NEW ORLEANS — Five former police officers involved in the shooting deaths of unarmed people here in the days after Hurricane Katrina, a case that drew national outrage and intense scrutiny to the city's police force, pleaded guilty in federal court on Wednesday and received significantly less prison time than they originally faced.
The guilty pleas, which drew prison terms from 3 to 12 years, were the latest development in a wrenching 10-year saga that began when police officers responding to a distress call on the Danziger Bridge on Sept. 4, 2005, opened fire on unarmed residents, killing two and injuring four.
The officers — Sgt. Kenneth Bowen, Sgt. Robert Gisevius, Officer Anthony Villavaso and Officer Robert Faulcon, as well as a detective, Arthur Kaufman, who was assigned to investigate the shooting — were initially indicted on state charges. Those indictments were dismissed, and the officers were then charged in federal court.
The men were found guilty in 2011 and faced sentences of six to 65 years, but a federal judge, Kurt D. Engelhardt, threw out the convictions two years later and ordered a retrial, a ruling that was upheld on appeal. All but Kaufman have been in custody in 2010.
Under the terms of Wednesday's deal, the four officers involved in the shooting received sentences ranging from seven to 12 years, with credit for time served. The fifth man, Kaufman, who was accused in the cover-up, got 3 years.
While the case made its tortuous way through the court system, the shootings on Danziger Bridge, as well as another shooting of an unarmed man in the immediate aftermath of Katrina, drew the attention of the Justice Department. In 2011, the police force here was brought under a federally mandated consent decree, a blueprint for a full-scale overhaul, which is continuing.
Long before Ferguson and Baltimore became bywords in national debates on police use of force, the shootings on the Danziger Bridge shocked and sickened many here and across the country and raised troubling questions about police behavior that have since played out elsewhere.
The victims, in a city still without order and drowning in floodwaters, were crossing the bridge in search of food or relatives when police officers rushed to the scene in a rental truck. The officers opened fire with shotguns and AK-47s, leaving four people severely injured and two dead: 17-year-old James Brisette, and Ronald Madison, a 40-year-old developmentally disabled man who took a shotgun blast in the back.
At the federal trial, defense lawyers emphasized that the officers were responding to a call that the police were being shot at, and that, under the extreme circumstances of that chaotic time, they should not be harshly judged.
But other officers who had pleaded guilty testified that defendants had fired without warning, stomped on the dying and immediately afterward began to construct what would become an extensive cover-up.
The officers were convicted of civil rights violations, conspiracy and obstruction of justice. At their sentencing, however, Engelhardt delivered a long speech condemning the prosecution for its plea deals and its use of certain witnesses, and deplored the mandatory minimum sentences he was forced to impose on some of the convicted officers.
Over the next two years, a scandal unfolded in the U.S. attorney's office in New Orleans, involving senior prosecutors who had anonymously commented online to articles in the local media about cases that were on trial. Citing this scandal, Engelhardt threw out the officers' convictions in 2013, pointing to the "highly unusual, extensive and truly bizarre actions" of prosecutors. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans upheld his ruling last year and ordered a new trial.