Case Study of Abner Louima



Case study of Abner Louima

Introduction

Abner Louima was a Haitian immigrant who was living in United States. On May 1999, Abner took the stand as a witness in federal court for the case of brutality in New York to describe how he had been tortured in a Brooklyn police station. On August 1997, He was arrested by few police officers from the New York Police Department, after a wrestle outside a nightclub. At the police station, Abner was taken handcuffed to the toilet, where the policemen pubched him and threw him to the ground. Abner was held by the officers while an officer, Justin Volpe introduced the broken stick of a broom from the rectum. While he was lying on the ground screaming in pain, the agent Volpe introduced him stick in his mouth (Perni, 2005).

Due to this brutal act of police department of New York, Abner had to suffer from many internal injuries including ruptured bladder and bowel perforation. He spent two months in hospital. In this paper, we will discuss the right and wrong practices of the prosecution and the police. Moreover we will also discuss the impact of the case on the immigrant public and minorities (Chan, 2007).

Discussion

This is one of many cases of police brutality in the United States documented by Amnesty International in recent years. Abner Louima's case is typical in many respects. The victim was a black man, who was arrested for a non-serious incident and whose treatment appears to have been racially motivated. However, one aspect that distinguishes this case from most is that agents, who were responsible, eventually brought to justice. Allegations of police brutality at the hands of the Police Department of New York rarely end in convictions, and at first it seemed that Abner Louima's complaint against the officers who tortured him would suffer the same fate. The officers denied the charges, stating that Abner Louima suffered those injuries by having sex with another man. They wove an intricate web of lies to cover up his involvement in the incident. As in many cases of torture or ill-treatment, the only direct witnesses were other police officers. In the world, the fact that the police refuse to testify against their colleagues has raised an insurmountable barrier to those who want to bring those responsible people to justice (Perni, 2005).

Nevertheless, by mid-1999 there was an exceptional event that cracked the wall impunity. One by one, several agents who had also been at the station that night came forward to testify against the accused. Only pressure from both federal investigators finally broke the code of silence that so often allows police officers to shirk their responsibility. Shortly after testifying agents among them were some who had witnessed Officer Volpe brandished a broomstick stained with feces and boasted of what he had done), Justin Volpe changed his plea and admitted his guilt. In December 1999 he was sentenced to thirty years in prison. Three other officers were convicted in March 2000 ...