But there was one point Hunold refused to concede, despite the cops' alleged encouragement: He wouldn't say that he'd witnessed Landau reaching for an officer's gun.
When it was all over, the cops wrote Hunold a $160 ticket for the marijuana and told him he could go home.
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Alex Landau wouldn't let paramedics help him until they took photos of his injuries.
Alex Landau wouldn't let paramedics help him until they took photos of his injuries.
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"It was so shady that I, a white person, walked out of the police station that night unscathed and Alex almost died because he was beat up so bad," Hunold says. "They let me go because that night I was cooperating with them and they were manipulating me."
One moment at the station particularly stood out, a moment described in the federal lawsuit. At one point, the officer interviewing Hunold asked how he knew Landau. After listening to Hunold describe their friendship, the cop allegedly looked him in the eye and said, "That nigger's not your friend."
First day of class
Face bruised and full of stitches
Good riddance is what they're hoping for
But I'm a motherfuckin' lion
It wasn't easy for Alex Landau to return to school after winter break with a stitched-up, black-and-blue face and a right eye swollen shut. To add insult to injury, the cops had left his Lincoln a wreck. They'd used a knife to slice up an Air Jordan backpack he had in the car, and had torn a notebook of his lyrics to shreds.
But such inconveniences paled in comparison to the fact that five days after the traffic stop, the Denver District Attorney's Office charged Landau with attempting to disarm a peace officer, a class 6 felony that could lead to eighteen months in prison. Landau's case wasn't helped by the police department's Internal Affairs Bureau, which two months later declined to launch a full investigation into the incident after concluding that the actions of the officers involved "were within the policies of the Denver Police Department." Still, when the DA offered a plea deal that would have reduced the felony to a misdemeanor and reduced the maximum time he could serve, Landau refused to take it, deciding instead to fight the charge.
That turned out to be a good move: Despite the bureau's finding, despite the fact that the eight officers on the scene presumably could have served as witnesses, seven months after charging Landau, the DA dropped the case.
By then, Hunold had retracted everything he'd written at the police station, claiming he'd been manipulated by the police into making the statement. And Landau's defense attorney had won a motion to obtain the police documents collected during the Internal Affairs investigation. Those documents included the officers' accounts of what transpired the night of the traffic stop — accounts that seemed to shift in the days following the incident.
According to the federal lawsuit, in their initial reports, officers Nixon, Middleton and Murr said that because Landau flailed and fought against them and appeared to be reaching for Middleton's gun, they were forced to punch him in the face. This did not affect Landau, Murr recounted, so "I reached over and pulled Middleton's flashlight from her gun belt and struck Landau an unknown number of times in the head."
The day after the traffic stop, a detective working on the case wrote an e-mail to Nixon, Middleton and Murr, noting that he'd relayed the facts to Deputy District Attorney Alma Staub and that she had "stated she would reject this case of attempt to disarm a peace officer based on the facts presented and I would need further details on the incident."
Nixon soon responded via e-mail that he'd forgotten something in his earlier report: "I spaced putting this in my statement, but prior to Officer Middleton cleaning the blood off of her weapon, I observed what appeared to be the imprint of the webbing of the hand in blood on the backstrap of her gun, I'm not too sure if this helps out or not."
For her part, Middleton never claimed that Landau touched her gun — but her story of the traffic stop changed in other ways. She initially reported that Landau was "fighting us" and had "pushed all three of us with such force that we all advanced toward the curb" and subsequently fell over — an account that clashed with the descriptions of the other officers, who reported that the group had tumbled over in the give-and-take of the commotion. Later, Middleton e-mailed a "clarification" of her report, stating, "I was never assaulted by Mr. Landau."
Reading through the documents, Landau was struck by what the officers seemed to think they could get away with — and he decided he wasn't going to let them. How many other people had been treated the same way? How many other victims of alleged police misconduct had been slapped with a felony charge and then offered a plea deal they couldn't refuse, thereby losing any chance to complain?
"It's not safe to have people like this who are supposed to be protecting the streets but instead are abusing their authority," says Landau. "There are probably other people who have been in the same situation as me who haven't had any recognition, maybe some who've had it worse. But you can only do this sort of thing for so long before it goes public."
