Louisiana Weekly

Page 3 THE LOUISIANA WEEKLY - YOUR MULTICULTURAL MEDIUM December 25 - December 31, 2023 St. Tammany deputy challenges appeals court decision allowing civil rights suit to move forward St. Tammany Parish Sheriff’s Deputy Ryan Moring blocks Teliah Perkins' son D.J. as Deputy Kyle Hart pins Perkins to the ground and puts his hand on her throat. Photo Credit courtesy of Verite News via video in court records By Richard A. Webster Contributing Writer (Veritenews.org) — A St. Tammany Parish sheriff’s deputy has challenged a federal appeals court ruling that found he likely violated the First Amendment rights of a 14-year-old boy when he tried to stop the boy from film- ing his mother’s arrest at their Slidell home, at one point threaten- ing him with a stun gun. Following a recent federal appeals court decision, the alleged First Amendment violation is the one remaining claim in a 2021 fed- eral civil rights suit filed by the boy’s mother, Teliah Perkins, against Ryan Moring and Kyle Hart, the two deputies that arrested her in May 2020. She also claimed the deputies, who forced her to the ground and pinned her head to the pavement during the arrest, used unconstitutionally excessive force. Earlier this month, a three-judge panel with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit tossed out the excessive force claim, overturning a July 2022 order from U.S. District Judge Wendy Vitter. The panel, however, found that the First Amendment claim against Moring — over the son’s video — should move forward. Last week, Moring’s attorney, Chadwick Collings, filed a peti- tion asking the panel to reconsid- er their ruling on the First Amendment issue. Collings said Moring didn’t violate the boy’s First Amendment rights because the deputy never instructed him to stop filming. He simply requested that D.J. back away and film from the porch of his house. “When he repeatedly refused to do so, he was met with a show of non-lethal force to induce compli- ance,” Collings wrote. “Never once was D.J.’s right to record hin- dered – his video angle was mere- ly blocked momentarily in a rea- sonable effort to secure the scene of an active arrest.” Perkins’ confrontation with the two deputies began over a minor traffic offense. An anonymous tipster had reported that she had been riding a motorcycle without a helmet in the Ozone Woods neighborhood of Slidell. When Moring and Hart confront- ed Perkins in her driveway, the sit- uation quickly spiraled out of con- trol. Perkins, who is Black, said she was innocent and accused the deputies, both of whom are white, of racial discrimination. The deputies said she was belligerent and repeatedly ignored their orders, forcing them to take her to the ground and pin her head to the pavement as they arrested her. Perkins’ 14-year-old son started taping the encounter on his phone. Moring shoved the teenager sever- al times, telling him to “Get back.” The deputy then stood in front of the boy’s phone so he couldn’t record what was happening to his mother and said he would Tase him if he didn’t stop recording. “You can’t Tase a child,” the son, who is referred to only as D.J. in court documents to protect his identity, says on the video. “Watch me,” the deputy responds. Perkins was later found guilty on a single charge: resisting arrest. She filed suit in May 2021, a year after the arrest. In July 2022, Vitter rejected an attempt from the deputies to throw out the case, finding that both the excessive force claim and First Amendment claim should be put before a jury. Moring and Hart appealed. And on Nov. 30, the 5th Circuit judges determined that the deputies’ actions were “reasonable” and did not amount to excessive force. The panel did find, however, that Moring likely violated the boy’s First Amendment rights, citing the deputy’s deposition in which he admitted that he “stood in front of D.J. and blocked him from record- ing Perkins’s arrest.” The appeals court ruled that while the son was close to the arrest scene, he “was not a hazard, was not too close, and did not impede the Deputies’ ability to perform their duties.” 5th Circuit Judge James Ho was the sole dissenter on the First Amendment issue, faulting the teenager for refusing to move away from the scene and for shout- ing at the deputies. Collings, in asking the panel to reconsider its ruling, described the arrest as “violent” given Perkins’ resistance, and said Moring was simply trying to establish a “safe and effective perimeter” when he blocked the boy’s phone and ordered him to step back. He also said it is “immaterial” that the incident happened on the family’s private property. “Just feet away, on this same pri- vate property, his mother was resisting arrest by flailing in the driveway and creating an increas- ingly uncertain situation for the Officers,” Collings said in his peti- tion. “Both D.J. and his mother were hostile and uncooperative.” Nora Ahmed, legal director for the ACLU of Louisiana, which represents Perkins, said she hopes the panel will reaffirm its original decision on the First Amendment issue, which she called “essential and groundbreaking as it upholds the rights of individuals, bystanders, children, everyone to film the police.”◊ He’s on Louisiana’s death row, his attorneys say, for a crime that didn’t happen By Greg LaRose Contributing Writer (lailluminator.com) — “Definitely, the system in Louisiana is broken.” That’s the frank assessment of Matilda Carbia with the Mwalimu Center for Justice, one of the organizations representing Jimmie “Chris” Duncan. He’s among more than 50 people incar- cerated on death row for whom Gov. John Bel Edwards has used his clemency power to push for state parole board reviews in order to switch their execution sentences to life in prison. Critics of the death penalty point out 11 people facing the electric chair or lethal injection have been exonerated or had their convic- tions reversed in Louisiana since it reinstated capital punishment in 1976. Over that same period, 28 people have been executed. Attorney General Jeff Landry, who will become governor in January, opposes Edwards’ clemency efforts and filed a law- suit to stop them ahead of his election. Since then, pardon board members have denied con- sideration to the handful of death row inmates who’ve appeared before them, and Landry is expected to block the rest once he becomes governor. Edwards – the grandson, son and brother of former sheriffs – has said the fallibility of police investigators and prosecutors is reason enough to curtail the death penalty in Louisiana, a punish- ment that conflicts with his per- sonal pro-life beliefs. “The death penalty is so final,” Edwards told lawmakers in March. “When you make a mistake, you can’t get it back.” Duncan’s attorneys believe the case against their client is the vic- tim of such a mistake. They with- drew his clemency petition Dec. 5, resigning themselves to its futility. Duncan was convicted in the December 1993 death of 23- month-old Haley Oliveaux of West Monroe. The young girl was the daughter of his girlfriend at the time. He told investigators he left the girl alone in the bathtub for a few minutes while he washed dish- es and returned to find her face down and unconscious. Duncan said he tried reviving the girl with CPR, but she would later be pro- nounced dead at a hospital. Police originally charged Duncan with negligent homicide for leaving the child unattended. Her body was sent to Jackson, Mississippi, for a pathologist’s examination, which led to Duncan’s charges being upgraded to first-degree murder. Pathologist Dr. Steven Hayne and dentist Dr. Michael West con- ducted the investigation. Hayne determined she was the victim of sexual assault, and West reported tooth marks on the girl’s body. Prosecutors inferred Duncan had forcibly drowned Haley to cover up his crime. A Ouachita Parish jury convicted him in 1998 and sentenced him to death. The Louisiana Legislature approved a law in 2021 that allows the incarcerated to petition the court if new evidence clears them of a crime. Duncan’s attorneys, with the backing of the Innocence Project and the Mwalimu Center, presented that evidence a year ago and have their first court date in front of a judge on Jan. 8 — the same day Landry will be sworn in as governor. “It is very hard to look at the evi- dence we have put forward and come to any conclusion other than the prosecution’s horrific story about rape and murder was based on falsified, fraudulent and unvali- dated ‘scientific evidence,’” Tania Brief, a senior staff attorney with the Innocence Project, told the Illuminator in an interview earlier this month. At the heart of evidence that attorneys say vindicates Duncan is a video that shows West using a mold of Duncan’s teeth multi- ple times to make bite marks in the girl’s body. Prosecutors pre- vented the jury from seeing the video, with the judge ruling that it didn’t support the defense’s claims of Duncan’s innocence. West wasn’t called as a witness because he was serving a one- year suspension from the American Board of Forensic Odontology for repeatedly stretching the conclusion of his findings in cases that involved bite marks. One such case was featured in the 2020 Netflix documentary Continued on Page 8 A Netflix documentary calls into question the methods of forensic examiners in the case