NEW ORLEANS (AP) - Federal prosecutors are opposing a former New Orleans police officer’s request for a transfer from a federal prison in California while he awaits a new trial.
Robert Faulcon is one of five ex-police officers who face a retrial on charges stemming from the 2005 shootings of unarmed civilians following Hurricane Katrina. His earlier conviction was overturned. Last week, he asked a judge for a transfer from a California maximum security prison to a New Orleans-area lockup where he could more easily consult with his defense team.
Prosecutors, in a filing this week, said the request should be denied because decisions about how and where Faulcon should be housed are up to the federal Bureau of Prisons. They argue that a court’s approval of his request would “open the floodgates” to requests from other prisoners.
Faulcon’s conviction on civil rights charges related to the 2005 shootings at the Danziger Bridge and the subsequent cover-up were overturned last September by a federal judge, who said the case had been tainted by anonymous comments on a New Orleans newspaper’s website that turned out to have been posted by prosecutors.
A co-defendant, former police Sgt. Kenneth Bowen, has already been granted a move to a New Orleans lockup.
Faulcon’s motion, filed Thursday, outlines a dilemma he faces at the California prison. His lawyers said that, as an ex-police officer, Faulcon is at risk among the inmates in the prison’s general population. But if he is held in the prison’s special housing unit, where he would be isolated from other prisoners, “he will be restricted to his cell for all but five hours a week, where he will be allowed only one 15-minute telephone call a month, and where his access to counsel will be limited to ’snail mail.’”
The motion states that Faulcon was placed in the maximum security prison because he had been sentenced to 65 years in 2012. But the overturning of his 2011 conviction means he is now a pretrial detainee, the motion notes.
Prosecutors are appealing the overturning of the Danziger-related convictions. They said in this week’s filing that Faulcon is not currently being held in restrictive housing, so his request for transfer has less merit than Bowen’s.
Two people died and four were wounded in the Danziger Bridge shootings.
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