Army Vet Serves Ex-Cop Summons for Brutality Lawsuit; Prosecutors Charged Him With Multiple Felonies Based on Testimony Contradicted by Cellphone Video

By | February 27, 2015

More
than two years ago, disabled Army veteran Douglas Dendinger agreed
to serve papers to a former cop from Bogalusa, La. for his nephew’s
brutality lawsuit against the officer. The same day he served the
cop, Chad Cassard, outside a courthouse he was charged with
obstructing justice and intimidating a witness, felonies, and
simple battery. Dendinger says local deputies and prosecutors had
clustered around him after he served Cassard, and that they threw
the summons back to him and cursed at him. Less than half an hour
after he got back home, police showed up to arrest him.

WWL-TV :

In a scene described in the lawsuit, Dendinger recounted a
nervous night handcuffed to a rail at the Washington Parish Jail.
He said he was jeered by officers, including Bogalusa Police Chief
Joe Culpepper, who whistled the ominous theme song from “The Good,
the Bad and the Ugly.”

After his family posted bail, he said he was hopeful that the
matter would be exposed as a big misunderstanding. After all, he
thought, a group of police officers and two St. Tammany prosecutors
witnessed the event.

“When I agreed to do it, I felt it was nothing more than someone
asking to pick up a gallon of milk at the convenience store on the
way home,” Dendinger said. “I know I didn’t anything wrong. I was
worried, but people told me, ‘Cooler heads will prevail.’ “

But instead of going away, the case escalated.

Supported by two of his prosecutors who were at the scene, [St.
Tammany District Attorney Walter] Reed formally charged Dendinger.
Both prosecutors, Julie Knight and Leigh Anne Wall, gave statements
to the Washington Parish Sheriff’s Office implicating
Dendinger.

With the bill of information, Dendinger’s attorney Philip Kaplan
said he got a bad feeling.

“It wasn’t fun and games,” Kaplan said. “They had a plan. The
plan was to really go after him a put him away. That’s scary.”

Cassard accused Dendinger of slapping him in the chest. One of
the attorneys said she thought she heard Dendinger punch Cassard.
Prosecutors ended up lining up seven witnesses against Dendinger,
and he faced up to 20 years if convicted.

Even the Bogalusa police chief was in it on it. Via WWL-TV:

Police Chief Culpepper gave a police statement that he witnessed
the battery, but in a deposition he said, “I wasn’t out there.” But
that didn’t stop Culpepper from characterizing Dendinger’s actions
as “violence, force.”

When Dendinger saw the police report, he said his reaction was
strong and immediate.

“I realized even more at that moment: These people are trying to
hurt me.”

At the last minute before going to serve Cassard, Dendinger
decided to bring his wife and nephew along to film the hand-off of
the summons to the cop on their cellphones. The two appear to contradict the entire story presented by
prosecution witnesses (including prosecutors). It took almost a
year before Dendinger’s lawyers could force the district attorney,
whose prosecutors were involved in the incident, to recuse himself.
Kicked up to the state Attorney General’s office, the charges were
dropped.

Dendinger is suing the cops involved, the district attorney, and
the two prosecutors who said they witnessed Dendinger serving
Cassard the summons, as well as the sheriff of Washington Parish,
where Dendinger lives, for, among other things, false imprisonment,
perjury, and abuse of due process. The parish sheriff told WWL-TV
he’s “confident that all claims against all WPSO deputies will be
rejected and dismissed by the court.”

Reed chose not to run for re-election last November. One of the
prosecutors, Wall, reportedly no longer works at the district
attorney’s office, but the other does. The new district attorney
insists he’s investigating the case but says he won’t comment
because of the lawsuit.

h/t Taylor W.

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One thought on “Army Vet Serves Ex-Cop Summons for Brutality Lawsuit; Prosecutors Charged Him With Multiple Felonies Based on Testimony Contradicted by Cellphone Video

  1. It is fair to say that the public does not want to believe that a group of senior police, prosecutors and lawyers would work together to deliberately fabricate evidence and deceive the court, with the intent of putting an innocent person in jail.

    The public accepts that two or three corrupt police officers might collude to present false evidence to the court, or that a lone rogue attorney might mislead the court by omission, but the idea that a mixed group of six or eight police officers and lawyers would work together to deliberately lie to the court is almost beyond belief. It shakes the very foundations of justice, so people are reluctant to accept that this could happen.

    Yet, in both the Dendinger case and my case, there are secretly-made digital recordings and other evidence proving that groups of lawyers and police deliberately deceived the court, and worked together to do so.

    Video and voice recording technologies are everywhere in today’s society. No matter what is happening, there is always a cell phone in someone’s hand, a dash camera driving by, or security camera pointing in the right direction.

    Due to the public nature of police work, most of the ‘hidden camera’ incidents in the news involve police misconduct. Lawyers, however, perform most of their work in private offices and conference rooms away from the public eye, so incidents of serious misconduct by groups of lawyers are far more difficult to document and prove.

    If there is one thing that can be gleaned from the Douglas Dendinger and Donald Best civil lawsuits, it is that police officers have no monopoly over lawyers when it comes to lying to the courts.

    Reply

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