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Rapper who filmed girlfriend dying after taking drugs at Bestival has manslaughter conviction overturned
Martin Evans
Rapper Ceon Broughton was convicted of gross negligence manslaughterRapper
Ceon Broughton, who gave his girlfriend drugs at a music festival and
then filmed her as she lay dying rather than getting help, has had his
conviction for manslaughter quashed by the Court of Appeal.
Louella Fletcher-Michie, the daughter of Holby City actor John Michie, died after taking the hallucinogenic class A drug 2-CP at the Bestival music festival in September 2017.
Her
31-year-old boyfriend was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison
after he was found guilty of gross negligence manslaughter in February
last year.
But the Court of Appeal overturned the conviction after
his lawyers argued that the jury could not be sure Miss Fletcher-Michie
would have survived if she had received medical attention.
Louella Eve Fletcher-Michie died after taking drugs at the Bestival music event - Zoe Barling/PADuring
the trial, Winchester Crown Court had heard how Broughton filmed her as
she lay dying from a drugs overdose rather than going to a nearby
medical tent to get help.
Prosecutors claimed Broughton had failed
to take "reasonable" steps to seek medical help for Miss
Fletcher-Michie because he had been given a suspended jail term for
possessing a lock-knife and a Stanley knife blade a month earlier and
feared the consequences.
But at his appeal hearing Stephen Kamlish
QC, questioned whether jurors could have been sure that Miss
Fletcher-Michie would have survived if she had she received appropriate
treatment.
He also argued that the sentence was "excessive".
Quashing
the conviction at the Court of Appeal, Lord Burnett said: "In our view,
this is one of those rare cases where the expert evidence was all that
the jury had to assist them in answering the question on causation.
"That expert evidence was not capable of establishing causation to the criminal standard."
Broughton was also convicted for supplying Class A drugs and he did not appeal that conviction.
The appeal was heard before The Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, Mr Justice Sweeney and Mr Justice Murray.
In a statement issued after the appeal ruling , Broughton said he remained devastated by the death of his girlfriend.
Louella Fletcher-Michie and Ceon Broughton - InstagramA
statement issued by Birnberg Peirce Solicitors said: "The Court of
Appeal has today found that Louella's death occurred not as a result of
criminal negligence but was instead a tragic accident.
"Ceon
remains devastated by her death. He has always wished that he could have
done more to save her. He loved Louella and she him, but he knows that
no words will ever be sufficient to convey his sense of responsibility
for what happened or to begin to remove the pain that others have been
caused."
Broughton's trial heard how he gave his girlfriend a "bumped up" dose of the Class A party drug 2-CP.
Medical
experts told the jury she could have been saved if he had walked just
"30 or more steps" in order to get her medical help from a nearby
hospital tent.
But the Appeal judges ruled that the expert evidence was not capable of establishing causation to the criminal standard.
1 dead, at least 20 injured in shooting at apparent D.C. block party
Doha Madani
A
teenager was killed and at least 20 others injured in a shooting at an
apparent block party in Washington, D.C., overnight Saturday.
Police
are searching for multiple gunmen who opened fire at a social gathering
that took place at 33rd St. and Dubois Place SE on Saturday night,
according to Metropolitan Police Chief Peter Newsham. 17-year-old
Christopher Brown was identified by Newsham as the sole fatality as of
Sunday morning.
Police respond to a shooting in a Washington, D.C., neighborhood on Aug. 9, 2020. (Tom Yeatman)Brown
was taken to a local hospital where he was pronounced dead. A police
officer, who was not identified, is in critical condition and fighting
for her life, Newsham said.
The rest of those who were injured at the party sustained non-life threatening wounds.
It
appeared that a dispute broke out at the event and multiple weapons
were “produced” as a result, police said. A motive is not yet known.
“We
have at least three shooters because we have at least three separate
locations where ... where gunshots were fired,” Newsham said. “And it’s
my understanding that the shots went off simultaneously.”
A preliminary investigation indicated handguns were used in the shootings.
Newsham
confirmed there were officers at the scene of the gathering, which did
not have a permit. The police chief said that such large gatherings were
too dangerous to be had during the coronavirus pandemic and amid the spread of COVID-19.
The officer response was not large enough to break up the gathering, which Newsham said had “hundreds” of people in attendance.
This
image provided by a resident in Washington, D.C., neighborhood shows a
party where a shooting later occurred. (via NBC News)D.C Mayor Muriel Bowser remarked that several people who “had no regard for human life” attacked the gathering.
“It’s
very important that as a community we have zero tolerance for this
activity, that we support the Metropolitan Police Department when
they’re going to have to make very difficult decisions in breaking up
these events,” Bowser said.
Bowser warned the community that some
people may be jailed while breaking up parties or large events that
violate the law in the district, which currently restricts gatherings of
more than 50 people.
Chancellor
Searcy’s policing career had already been controversial by the time
prosecutors charged him this summer with demanding phone numbers from
women to avoid traffic tickets.
Searcy,
who resigned from the Detroit Police Department in July, is facing
misconduct in office charges — and the possibility of never again
wearing a badge in another city. If convicted, he would join the small
number of officers across Michigan to have their law enforcement
licenses revoked.
An investigation by the Free
Press, which has been examining police misconduct issues in an ongoing
series of stories since 2017, showed Michigan is lax compared with other
states when it comes to holding officers accountable for misconduct and
questionable behavior. In Michigan, an officer's license is yanked
when they are convicted of a felony or, in a recent addition to state
law, a handful of misdemeanor charges. Other states are more aggressive.
A
review of meeting minutes for the Michigan Commission on Law
Enforcement Standards found that, as of June, 144 officers have had
their licenses revoked since 2007. In Michigan, where there are about
19,000 officers, it is nearly impossible to determine how many have
committed other types of serious misconduct because no agency collects
that information.
Like other officers the newspaper has reported on around the state, Searcy's most recent problem isn't his first.
Searcy
was charged criminally in 2015, accused of wrongfully seizing money
and, in one case, fabricating the circumstances of an arrest. Searcy was
acquitted, though, and went back to work as a Detroit Police officer.
While
that episode garnered headlines, the Free Press has learned that Searcy
also faced troubles in 2010 after a woman claimed he threatened to
shoot her during a road rage incident. Prosecutors declined to charge
Searcy in that case because there was “insufficient evidence,” but
Detroit’s top cop recently said that Searcy’s past causes him concern.
“Given his history,” Detroit Police Chief James Craig said, “I am pleased that he is no longer a member of this department."
Searcy faces trial on his current case early next year.
Todd
Perkins, his attorney, declined to comment on the pending criminal
case, as well as the 2010 incident, saying he doesn’t know the
circumstances surrounding that case. Perkins also said Searcy would not
make any comments, “on the advice of counsel.”
Craig
said Searcy’s resignation is noted as having been “under charges” —
meaning if he tried to get another policing job, the circumstances of
his departure should be clear to agencies conducting a background check.
In its investigation, the Free Press found previous examples of
officers job-hopping from one town to another, regardless of past
transgressions. Though background checks are routinely conducted, the
newspaper found that some departments decided to overlook histories of problems.
In
2017, legislation was passed in an effort to prevent misconduct from
being hidden by officers' resignations. It, in part, requires that
police departments keep records about the circumstances of an officer's
departure from the agency.
Searcy,
33, who started working for Detroit Police in 2008, found himself under
investigation by internal affairs following an alleged off-duty road
rage incident in 2010.
According to a warrant
request submitted to the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office and obtained
by the Free Press through a Michigan Freedom of Information Act request,
a woman was driving in Detroit in June 2010 with her three friends and
2-year-old daughter when she saw Searcy standing in the street and
honked her horn to get him out of the way. She said he got into a
vehicle, followed her, then pulled up alongside and said: “I’ll shoot
you (expletives).”
The
woman then drove “at a high rate of speed” to the Highland Park police
station, where she banged on the door and told officers that Searcy, who
was sitting in his vehicle in the parking lot, had threatened to shoot
her and her passengers, according to the request.
Police
saw a handgun between the armrest and driver’s seat in Searcy’s car. As
he was being taken into custody, Searcy initially refused to put his
hands on his head, asking the officers what probable cause they had and
“why are you felonious assaulting me?” according to the warrant request.
Searcy
refused to answer any questions or provide a statement to the Detroit
Police internal affairs sergeant in charge of the investigation, the
request says. The prosecutor’s office declined to charge him.
When
asked recently how the prosecutor's office made its determination, a
spokeswoman wrote that the office “looked at the facts and evidence in
the case and determined that there was insufficient evidence to bring a
criminal charge in the matter.” She did not elaborate.
Detroit
Police officials recommended Searcy serve a 20-day suspension for the
incident — but that recommendation wasn’t made until four years later,
in 2014.
Craig, who came to the departmentas
chief in 2013, dismissed the case. He said recently that four years is
an “excessive” amount of time to have elapsed. Craig said he has issued a
rule in the department that misconduct investigations typically need to
be adjudicated within one year.
He said the department had lost cases with similarly long delays that ended up in arbitration and that was a concern.
“I
think part of the problem in this case was that it wasn’t adjudicated.
It took four years,” Craig said. When the 20-day suspension was
recommended, “I said, ‘Well the case is four years old, what have we
done with it for four years but just put it in a desk?’ That’s a glaring
example of some of the things we found that was broken in our system
and one of the primary reasons, I think, that the arbitrator was
dismissing these cases.”
That
same year, in 2014, Searcy and his partner in the tactical response
unit were suspended while being investigated for alleged misconduct,
according to a 2015 Free Press article. The officers were accused
of wrongly confiscating money from a man they arrested and
fabricating the circumstances of another arrest.
The
officers were charged criminally in 2015 with several counts, including
misconduct in office, embezzlement, larceny and false report of a
felony. Searcy was also charged in two additional cases, also involving
the seizing of money from people who had been stopped.
The
then-president of the Detroit Police Officers Association told the Free
Press at the time that Searcy and his partner were “two solid police
officers with one goal, and that is to protect our citizens.”
Both officers were acquitted by a jury.
But when Searcy returned to work in 2017, he was given a lower-profile assignment in communications, Craig said.
Then came the latest criminal allegations.
Prosecutors
said that during two separate incidents in summer 2018, Searcy pulled
women over and demanded their phone numbers to avoid a ticket from him.
Both
women testified during Searcy's preliminary examination that
Searcy — wearing a uniform and driving a patrol car — stopped them in
downtown Detroit. They said Searcy told them to provide their phone
numbers, which he had them recite.
A sergeant with
internal affairs testified that Searcy had been doing work at the time
through the Detroit Police Department's secondary employment program,
which allows businesses or organizations to hire off-duty officers.
Perkins, Searcy's attorney, said his client had been working secondary
assignments on the dates of the alleged incidents.
According
to a transcript of the preliminary exam, Detroit Police Sgt. Kenneth
Butler testified that, even while on a secondary assignment, an officer
has the authority to "make arrests, issue tickets, conduct traffic
stops" in uniform and in a police vehicle.
One
woman, pulled over in July 2018, testified that Searcy's instruction to
provide her number felt "like a demand." Afterward, she said Searcy
called and texted, at one point asking in a message whether she had
received a ticket in the mail. The woman testified she then filed a
complaint with the police department, "because I felt like he was trying
to scare me into responding."
The other woman, who
was stopped in August 2018, testified that Searcy told her she made an
illegal turn and said her license had been suspended, though she
disputed both claims and testified she had just renewed her license.
The
woman testified Searcy told her he could take her to jail over the
suspended license, give her a ticket and impound the car. She said
Searcy told her he could "make all of this go away" if she gave him her
number. After she did, the woman testified, Searcy cautioned that he
still her information, saying: "This better be the right number,"
according to the transcript.
Asked
about not giving Searcy a fake number instead, the woman testified: "Of
course I didn't. He's a police officer and he definitely would verify
it and if he wanted to do anything to me, with all my information he
already had, he could have."
She said Searcy called
and texted her, too, but she eventually told him she was uncomfortable
with the contact and reported the issue to a friend, whose brother works
for Detroit Police.
Searcy, the woman testified, later apologized.
Searcy is charged with two counts of misconduct in office. His trial is scheduled to start March 2.
Though Searcy resigned on his own, Craig said he would have been let go anyway.
"He resigned," Craig said, "before I could fire him."
Gina
Kaufman is a member of the Free Press Investigations Team specializing
in criminal justice issues. Contact her at 313-223-4526 or
gkaufman@freepress.com. To read more about police misconduct or other
Free Press investigations, visit www.freep.com/news/investigations.
When
Americans panic, they buy guns — lots of them. During the first six
months of 2020, amid a global coronavirus pandemic, gun retailers have
reported a record 10.3 million firearm transactions, according to a new
survey by the National Shooting Sports Foundation.
Overall, gun sales in the U.S. have increased by 95 percent while
ammunition sales have increased 139 percent compared to the same period
last year.
And while various demographic groups are buying guns in
2020, African-Americans account for the highest increase in gun
purchases of any group.
“The highest overall firearm sales
increase comes from Black men and women, who show a 58.2% increase in
purchases during the first six months of 2020 versus the same period
last year,” Jim Curcuruto,
NSSF director of research and market development, wrote in his report.
“Bottom line is that there has never been a sustained surge in firearm
sales quite like what we are in the midst of.”
Getty ImagesIn many states, estimated gun sales doubled in March compared with February. In Utah, they nearly tripled. And in Michigan, a coronavirus hot spot, sales more than tripled.
Yet it’s not the first time gun sales have surged following an event with national implications. In 2012, more than 3 million were purchased
in the months after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, in which
a gunman killed 26 people, including 20 children, in Newtown, Conn.
After this tragedy, Americans feared stricter gun laws so they bought
more guns. In the eight years under President Obama, the gun industry grew 158 percent, according to the NSSF, over fears of impending gun control.
While
much of the spike in sales early on can be attributed to uncertainty
surrounding business shutdowns and initial stay-at-home orders because
of COVID-19 precautions, more recent sales may be due to an uneasiness
around Black Lives Matter rallies and increased calls to defund police
departments.
Michael Cargill, a Black man and owner of Central
Texas Gun Works in Austin, Texas, says that amid all the anxiety over
the pandemic and rallies, people are buying guns to take personal
responsibility for their safety. “People were concerned with people
breaking into their home or breaking into their vehicle or attacking
them while they’re in their vehicles [after COVID-19],” he said in a
video interview with Yahoo News. “So people wanted to take their own
protection into their own hands.”
Michael Cargill, owner of Central Texas Gun Works in Austin, Texas.In
the past few months, Cargill says he’s seen triple the amount of people
coming into his store wanting to purchase firearms, and he’s noticed a
surge in Black customers in particular. Cargill believes Black people
are buying more guns because they are getting more educated on the
history of gun control. “They’re understanding that gun control first
started in the 1800s … so people are realizing that every time there's a
gun law that’s targeting a certain group of people, it’s usually the
African-American group,” he said. “So they’re saying, with everything
going on, we’ve got to make sure that we’re legal with this firearm.
We’re going to make sure we know what the law is, we want to make sure
we know where we can take it, where we can’t take it.”
History
shows that gun control laws have always been unfavorable to Black
Americans. Even before America was a country, Black people were banned
from owning guns. “The first gun control law in the territory that is
now the United States was passed in Virginia in 1640,” journalist Daniel
Rivero noted in a 2016 Splinter article. “It explicitly banned black people from owning guns, even if they were not slaves.”
More than 200 years later, in 1857, the prospect of armed Black people became a crucial factor in the Dred Scott case.
As Scott attempted to become an American citizen with all its
inalienable rights that include owning a gun, the court ruled that "a
negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as
slaves," were not "intended to be included in the general words used in
[the Constitution].”
Following the Civil War, when Black people attempted to arm themselves against white supremacists, Southern state governments passed so-called black codes barring them from owning guns.
Two
members of the Black Panther Party meeting with police Lt. Ernest
Holloway on the steps of the California state Capitol in 1967. (Getty
Images)Throughout the 1960s, the Black Panthers
chose to open carry in California as a sign to police that they would
no longer endure racial attacks. In 1967, 30 Black Panthers
protested on the steps of the California state house armed with
shotguns and pistols. They announced that “the time has come for Black
people to arm themselves.” The move frightened politicians, and it
wasn’t long before then-Gov. Ronald Reagan signed a state ban on open
carry into law, called the Mulford Act.
Whitney Davis of Houston
admits that learning more about Black history is the reason why she
recently purchased two guns for herself. “I realize in this country a
long time ago, Black people weren't even allowed to own guns,” she
said.
Davis’s dad grew up on a ranch in rural Texas, where over
his lifetime he accrued a lot of guns, but it wasn’t until Davis learned
more about her Black ancestors that she felt motivated to buy guns of
her own. “So just like people promote that our ancestors died for us to
vote, they also died for us to be able to carry guns as well,” she said.
“So I wanted to fulfill what my ancestors weren’t able to do in the
past.”
Davis endorses a common rationale voiced by proponents of
easing restrictions on guns. “If everybody knows that everybody has a
gun then maybe you’re a lot of less likely to attack people or hurt
people,” she said. “If everyone knows, if you have a gun, I got one too,
it’s an equal playing field.”
Despite the increase in Black gun
ownership and general knowledge about Black history, many Black people
have still lost their lives over owning a gun. “In 2016, legal gun owner
Philando Castile was shot after informing a Minnesota police officer
that he was armed,” HuffPost’s Julia Craven wrote.
“Two years prior, Tamir Rice was killed by Cleveland police while
holding a toy gun. John Crawford suffered the same fate in a
Beavercreek, Ohio, Walmart.”
On July 25, Garrett Foster, a white
man, attended a Black Lives Matter protest in Austin, Texas, carrying a
semi-automatic rifle. After a confrontation with a motorist, Foster was shot dead on July 25.
The
move for African-Americans to own guns appears to be a break from the
progressive movement in American politics, which people of color
generally align with.
A view of Washington, D.C., following the 1968 riots. (Getty Images)The
Congressional Black Caucus has pushed for stricter gun control measures
in the past, most recently following two mass shootings in El Paso,
Texas, and Dayton, Ohio. “We have worked vigorously with House Democrats
to pass universal background check legislation,” Rep. Karen Bass,
D-Calif., chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, said in the aftermath
of those two tragedies. The lawmaker said the CBC has also backed a
bill to ban a loophole in gun control law introduced by Majority Whip
Jim Clyburn, D-S.C. Rep. Bass did not return Yahoo News’ request for
comment.
But Republicans have been consistently resistant to
increased gun control measures. In response to the CBC’s push, Senate
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Congress was “in a holding pattern” on gun control.
“I
still await guidance from the White House as to what [Trump] thinks
he’s comfortable signing,” the Kentucky Republican said last September.
“If and when that happens, then we’ll have a real possibility of
actually changing the law and hopefully making some progress.”
Maj Toure, founder of Black Guns Matter,
a nonprofit that educates people in urban communities on their Second
Amendment rights through firearms training and education, believes the
more Black people who have guns, the better race relations will be in
America. “If everyone has the right mindset with a gun, that solves race
issues,” Toure told Yahoo News in a phone interview. “An armed society
is a polite society.”
Maj Toure of Black Guns Matter at a town hall meeting in Philadelphia. (Bastiaan Slabbers/NurPhoto)Toure
advocates for Black gun ownership as a tool for self-defense and pushes
gun safety. But he acknowledges the fact that fear makes people buy
things. Toure welcomes this.
“I love that so many Black people
are buying guns,” he said. “If you’re racist ... and you think that one
group is inferior to another, then you should be afraid.”
