BATON ROUGE — Baton Rouge Police got a win Wednesday night when a jury in federal court rejected the claims of the first BRAVE cave lawsuit to go to trial.
Jeremy Lee claimed in his suit that he was improperly detained and strip-searched before a police officer hit him in the face and then repeatedly kicked him, breaking a rib.
It was Jan. 9, 2023 when police stopped Lee when he walked out of a house on Cadillac Street that officers had under surveillance as a drug hotspot. His drug and gun charges were later dismissed.
Lee’s lawsuit was the first one filed involving the activities of the Street Crimes Unit and its conduct at the BRAVE cave, a warehouse next to the First District police station.
Ryan Thompson, Lee’s attorney and a current candidate for district attorney, called the facility a “torture warehouse” in court filings.
Thompson did not return phone messages from UWK on Thursday.
City-parish officials declined to comment.
Thompson’s revelations about the BRAVE cave shut down the facility.
Baton Rouge attorney Franz Borghardt said he was surprised by the verdict, and by the fact that it came to a verdict at all.
“I was surprised we didn’t have a settlement. I was frankly surprised that cooler heads didn’t prevail,” Borghardt told UWK. “The optics on this case were horrendous for law enforcement. I didn’t even expect it to get this far.”
In August, U.S. District Judge Shelly Dick had dismissed claims against most of the officers and had rejected most of Lee’s claims about his rights being violated.
She ruled that police did have probable cause to detain Lee and then probable cause to arrest him. She ruled that a search outside the house on Cadillac that had exposed Lee’s underwear did not qualify as a strip search and that the strip search at the BRAVE cave did not violate his constitutional rights.
Dick previously ruled that a BRPD policy regarding strip searching people who were not being arrested was unconstitutional, but that was not the issue in Lee’s arrest.
After Dick’s August rulings, the only issue remaining for the jury to consider was whether Troy Lawrence Jr., who was a police officer at the time of the January 2023 arrest, used excessive force against Lee.
Borghardt explained that police officers have “qualified immunity” to prevent them from being held liable in civil court for their on-the-job actions when those actions are reasonable.
But he said Dick “deplores violations of civil rights” and is “an exceptionally fair, reasonable judge,” putting the plaintiff in that kind of case in good hands in her court.
Borghardt said juries have to evaluate the credibility of everyone who is part of the lawsuit.
“You’ve got to have a real case with real constitutional civil rights violations, and if you don’t have that, then a jury’s not going to believe you, because here’s the thing: as much as we want to give money damages, we want to pay out damages to individuals that are really, really, really injured,” he said. “We absolutely, in a tort reform world, do not want to pay out big bucks to someone who may be lying.”
He said he didn’t know if Lee’s claims were legitimate.
“If he was legitimately injured, I feel bad for him. If he wasn’t, then this is the right decision,” Borghardt said.
Dick said that whether Lawrence’s use of force was excessive was an issue for the jury to determine. A video from another part of the building, after Lee and Lawrence’s interaction, showed Lee talking and moving without appearing to be injured. However, medical records did show that Lee had a broken rib when he was taken for medical treatment before the sheriff’s office would allow him to be booked into jail.
At least three other lawsuits dealing with the BRAVE cave or the Street Crimes Unit are still working their way through the federal court system.
The city-parish settled another such lawsuit for $180,000.
Lawrence Jr. resigned from BRPD after he was placed on administrative leave during the investigations.
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