury delib­er­at­ed for 16 hours before award­ing the moth­er and daugh­ters this unprece­dent­ed amount from the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office.

Specifically, the jury found Deputy Steven Holland liable for $2.7 mil­lion to their moth­er, Aasylei Loggervale, and $2 mil­lion apiece to her daugh­ters, Aaottae Loggervale, then 17, and Aasyeli Hardege-Loggervale, then 19. The jury also found then-Deputy Monica Pope liable for $750,000 to both daugh­ters and that Alameda County is liable for the actions of its deputies. It’s pos­si­ble the judge could low­er the award if the coun­ty con­vinces him to do so. But noth­ing has been filed in court to indi­cate that so far. Neither the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office nor Kevin Gilbert, the attor­ney rep­re­sent­ing the coun­ty, respond­ed for com­ment on Monday. Both Holland and Pope have since been pro­mot­ed. The civ­il tri­al, also lit­i­gat­ed by attor­neys Joseph May and Brian Gearinger, alleged false arrest, inva­sion of pri­va­cy, neg­li­gence, and vio­la­tions of the 1^st, 4^th, and 14^th Amendments. The Loggervales declined to be inter­viewed. Their sto­ry has nev­er been pub­licly told before, and some of their rel­a­tives don’t even know what hap­pened to them or that they won a mas­sive jury amount. But they tes­ti­fied dur­ing the tri­al, and jurors found sided with their account, stem­ming from an encounter on Sept. 20, 2019.

That’s when moth­er Aasylei Loggervale, who is a tax pre­par­er, and her two daugh­ters were sit­ting in their rent­ed Cadillac out­side of Starbucks in Castro Valley. The trio, all of whom are Black, were at the end of their dri­ve from Nevada. They were parked in a dis­abled spot, and were at the cof­fee shop ear­ly to take Aasylei Hardge-Loggervale to a sta­tis­tics test in Berkeley on time. She was attend­ing com­mu­ni­ty col­lege and was plan­ning on trans­fer­ring her cred­its to UCLA. Two deputies, Holland and Pope, were on patrol at the time and approached the rent­ed Cadillac. They told the Loggervale fam­i­ly that they were inves­ti­gat­ing car bur­glar­ies com­mit­ted by uniden­ti­fied Black men. But in fact, one police report shows that the sus­pects were iden­ti­fied as one Black man and one Latino man, Peters said. At first, the Loggervales thought they were being warned about the break-ins and they were grateful. 

But that feel­ing quick­ly soured when the deputies began ques­tion­ing the moth­er about whether she was legal­ly able to park in a dis­abled spot, despite her hav­ing a vis­i­ble plac­ard in her car win­dow. The deputies also demand­ed to see the elder Loggervale’s iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, which she declined to pro­vide. Under the 4^th Amendment, cit­i­zens have the right to be free from unrea­son­able search­es, which includes being asked for ID if an offi­cer can’t artic­u­late that a per­son has com­mit­ted a crime. “Ms. Loggervale did not want to engage fur­ther with defen­dants because as a Black per­son, she feared the encounter could result in seri­ous phys­i­cal harm or death to her and/​or her daugh­ters,” the orig­i­nal civ­il suit stat­ed. Still, the deputies arrest­ed the women, put them in the back of their patrol car and searched their trunk. 

The deputies then claimed that one of the daugh­ters com­mit­ted “bat­tery” when she opened the car door and struck Holland. But the video pre­sent­ed in court showed that when she tried to open the car door to exit, the deputy pushed it closed on her. Video tak­en by the daugh­ters, as well as body cam­era video from the sher­if­f’s office, showed how the stop esca­lat­ed into ten­sion and tears. “What am I being detained for?” the elder Loggervale asked. “I’m informed I can’t go to the restroom.” Holland respond­ed: “Sit in the car, or you’re going in hand­cuffs.” Mother and daugh­ters repeat­ed­ly asked what they were being detained for. They nev­er received an answer. “You have to tell me what you’re detain­ing me for,” the elder Loggervale is heard say­ing. “I do not,” said Deputy Keith Leeper, who had also showed up at the scene. The deputies placed the fam­i­ly in the back of the patrol car, where they were held for about 70 min­utes. They’re heard cry­ing. Loggervale kept ask­ing to use the restroom.
Eventually, the fam­i­ly was let go. None was charged with any crime. During the tri­al, the deputies tes­ti­fied about their ver­sion of events, and how they were out inves­ti­gat­ing car bur­glar­ies. They insist­ed that they were in the right. “The offi­cers would have been well-served to sort of take a good hard look at what had hap­pened and just acknowl­edge some of it,” Peters said. “But instead, they kind of dou­bled down on try­ing to shade facts to try and make this sit­u­a­tion seem not as bad as it was, try to raise some doubt, you know, attack­ing the women.”

An Internal Affairs inves­ti­ga­tion found that the deputies did noth­ing wrong, accord­ing to Peters. Both Holland and Pope are now sergeants. “I think what makes me upset is that the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office did­n’t take the ini­tia­tive to cor­rect what to me seems like such an easy thing to have cor­rect­ed ear­ly on,” Peters said. “And instead, they want­ed to sweep it under the rug.” Peters said no one in the sher­if­f’s office seemed to say, “we need to fix this, let’s talk to this fam­i­ly, apol­o­gize, say, ‘Hey, we were wrong, we’re work­ing on this,’ do some retrain­ing. That would have been the respon­si­ble thing to do.” An analy­sis of exces­sive force and wrong­ful death police pay­outs from 2015 to 2020 by KTVU revealed that Alamada County has paid out the most of any law enforce­ment agency in the Bay Area dur­ing that time peri­od. The top two awards, before the Loggervale’s, were for $5.5 mil­lion and $5 mil­lion, respec­tive­ly, stem­ming from injuries and the death of a 20-year-old Fremont man. As for Aasylei Hardge-Loggervale, she made it to her math test that day, 40 min­utes late. She is about to grad­u­ate UCLA this year. But her life, and her sis­ter’s and moth­er’s lives, will nev­er be the same. “They worked hard,” Peters said. “And then this hap­pens and it just shakes your foun­da­tion about the place you live in. I hope that they can recov­er that at some point, but I sus­pect they won’t. I sus­pect that to some extent for the rest of their life, every time they see police offi­cers, every time they’re in a Starbucks park­ing lot, they’re going to remem­ber this.”(foxla)