Palo Alto Officer Exonerated
By
Alison Berry Wilkinson
Rains, Lucia & Wilkinson LLP
When
representing peace officers accused of criminal misconduct, sometimes
taking the most conservative route, while may be the easiest course of
action, is not always the best. This
case is an example of setting aside the risks associated with providing
a voluntary criminal statement resulted in the officer being fully
exonerated of criminal wrongdoing.
This
tragic case could happen to anyone.
It all started when Palo Alto Police Officer Brad Kilpatrick saw
a 14-year-old juvenile skateboarding without a helmet and issued him a
ticket, plus a warning that he would be ticketed again if he was seen
doing it again.
Several
weeks later, the juvenile was walking to school, this time carrying his
skateboard under his arm. When
he saw Kilpatrick, the juvenile (who was not wearing a helmet) dropped
the skateboard to the ground and jumped on.
Kilpatrick issued the juvenile another ticket.
After all, Kilpatrick’s assigned duty was traffic enforcement
in front of several schools.
Out
of this relatively benign and routine contact, Kilpatrick became the
center of a storm of controversy, with newspaper articles decrying his
“abuse” of the juvenile, because the juvenile’s mother’s fiancé
publicly accused Kilpatrick of using excessive force by “shaking”
the boy before “throwing him to the ground”.
In
reality, the only force used by Kilpatrick was to hold the juveniles arm
while escorting him to the curb before issuing the ticket.
The
hue and cry raised by the juvenile’s mother’s fiancé (a notorious
anti-police civil rights attorney and former public defender), forced
the district attorney’s office to open a criminal investigation.
But despite his very public accusations, the fiancé would not
allow the criminal or administrative investigators to interview the
juvenile.
Without
the alleged victim’s statement, the criminal case could not be
charged. But the damage was
done to Kilpatrick’s reputation with the accusations, and the public
flogging would only continue unless a full exoneration of the
officer’s conduct was made.
So, while it would have been more prudent to have Kilpatrick
decline to make a voluntary statement and have the district attorney’s
office refuse to charge because insufficient evidence existed, after a
full examination of the risks and benefits, the decision was made to
cooperate in the criminal investigation.
The decision was not without risk, as there were 17 witnesses
interviewed, six of which were videotaped statements provided by the
fiancé to the district attorney’s office.
Kilpatrick’s
cooperation, coupled with the information revealed in the witness
statements gathered by the criminal investigators, resulted in a full
exoneration of Kilpatrick. Indeed,
the district attorney’s office concluded that there was “no credible
evidence that Kilpatrick committed a crime” and found that it “was
reasonable for him to forcibly hold the juvenile’s arm during the
detention.”
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