Williams: Irvo Otieno’s family needs the Justice Department, without delay

Ouko is the mother of Irvo Otieno, 28, who died of asphyxiation on March 6, 2023, after he was pinned on the floor while shackled and handcuffed for about 11 minutes by Henrico County sheriff’s deputies and hospital personnel during his intake at Central State Hospital.

Before her resignation last June, Baskervill pursued the case aggressively, initially charging 10 defendants before dropping two cases involving hospital employees. Prosecuting the remaining defendants would have been a heavy lift for an experienced prosecutor, given the sparse manpower and resources of her office. For months, Baskervill had been its sole prosecutor.

A panel of Dinwiddie Circuit judges appointed Jonathan Bourlier as her interim replacement. Ouko and her attorneys warmed to him, despite his lack of prosecutorial experience. But he was defeated in the November election by Amanda Mann.

Dinwiddie has had three lead prosecutors in less than a year. That was never going to redound to the benefit of a smooth prosecution of the people accused of murdering Otieno.

Now, matters are coming to a head.

Ouko’s attorneys — nationally renowned civil rights attorney Ben Crump and Richmond lawyer Mark Krudys — are imploring the U.S. Justice Department to intervene. The attorneys had reached out to the department to investigate the case last June, shortly after Baskervill’s departure. But Mann’s recent decision to drop five of the cases has lent urgency to this latest request.

Mann has described her action as a reordering of the cases — according to Krudys, she wants to try the strongest cases first. He’s under the impression that the other cases will be brought back at some future time.

At least one of the defense attorneys in the case was left with a different impression: that his client, Henrico sheriff’s deputy Dwayne Bramble, won’t be going to trial.

“I don’t believe that that will happen,” attorney G. Russell Stone said in Tuesday’s Times-Dispatch. “I have watched that video over and over. Mr. Bramble never should have been charged.”

Crump and Krudys insist that the eight cases were strong and ready to roll out. They opposed Mann’s action as unnecessary and unwise.

“It was both deflating to the family and naïve of Mann to think that the defense would not capitalize on that as an articulation of some type of apathy on her part,” Krudys said Thursday.

Ouko argued at a news conference on Monday that everyone who piled on her son was culpable in his death.

“There is no way that anybody can look into that camera and say, ‘Oh, you are less culpable; oh, you didn’t do anything; oh, you didn’t do much. … We all know what we saw.”

At Monday’s news conference, Caroline Ouko asked: “DOJ, where are you? Kindly step in and stand for Irvo Otieno. And turn every stone upside down to find the truth. Because what happened to my son is unimaginable.”

She grew emotional toward the end of the news conference.

“Why should we leave it to discretion when we have everything now? It is time to prosecute. … And we hope that the Dinwiddie commonwealth’s attorney can do her job. And if she’s not willing to prosecute, the DOJ — where are you? Where are you?” she said, her rising voice drenched with despair. “The Department of Justice. Where are you?”

Otieno’s death and the video of his restraint were national news at the time, drawing comparisons to the murder of George Floyd, who was similarly asphyxiated while being restrained by Minneapolis police. The Rev. Al Sharpton presided over Otieno’s funeral.

But public attitudes — as they are wont to do in the U.S. on matters of race and justice — have shifted precipitously since the social justice protests that followed Floyd’s May 2020 murder. The pendulum has swung, and Black folks are ducking.

“This is not a difficult case,” Crump, piped in on video, said during Monday’s news conference.

“The only thing that makes it a complicated, difficult case is the police that killed a Black man. And in America, apparently to hold a police officer or police officers responsible for taking the life of a Black person is always a complicated matter,” said Crump, who represented the family of Floyd.

From a layman’s perspective, a strategy to try the strongest cases first comes with a caveat: It might convey weakness in the other cases. Meanwhile, Ouko is being asked to trust a criminal justice system accused of being complicit in her son’s death.

Or as Crump said: “If that was your child, you can only imagine how this is eating her up inside. Now you’re going to dismiss the charges against the police. You want me to take your word you’re going to bring them back? Well, why’d you take them away in the first place?”

Her attorneys have sought the help of the Justice Department before, in a June 26, 2023, letter to Kristen Clarke, assistant attorney general for Civil Rights; Jessica Aber, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia; and Stanley Meador of the Richmond Field Office of the FBI.

What the prosecution alleges is a timeline of abuse that began at the Henrico County Regional Jail West, which makes this matter multijurisdictional, Krudys says. Add the competing demands of a relatively small Dinwiddie prosecutor’s office and “the matter is ripe for their involvement,” said Krudys, whose résumé includes a stint as a Justice Department prosecutor in Miami.

Any criminal case lodged against law enforcement officers is a major challenge, even with video evidence. You’d certainly want everyone involved in the pursuit of justice for Otieno to be pulling in the same direction.

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Justice Department are already looking timid, tardy and overly cautious in the department’s prosecution of Donald Trump on charges of election interference.

Add the broader implications of race and policing in the Otieno case — yet another instance when mental illness proved to be a death sentence — and this looks like an infringement of civil rights too important for the feds to ignore.

A Justice Department denial of this request could be justice delayed — or worse.