The legal fight included dozens of depositions and competing medical opinions and claims of responsibility, all of them publicly filed in federal court in Los Angeles. What never became public, however, were 30 minutes of video showing Howard’s death inside the 77th Street Station Jail — recordings of a sequence of events that had enraged a family and cost Los Angeles taxpayers nearly $3 million. The tapes — recorded by two fixed cameras in the jail — had been filed with the judge in the case, S. James Otero, but when ProPublica requested the footage, Otero’s clerk said he was unsure if the judge still had it, and that the judge’s practice was not to make such material available to the news media. The police department denied a request for any video and the city attorney’s office said it didn’t have the footage.
ProPublica has now obtained copies of the tapes, and is publishing them in the interest of establishing a more complete public record of a controversial and costly death. The videos offer compelling evidence of how Howard died and how police and medical personnel at the jail responded to Howard’s needs in the aftermath of an ultimately deadly jailhouse struggle.
