|
CounterPunch
October
28, 2002
"The Beat the Hell Out
of Me"
Cops Target
Green Politician
by STEVEN HIGGS
progressives in Bloomington, Indiana have been
disabused of the notion that there are depths to which local
right-wing vigilantes will not sink. Two Fridays ago, Monroe
County Councilman Scott Wells was set up, roughed up and arrested
on politically motivated, bogus charges of drunken driving and
resisting arrest. Plot participants included uniformed officers
of the Indiana State Police.
"It's scary as hell," Wells
said last Thursday evening.
Wells, a high school teacher and top
vote-getter in the 2000 county elections, suffered a serious
knee injury, abrasions to his face and hand, and a deep abrasion
on his right elbow after two cops kicked him in the knee, wrestled
him to the ground, and smashed his face into the pavement for
allegedly resisting arrest.
On Sunday, Wells went to the Bloomington
Hospital emergency room, where X-rays showed a break or separation
of the lateral-superior region of the left patella. The total
cost for the visit and prescription drugs was over $800. He soon
will be seeing an orthopedic specialist.
What follows is Wells version of an encounter
between an elected representative of the people of Monroe County
and America's 21st Century police state.
***
Describing himself as one who leads a
"structured, conservative life," Wells says he has
gotten into the habit of late of having a couple of beers downtown
on Friday evenings after completing his week teaching at Owen
Valley High School.
He starts at the Crazy Horse, where he
has a couple beers with dinner, and ends up at Nick's or Kilroy's.
On that Friday, Wells, a former football player, says he drank
two beers with dinner at the Horse. "That's how I relax.
I have a couple beers with people."
Upon leaving the Horse, Wells drove up
Sixth Street and parked his car on the north side of Sixth between
Indiana and Dunn, just west of Indiana. Per his routine, he hung
out Nick's and Kilroy's. He says he had a beer at Nick's and
a daiquiri at Kilroy's before returning to his car at a little
after 10 p.m.
A full two hours earlier, after Wells
left the Crazy Horse, someone had called off-duty Indiana State
Trooper and Monroe County Sheriff candidate J.D. Maxwell at home
to report "a man" walking and driving drunk downtown.
Even though the alleged offense occurred in the city police department's
jurisdiction, Maxwell called the state police post, which dispatched
Trooper Stacy Brown to the area.
It is still not known who called Maxwell.
Whoever it was scheduled a news conference for Friday afternoon,
only to cancel at the last minute at the request of the State
Police. But Wells has his suspicions. One reason he goes to the
Crazy Horse is that local Republicans, including County Council
candidate Trent Jones, drink there. Wells says he likes to keep
an eye on them and see what he can pick up.
"I think that's where the phone
call came from - either from the Crazy Horse or around that area,"
he says.
*** Wells said he left Kilroy's a few
minutes after 10 and walked to his car. As he was pulling away
and fastening his seat belt, he looked toward the IU parking
lot on the north side of Sixth and felt a chill spread over his
body.
"I look over there and about 70
feet back from the entrance is a State Police car with its lights
off, but the person is in there," he says. "He looks
at me, and the first thing I think is, 'J.D. Maxwell. Oh shit,
here we go.' And sure enough, the headlights come on."
Knowing that he's being followed, Wells
says he practiced "textbook driving" - complete stops,
turn signals, following the speed limit, etc. He turns left on
Indiana, left on Seventh. "Halfway between Dunn and Indiana,
the lights come on," he says. "I knew it was going
to be a long night."
When Wells asked why he was being stopped,
Brown said it was for a seat-belt violation. Wells replied that
he was putting his seat belt on as he pulled away and was wearing
it when he was stopped. Brown changed the subject, saying there
had been complaints about his vehicle, about erratic driving
and the driver walking intoxicated. Wells wondered how the trooper
could say that after he had tailed him for about four city blocks.
Wells says he told Trooper Brown: "Officer,
my vehicle has been parked over there for over two hours.' I
inferred but didn't say, 'If I was drunk then, wouldn't I be
bombed out of my gourd now after spending an additional two hours
at the bars?' I mean, most people that I know don't go to bars
to sober up. I also implied, how many minutes or hours have you
been sitting there in that parking lot waiting for me with your
lights out?"
Brown then returned to his car, and soon
another trooper arrived. They told Wells that they wanted him
to take a sobriety test. He agreed, expecting the routine dexterity
tests - walking a straight line, touching the nose. "They
didn't do any of that," he says. "He tells me, 'We're
going to do a breath analyzer.'"
***
To that point, Wells says Brown had been
extremely agitated and confrontational, which made him suspicious.
"I'm thinking, 'All of this for a seat-belt violation. You're
really stretching this, brother, to be this pumped up for something
so minor. There's something wrong here.'"
Wells said he agreed to a breath test
but insisted it be fair and unbiased. He requested it be administered
at the jail on Seventh Street, just a few blocks away, where
the most accurate tests are done. He repeated he wanted it to
be fair and unbiased. When asked if he was refusing, Wells says
he repeated that he wanted the test done at the station.
Because Wells already thought he was
being set up by Maxwell and crew, he worried it might be possible
to rig the results. He knew of Maxwell's checkered history with
the State Police. That's why, he says, he requested the Breathalyzer
test be done at the city police station.
At that point, one of the troopers forcefully
grabbed Wells' arm, without warning, and pulled it behind his
back in a "chicken wing" and said, 'You're under arrest.'
Wells says he tensed up due to a reflex action, but did not assault,
push, shove, or hit. When he protested that he hadn't done anything
wrong, the trooper accused him of resisting arrest and "karate
kicked me in my left knee. I couldn't see it coming. It was like
a clip in football, a cheap shot."
That assault landed Wells face down on
the sidewalk. "Then, he starts grinding my face into the
cement, with his forearm. I have these strawberry patches on
my face to verify it."
All of this was taking place in isolation.
Wells said he kept screaming, "This is America, you can't
do this to people," in hopes a witness would show up. None
did.
***
As the events transpired, two city police
cars arrived on the scene as backup. One of them took Wells to
the County Jail, where he was booked on driving while intoxicated
and resisting arrest charges.
As the squad car was pulling through
the alley that leads to the jail, Wells looked out the window
and saw four guys in the alley. "I know what J.D. Maxwell
looks like," he says. "It was in the alley, and I can't
say for sure. But the gray-haired, squatty guy in the red shirt,
he sure looked like J.D. Maxwell to me."
The first thing Wells said inside the
lockup was that he wanted a breath test. They gave him a test
called an Alco-Sensor, which came out 0.075. The legal limit
for drinking and driving is 0.08.
"I was really pissed off,"
he says. "I said, 'It feels like you broke my left knee.
Look at what you've done to my elbow. Look at what you've done
to my face. I've done nothing wrong.' I'm agitated now."
They briefly put Wells in detox, only
to haul him out a few minutes later and tell him he had one option
- to be taken to Bloomington Hospital, in hand cuffs, and have
his blood tested for alcohol and other drugs.
Alco-Sensor tests are not admissible
in court. And Wells says he wondered why they would not do the
alcohol test on the "official" Breathalyzer test machine
that was right there in the station and why it would take 30
days to get the blood-test results back. He asked for a chance
to call his lawyer but was told no. He asked for time to think
about it but was told no. So, he refused the blood test and spent
24 hours in the drunk tank. It cost him $1,100 to get out on
bond.
"Eleven-hundred dollars, and I didn't
even blow a .08," he says. "If I didn't have $1,100,
I'd have been there until Monday at 2:30."
***
There's no question why the unholy alliance
of developers, right-wing fanatics and cops are after Scott Wells.
Working within the system, he's been an extraordinarily effective
political activist, exposing the wrongdoings of some of the county's
most powerful vested interests.
He's also in the forefront of a growing
citizen movement that threatens the flow of taxpayer funds into
developer pockets. If three "green Democrats" running
in November are elected, Wells would be part of a progressive
majority that could dramatically change the council's direction.
"When you're rocking the boat the
way I am, they're going to try to get you anyway they can,"
he says. "I was stupid enough not to realize that."
He also has no doubt why Maxwell would
target him. Wells recently sued county resident Kevin Shiflet
for defamation after he charged at a county council meeting that
Wells knew who set the fire at the Pedigo Bay housing development
on Lake Monroe. In a 108-page deposition taken in that case,
Shiflet "cracked like an egg, and the egg splattered, and
part of it landed on J.D. Maxwell," Wells says.
"J.D. Maxwell is clearly one of
the active participants in my defamation lawsuit against Kevin
Shiflet et al," Wells says. Maxwell, along with other right-wing
zealots like Franklin Andrew, Leo Hickman, Richard Wells and
Bud Burnitt, were implicated in the deposition, Wells says.
"What's the motive for J.D. Maxwell
to go after me?" he asks. "Is it the defamation lawsuit?
Is that why he may have a vendetta to take my ass out? I don't
know."
An out-of-county special prosecutor has
been appointed to handle the case. And the Monroe County prosecutor
and State Police have refused to release any information to the
public on Wells' arrest.
Meanwhile, Wells worries about the advice
he's getting from some friends and colleagues. "People tell
me, 'They're getting so desperate, they might shoot your ass,'"
he says. "You never know after this. They beat the hell
out of me."
Steven Higgs
is the editor of the Bloomington
Alternative. He can be reached at: editor@BloomingtonAlternative.com
Yesterday's
Features
Naseer Aruri
Remapping
the Middle East:
Whose War Is It This Time?
Yigal Bronner
A Letter
to the General
Kurt Nimmo
Horowitz, Powell and Belafonte
Robert Jensen
Bush's
Lies and Simple Truths
Patrick Cockburn
Putin's Gas:
115 Killed by Poison Gas
Anthony Gancarski
Johnny Muhammad Got His Gun
William Hughes
Report from DC:
The Anti-War Movement Arrives
William Blum
Bush's Wars:
Anti-Terror or Empire Building?
New
Print Edition of CounterPunch Available Exclusively
to Subscribers:
- The Shafts of Death: Bush, Coal Mines, and Death
in the Tunnels;
- Speak Memory!: Carter and the Draft;
- Daniel Pipes' World: Smearing Pro-Arab Academics;
- Ashcroft's Gays: the War on Free Speech;
- Saddam's Amnesty: Could It Happen Here?
- Criminalizing Dissent: a history and preview;
- Iraq 1987: When the Going Was Good;
- Egypt in Turmoil: an Anthropologist's Account;
- Green and Grounded: Profiled at the Gate.
Remember, the CounterPunch website is
supported exclusively by subscribers to our newsletter. Our worldwide
web audience is soaring , with about seven million hits a month
now. This is inspiring, but the work involved also compels us
to remind you more urgently than ever to subscribe and/or make
a (tax deductible) donation if you can afford it. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe
Now!
Or Call Toll Free 1 800 840 3683
home / subscribe
/ about us
/ books
/ archives
/ search
/ links
/
|