News - Local/State

Saturday, Oct. 04, 2008

Trooper will return to his job

Black leaders say verdict sends troubling message

GREENVILLE — After spending months under a cloud of suspicion because of a 10-minute videotape, state trooper Steve Garren walked out of a federal courthouse Friday afternoon a free and jubilant man.

A jury of five men and seven women deliberated about 2 hours at the end of a four-day trial before acquitting Garren of violating the civil rights of Marvin Grant on June 24, 2007, in Greenwood County.

Garren, a 15-year Highway Patrol veteran, was accused of hitting Grant with his patrol car while Grant was fleeing on foot after a short car chase. The collision was captured on Garren’s dashboard video camera, as were comments by the trooper that he was trying to hit Grant, who never was charged in the incident.

S.C. Department of Public Safety director Mark Keel said Friday that Garren, a lance corporal whom he suspended without pay after his June indictment, would be allowed to return to his job at his current rank. Keel’s predecessor, James Schweitzer, had suspended Garren for two days after reviewing the incident.

“The bottom line is this: If I go back and try to discipline him again at this point, we’ll be writing a big check one day,” said Keel, an attorney. “This situation was dealt with by a previous administration, and he will be back to work.”

David Latimer, executive director of the S.C. Troopers Association, said Friday, “Anything less than to return him to his current job under his current rank would be an injustice.”

Still, Keel, who vowed to improve discipline within the Patrol when he took over in June, said he likely would fire any trooper who did something similar in the future, though he said his decision would be on a case-by-case basis.

“I told everyone when I came here that I’m going to raise the bar, and if similar incidents happen on my watch, they will be handled much differently here,” he said.

But state Rep. Leon Howard, D-Richland, chairman of the Legislative Black Caucus, and Lonnie Randolph, president of the state NAACP chapter, said Friday’s verdict sends a troubling message.

“It is a major setback because you’ve got guys who believe they can continue this culture and nothing’s going to happen,” Howard said. “What does it take when a guy openly admits on tape that he intended to invoke bodily harm against another human being?”

Garren testified earlier this week that while his recorded statements, which he made in the presence of other officers at the scene, were “dumb, stupid,” he never intended to hit the fleeing Grant. Instead, he contended, he couldn’t avoid the collision because Grant suddenly cut in front of his patrol car.

Howard and Randolph said they believed race was a factor in Friday’s verdict, pointing out a mostly white jury acquitted Garren, who is white, and that Grant is black. Two of the jurors are black.

Randolph said the verdict brings back painful reminders of another federal jury’s acquittal of a group of white state troopers in the 1968 shooting deaths of three young black men on the South Carolina State University campus.

Members of the Black Caucus and of the NAACP, which is holding its state convention this week in Charlotte, plan to meet Sunday to discuss “what’s next” in response to the verdict, Randolph said.

First Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin McDonald said Friday the verdict will “do nothing to deter us in our effort to go forward” with a civil rights case against another indicted trooper, John Sawyer, who is seen on videotape repeatedly kicking a dump truck driver in the head after a long chase.

He noted, though, he didn’t believe the Garren case was “about putting the Highway Patrol as an institution under indictment,” adding, “I don’t think this case is representative of the Highway Patrol or other agencies.”

Former Highway Patrol commander Col. Russell Roark, whom Gov. Mark Sanford ousted in February, along with Schweitzer, for not firing another white trooper who made a racial slur while threatening to kill a fleeing black suspect, said Friday he didn’t believe Garren’s actions “rose to the level where he should have been incarcerated for his actions.”

Had he been convicted, Garren could have received 10 years in federal prison, though he more likely would have faced 21 to 27 months under federal sentencing guidelines, said Columbia attorney Pete Strom, a former U.S. attorney for South Carolina who was not involved in the case.