“I think Chasse’s death is a great example of the lethal nature of commonly-used police tactics,” says Benjamin Haile, who has signed on to be our attorney. “Maybe the police were being extra-aggressive because of the demographic changes in the Pearl District at the time, and the decreased tolerance for people who seemed out of place there.”
“But the basic theme of Tasing someone then having the enormous weight of a police officer on top of them while they are in shock is something that I see very often,” Haile continues. “I frequently have clients say they thought they were going to die during such encounters.”
Haile qualified from Lewis & Clark law school in 2004, and initially focused on criminal defense work. In September 2005 he started a small practice focusing on civil rights, primarily police misconduct cases.
“That’s always been something that concerns me,” he says. “The need to police the police. Somebody needs to be doing it from outside of government. I think internal affairs investigations can be effective when they have effective civilian oversight, but in Portland at least, I don’t think the Independent Police Review really has enough investigatory power to be effective, and I haven’t seen very good results from the Citizen’s Review Committee, either.”
Frequently, Haile’s clients come to him having exhausted Portland’s police review process. If a client comes to him without having made a complaint to the city’s oversight system, Haile frequently files such complaints alongside civil lawsuits, because he wants to empower the review process as much as possible.
One of Haile’s first clients even alleged excessive force against officer Christopher Humphreys, in an incident in 2003. In that case, the violence escalated quickly. The police were looking for Haile’s client’s friend, and assumed that the client was the person they were looking for, even though he was sleeping in a car outside the person’s house.
“They broke the car windows and pepper-sprayed him,” says Haile. “So my client drove around the corner to another friend’s house, where he stopped. The officers dragged him out of the car, Tazed him and beat him.”
Haile secured an $85,000 settlement for his client in that case, although there was no discipline for Officer Humphreys. Haile says he wasn’t altogether surprised by this, but that he did feel the city’s having to pay a significant settlement might draw some attention. Another of Haile’s clients, Richard Prentice, alleges he was confronted by Humphreys in a cell in 2007, after putting up posters of him downtown.
Haile is excited about our project, especially that we are making Alien Boy while the lawsuit is being pursued by the Chasse family.
“When a lawsuit is filed, often an issue drops out of public view,” he says. “So I think it’s very important that others who are concerned about the issue keep it in the public view. It’s tragic when lawyers get involved and cause everyone to clam up.”
Thanks for giving us your help and advice, Ben!