A district attorney on eastern Long Island and a top aide were charged with intimidating witnesses in a federal civil rights investigation into the beating of a handcuffed prisoner by a police chief.
D- Suffolk County District Attorney Thomas Spota and the chief of his anti-corruption bureau, Christopher McPartland, were named in an indictment charging them with obstruction of justice, witness tampering and other offenses related to the case against former county Police Chief James Burke.
Last year, Burke was sentenced to nearly four years in prison for orchestrating a department cover-up after beating a handcuffed man for stealing embarrassing items from his department-issued SUV. Burke was a longtime protege of Spota's and once worked as an investigator in the district attorney's office before being named chief of the Suffolk County Police Department, one of the largest suburban departments in the country with 2,500 officers.
Officers subpoenaed by FBI agents investigating the 2012 beating were interrogated afterward about whether they had talked, prosecutors said. Unnamed co-conspirators had warned some that if they admitted wrongdoing, their union would not pay their legal fees.
No comments:
Post a Comment