Prince George’s police get away with a beating.

Maryland - Judge Woodard left no secret about her leanings, according to several courtroom observers. During the trial, she was overtly sympathetic toward the defense and hostile to the prosecution, signaling her disdain with facial expressions and by turning her back on the prosecutor, Joseph Ruddy, during his closing argument. Those gestures may have been noticed by jurors.

This month at the sentencing, where Mr. Harrison faced up to several years in prison for his conviction for second-degree assault, the judge dispensed a token punishment: 30 days of home detention, followed by 18 months of unsupervised probation. The judge opted for leniency despite the fact that Mr. Harrison displayed no remorse for the beating or the coverup, and he failed even to acknowledge Mr. McKenna, whom he had bludgeoned with his baton, in the courtroom.

In fact, Mr. Harrison had the gall to suggest he had been persecuted for what he regarded as reasonable use of force. One need only watch the videotape to disprove that self-serving account.

At the same time, Judge Woodard, in her comments at sentencing, went out of her way to vilify Mr. McKenna by dwelling at length on the unruly behavior of some, though not most, Maryland students following the game. She thereby managed to smear an innocent victim by associating him with the unrelated actions of others. Judge Woodard did not respond to phone calls to her office.

Other Maryland students were roughed up and badly injured by the police after the basketball game. At least three were knocked unconscious; two of them required medical care. Nine students (in addition to Mr. McKenna) received a total of $1.6 million in settlements from the county stemming from police violence.

In the absence of video evidence in those cases, the officers who used Maryland students as punching bags faced no disciplinary consequences. Amazingly, the police department’s internal affairs division, which handled the abuse complaints, did not even interview most of the students who were injured. It follows that if no video had surfaced of Mr. McKenna’s beating, that too would have been swept under the rug of police impunity and official indifference.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/prince-georges-police-get-away-with-a-college-park-beating/2012/12/28/9f6186c6-505f-11e2-8b49-64675006147f_story_1.html