LITTLE ROCK — The fate of a civilian internal-affairs investigator at the West Memphis Police Department, who federal prosecutors say tried to cover up an officer’s crime to protect the police “brotherhood,” is now in the hands of a federal jury.
The seven women and five men who will begin deliberations this morning in Little Rock spent Tuesday and Wednesday listening to a string of character witnesses describe Lester Ditto as a man of impeccable integrity. They said they could not believe that he would have pressured two dispatchers to lie about seeing an officer choke an unruly man in the department’s lobby on June 14, 2010.
But regardless of Ditto’s credibility in other situations, none of those defense witnesses actually sat in on Ditto’s interviews of the dispatchers to know whether he “corruptly persuaded” them, federal prosecutors argued Tuesday afternoon.
The former dispatchers both testified that when Ditto first asked them in separate interviews what they saw on the night of barber Michael Young’s visit to the station to complain about his daughter’s traffic ticket, they told him the truth: that they had heard a “commotion” from the dispatch room adjoining the lobby, and when they ran into the lobby, they saw officer Scott McCall’s hands around Young’s neck while Young sat in a chair with his hands cuffed behind his back.
The women testified that they pulled McCall off the man, who had been spewing insults at officers, even yelling that the recent shooting deaths of two officers were “deserved.”
But after the women told Ditto what happened, they said, he reminded them that there were no cameras in the lobby to verify what had occurred, told them that the department was a “brotherhood,” and asked who they would rather see prevail - a “dirt bag” like Young or an otherwise good officer.
The women both testified that Ditto’s words - while not a direct threat - made it clear to them that if they wanted to keep their jobs, they wouldn’t mention the choking when he turned on an audio recorder.
The women each testified that when Ditto started up the recorder, they described everything they had witnessed but the choking, leaving the impression that McCall merely put his hands on Young’s shoulders to push him back down into his chair.
They said that Ditto, sitting across his desk from them, nodded and gestured as they spoke, to silently indicate his approval. Never once in the tape recordingdid Ditto ask if either woman had seen McCall choke Young.
None of the officers later interviewed by Ditto for the internal investigation - which was prompted by a complaint Young made - were ever asked if they knew anything about a choking, prosecutors said.
In November 2010, Ditto sent Young a letter saying his claims of abuse weren’t substantiated and the case was closed.
The subject didn’t arise again until December 2010, when FBI Agent Phillip Spainhour, assigned to investigate a civil-rights complaint Young had filed against the department, discovered there was more footage recorded on a videotape in the dispatch room that night than anyone else officially knew about.
The video showed the two dispatchers - Debra Deweese and Mea May, now Mea Taylor - re-enacting the scene they had witnessed in the lobby, including what federal prosecutors said was clearly a choking, but that defense attorney Erin Cassinelli said was ambiguous and could have been an illustration of McCall merely pushing Young into his seat.
Spainhour then interviewed the women, with Deweese readily admitting she had lied in the internal investigation and Taylor initially defending her first statement but then breaking down and admitting she had lied.
At a trial in May in which another jury saw the same footage, McCall was convicted of a civil-rights violation, albeit a misdemeanor version of the felony that the Department of Justice had sought.
Henry Leventis and Chiraag Bains, attorneys from the department’s civil-rights division in Washington, D.C., both emphasized in their closing arguments Tuesday that jurors had seen “the brotherhood” in action, when other officers testified in Ditto’s defense, and other department employees testified that Deweese and Taylor had questionable reputations.
Leventis noted that Ditto conducted seven interviews for his internal inquiry without mentioning the word “choke” - all before interviewing Young.
“How do you conduct seven interviews in a choking investigation and never once use the word choke?” he asked.
Leventis noted that Ditto never obtained medical records for Young showing he had been treated at the hospital that night for contusions on his neck.
Cassinelli argued that Ditto, who was hired after 25 years of being in charge of the Memphis Police Department’s property room, was “an outsider” at the West Memphis department, giving him no reason to consider West Memphis officers part of his “brotherhood.”
She said the dispatchers “threw Lester Ditto in front of the train,” simply out of fear that they would be arrested by the FBI otherwise.
Ditto faces three charges of witness tampering - one for each of the recorded statements the women made in the internal investigation and the third for Taylor’s initial statement to the FBI supporting her recorded statement to Ditto.
Arkansas, Pages 15 on 07/26/2012