City attorney Rod Rodrigue on Thursday declined to comment on the latest suits, one filed by a man alleging he was beaten and tased repeatedly, and the other by a lieutenant fired in the dust-up after another brutality complaint, then reinstated under court order.
Lt. Joseph Mayberry is suing the city, the department, its insurance company, Chief Richard Palmisano and former mayor Candace Watkins, alleging wrongful termination, defamation and privacy violations.
Mayberry, a 17-year veteran of the department, was fired last year in the fallout from another officer's tussle with a prominent local businessman.
Officer Kenneth Stevens went to the home of Jerry Braswell, owner of Braswell Pharmacy, and ordered him to remove yellow caution tape he'd strung to prevent parking in front of his home in the days before last year's Mardi Gras parade.
Braswell balked; Stevens allegedly hit him in the chest, then picked him up by the arm and threw him off the front porch. Stevens resigned from the department after an internal investigation, was indicted on a charge of simple battery and is awaiting trial. Braswell filed a civil suit late last year, condemning the department's culture of "deliberate indifference to the rights of citizens with whom the police come into contact."
Mayberry, Stevens' supervisor, was fired because, the city said at the time, he disobeyed orders leading up to the incident then lied about it afterward. State District Judge Martin Coady reversed the termination, calling it "arbitrary and capricious and manifestly erroneous." Mayberry got his job back.
But in his lawsuit, he said he returned to a "hostile work environment" and that the chief had "pitted the department employees against Lt. Mayberry by painting Lt. Mayberry as a liar." He alleges that the chief told his co-workers that firing Mayberry was "the best decision he had ever made."
Mayberry describes himself in the suit as a political scapegoat. The incident happened in the heated months before the city's mayoral election, his lawsuit notes, when candidates including now-Mayor Mike Cooper were publicly lambasting the police department as having run amok.
He was fired unfairly, he claims, as confirmed by his court-ordered reinstatement, and defamed by press releases of his termination sent by the city to the media and the ensuing coverage in newspapers and on television.
He is asking for damages for humiliation, mental anguish, defamation of character, embarrassment, loss of pride, stress, medical expenses, lost wages from detail work, punitive damages and attorney's fees.
The other suit, filed on behalf of a man who claims he was beaten and tased behind a downtown bar, asks for $2.8 million for physical pain and suffering, mental anguish, humiliation and denial of civil rights, medical expenses and punitive damages.
Lucas Breazeale and his friend Edward Boudreaux reportedly were leaving the Green Room around closing time one morning in February 2011 when several police officers arrived in response to a report of a bar fight.
In their reports, the officers said the men ignored officers' commands, resisted arrest and were appropriately subdued.
But Breazeale and Boudreaux, and seven witnesses to the scuffle, say the other officers grabbed the men at random, smashed Boudreaux against the hood of a car, then beat and repeatedly shocked Breazeale with a Taser, even after he was handcuffed, lying on the ground and begging them to stop.
One officer involved in the Green Room incident, Eric Driscoll, has resigned from the department and pleaded guilty to battery stemming from another brutality case, a traffic stop during which he choked a man and left him handcuffed in the back of a patrol cruiser for "an inordinate amount of time."
Breazeale's suit names as defendants Palmisano, Driscoll, officers William Manning, Philip Maranto, Bradley Eckert, Casey Anthony, Joseph Mahon and Stephen Culotta, along with city, the department and its insurance company.
None of the officers has been charged criminally, and resisting-arrest charges remain pending against Breazeale and Boudreaux.