Lack of Charges in US Police Killings “A Travesty of Justice”: Activist
WASHINGTON, DC (Tasnim) – The mother of an American victim who was shot 14 times by two US police officers while in handcuffs 23 years ago says she still does not know why those who killed her son were never charged.
Dorothy Copp Elliott’s son, 24-year-old Artie Elliott, was killed on June 18, 1993, when two police officers fatally shot him 14 times in in District Heights, an incorporated city in Prince George's County, Maryland. She has spent her life ever since the shooting, fighting for victims of police brutality.
Both officers -- Jason Leavitt of District Heights and Prince George's County officer Wayne Cheney— claimed Archie Elliott pointed a gun at them, but Dorothy Elliott said, in a Tasnim interview, this cannot be the case, as his son was handcuffed behind his back in the front passenger seat of a police cruiser with his seat belt strapped.
A 23-member county grand jury that investigated the killing, acquitted the two officers of all wrongdoings.
“Nobody was pleased or expected the outcome of not having the officers charged, and to this day I still don’t know why, because my son was in no position to harm those officers,” Dorothy Elliott said. “If he were, I’d be the first to say: ‘you did what you did because you wanted to save your life’, but I don’t believe that was the case at all.”
Dorothy Elliott posits that the officers had searched his son after arresting him for a DUI, but “no contraband,whatsoever, was found.”
“You know, with his hands still cuffed behind him and the judge said ‘wait a minute I thought you said the windows were rolled up’; so they were lying and they still lie and there is no justice in Prince George’s County when it comes to dealing with police officers who killed citizens, and I believe there’s no justice in Baltimore, there’s no justice in D.C., there’s no justice in Richmond Virginia, or any place when police officers are involved. The outcome is always the same; it’s a travesty of Justice,” she highlighted.
Elliott called for a repeal in the “bad laws” which, in her view, give the police officers the advantage to put up their stories before appearing at the court.
“We, as loved ones, need to have laws repealed or do everything we can to make sure that there are laws on the book that they are enforced and to repeal certain bad laws that give police the advantage of not having to speak for 10 days and getting their stories together.”
Elliot says she has gone to legislative sessions in Capitol Hill numerous times since the death of his son to help repeal those laws.