Ashlie Hardway, reporter for Channel 7, KVIA, in El Paso, Texas was sued twice in one month in 2008. On October 27, 2008, my lawyer, Doris Sipes, served a lawsuit on Ashlie Hardway. I am suing her for a false and defamatory story she ran on the public airwaves regarding me during the 2008 Democratic Primary when I was a candidate for District Attorney. (See blog dated October 28, 2009.) Amazingly, less than one month later, on November 26, 2008, in another city where Ashlie Hardway used to live and work, Mr. Rene Cervantes of Laredo, Texas filed a lawsuit against Ashlie Hardway in Webb County, Texas District Court for Tortious Interference with Prospective Relation and Tortious Interference with Existing Contract. The cause number is 2008CVQ0018532 styled:
Rene Cervantes
v.
The City of Laredo
PRO 8 News, Hearst
Newspapers II.L.L.C. D/B/A
The Laredo Morning Times,
Entravision-Texas G.P., L.L.C.
D/B/A KLDO-TV, and Ashlie Hardway,
Defendants
I will post this lawsuit as a link on Friday, May 22, 2009.
Mr. Cervantes is suing Ashlie Hardway for a story she ran on him. According to his pleadings, Hardway used documents that were not available to the public and she admitted to having received them from the Laredo Police Department. Mr. Cervantes has sued several entities but Ashlie Hardway has the distinction of being the only individual actually named in his lawsuit. He has a special place for her.
Ashlie Hardway has racked up at least two lawsuits in her short career as a reporter. No wonder she moved to El Paso from Laredo. However, her past is catching up with her. Now the question is, how many more lawsuits are out there against Ashlie Hardway? How many more are there to come? Most people live their whole lives without ever being sued even once. Not Ashlie Hardway. She just rackin'em up. KVIA is now on abundant notice about Ashlie Hardway and her work practices. It will be interesting to see them defend her in future lawsuits. Ashlie Hardway is the caliber of reporter El Paso, the 99th market place, attracts and whom KVIA is eager to hire. Lucky us.
Ashlie Hardway Sued in Two Unrelated Incidents in 2008
May 21, 2009, 6:15 pmPolice Brutality in El Paso and the New York Times vis-a-vis Darren Hunt
May 19, 2009, 11:22 am
KVIA, channel 7, car crash reporter Darren Hunt, was roughed up on the side of the freeway by an El Paso Police Sgt. last month. Darren Hunt and KVIA have gotten as much mileage out of the footage as they can. My perspective has been that the police department has needed reformation for many, many years now. The average citizen has suffered greatly by our poorly trained police force; they have been subjected to being shot in the back, maimed, sodomized, crippled, raped and accused and convicted on perjurious police testimony.
Darren Hunt and his ilk in the local media have watched the suffering of El Pasoans and have either ignored it or slanted the reporting to shield the police and District Attorney Jaime Esparza. If Darren Hunt and the press had truly acted as watch dogs, things would be different in El Paso for everyone, not just Darren Hunt. The brutality endemic in the police department and the collusion of District Attorney Jaime Esparza had to be covered by an outside news source because the locals, i.e. Darren Hunt/KVIA, would not do it. The New York Times sent reporter Ralph Blumenthal to El Paso in May of 2004 to research the complaints, most specifically my client's, Nancy Hollebeke's. He spent days here talking to different people. Why did it take the New York Times to expose the problems here?
I called Mr. Blumenthal and asked him to come to El Paso specifically because the local press was purposefully ignoring the problem. And again, where are the local news stories since the NY Times' 2004 article. Since 2004, several El Pasoans have been shot and killed by the police and a settlement has been reached by the city on at least one of these cases that I know of. Where are the stories? Yet we have to watch Darren Hunt night after night ad nauseum getting arrested and roughed up as if this were the worst example of police brutality ever committed in El Paso, Texas.
The police sgt. in the Darren Hunt story was demoted. Readers of the NY Times article listed below should bear in mind that this sgt. was punished more than any officer involved in any of the horror stories recounted by Reporter Blumenthal. In fact, one of the officers involved in the police nightstick case has been promoted to trainer on the westside of town and officer Jose Garcia is in charge of the sexual offender registration department, irony of all ironies. The cop who shot the man at the Coronado Hotel 11 times last year, with most of the shots hitting the deceased in the BACK, was named officer of the year this year. Officer Louis Johnson, while on the stand in the middle of a hearing, was told by a district court judge, on the record, that she did not believe a word that was coming out of his mouth. After El Paso Mayor John Cook, Louis Johnson's boss, received a copy of the transcript, Louis Johnson was promptly promoted to sgt.
For memories that have faded or for people who were not tuned in at the time, here is the June 4, 2004, New York Times article which appeared on the front page of the National section. The story took up almost the entire front page and reports on corruption and brutality in the El Paso Police Department and the collusion of District Attorney Jaime Esparza. While all of this has been going on, where has Darren Hunt been? Why he has been spending his time and using the public airwaves chasing and reporting on car crashes.
Rarely Used Courts Investigate El Paso Police and District Attorney
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
Published: Friday, June 4, 2004
EL PASO - What happened in the Chihuahuan Desert that May night in 2002 may never be known for certain.
But here in the nation's largest city on the Mexican border, a teenager's complaint that she was sexually assaulted by two El Paso police officers who remained free while she was jailed has set off an extraordinary set of judicial investigations.
Two rarely invoked State Courts of Inquiry are trying to determine in part whether the El Paso district attorney and the Police Department conspired to shield officers accused of brutalizing people in at least six cases.
District Attorney Jaime Esparza and interim Police Chief Richard Wiles denied any wrongdoing and said they were cooperating with the inquiries. "I don't lose any sleep over the outcome," said Mr. Esparza, now serving his third term.
Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union say the investigations are overdue. "If you are a police officer in this town, you can violate criminal rights left and right and not get prosecuted," said Ed Hernandez, who with his wife, Maria, represents several plaintiffs.
Figures supplied by Chief Wiles suggest that dismissals from the department for use of excessive force were rare. From 1999 through March 2004, El Paso police officers made about 36,000 arrests, with 1,830 accusations of excessive force, which led to the dismissals of five officers and the resignations of two. In nearly all the other cases the complaints were ruled unsubstantiated or unfounded, with 84 cases still under investigation.
With city officials and the district attorney up for election every two or four years in this city of 638,000, the police department of some 1,100 officers and 300 civilians and all their dependents "constitute a pretty good voting bloc," said Sam Snoddy, another lawyer who represents people with complaints against the police. "The D.A. does not want to hack the police off."
Mr. Esparza said he recognized that critics saw his office as improperly close to the police. "The reputation of this office may be in some circles that we're giving the cops a break," he said, "but I think generally the reputation is we do what's right." He defended an unusual arrangement, which critics call unconstitutional, that has his office rather than a magistrate setting bail for many defendants.
The first inquest is set for June 14 with an open hearing into the case of the woman, Nancy Hollebeke, now 20. In an interview in her lawyer's office, Ms. Hollebeke said that on May 17, 2002, she had been drinking and smoking marijuana with friends, and was with them later at a party in the desert when two officers found her hiding behind shrubs, pulled down her pants and inserted fingers or an object into her vagina. A medical report said she had suffered "multiple abrasions to body and vaginal abrasion" and "a two-millimeter superficial tear" in her labia.
"I didn't think I'd make it home that night,&qu
ot; Ms. Hollebeke said. "I thought they'd leave me there, maybe kill me."
The officers were never charged. But four months after making her claims, Ms. Hollebeke was arrested on charges of filing a false report, a misdemeanor, and jailed for seven hours. Mr. Esparza later dropped the charges, "due to the ongoing Court of Inquiry." One of her lawyers, Michael R. Milligan, has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city, prosecutors and several police officers, including Chief Wiles and his predecessor, Carlos Leon.
Other cases under review by a second Court of Inquiry involve a woman who says she was raped by her husband, a police officer, who was exonerated without the district attorney ever calling her or other witnesses to testify before a grand jury; the former wife of a police officer who says he beat her and buzzed her house in a police plane; and a Marine corporal who says he was hit and jailed for no reason.
Some of the complainants, including Ms. Hollebeke, said police officers seemed to be stalking them after they made complaints. Chief Wiles, who took over in August 2003, acknowledged that the department's internal affairs unit did investigate members of the public in cases in which officers felt wrongly accused.
1 2 Next Page >
Among other cases brought as federal civil rights lawsuits, an illegal Mexican immigrant, Andrés Pérez Ruíz, claimed that police officers who stopped his car thrust a police baton up his rectum, causing severe injury. He settled for a city payment of $195,000. No officers were ever prosecuted. The case was sealed, and Mr. Ruiz's lawyer said he could not discuss it.
In another lawsuit, a 49-year-old construction worker said he suffered a stroke and crashed his van on Interstate 10 in 2002. When he could not obey police officers' commands to put his paralyzed hand on the wheel, said the man, Luis Maldonado, officers put a gun to his head, beat him, dragged him out of the car and doused him with pepper spray. He now needs a wheelchair, he said, because he was denied immediate treatment. The officers were never charged.
Judge Richard Roman of the 346th District Court of El Paso found cause for the first Court of Inquiry in January after lawyers for Ms. Hollebeke, Stuart Leeds and Theresa Caballero, said no other judge would hear her complaint. Judge Roman called it an easy decision. "Something was wrong," he said. "They presented me with a compelling set of facts." The region's presiding judge, Stephen B. Ables, granted the inquiry, appointing himself to preside and naming a former El Paso judge, Dick Alcala, to gather and present the facts. The second Court of Inquiry into the other cases is separate.
But whether the courts can issue indictments is not clear. "This is uncharted legal territory," said Judge Roman, who said that the 19th-century statute that allowed the courts had rarely been invoked for criminal inquiries. The scope of the inquiries may widen. Among those talked to by investigators is George DeAngelis, a former assistant police chief who voiced concerns in 1999 about possible infiltration of the department by Mexican drug cartels. An inquiry was quashed, Mr. DeAngelis said.
The Hollebeke case is a special flashpoint. Although the district attorney's office does not usually electronically record complainants, it videotaped Ms. Hollebeke straight from the hospital as she spoke to a detective, Brigitte Ballou, with prosecutors concealed behind a two-way mirror. Mr. Esparza said he would have been criticized if he had not made an exact record. His office insisted Ms. Hollebeke was notified of the videotaping; she says she was not and the tape reflects no such advisory.
It does show that after two hours of questioning, Detective Ballou left and later returned wearing a headset, through which she often seemed to be receiving instructions. She told Ms. Hollebeke at one point, "If there are discrepancies, it's going to be really hard on you - if you lie to a police officer you can be arrested."
Ms. Hollebeke, upset, said, "I don't feel you're on my side at all" and walked out.
The officers she named, Albert Machorro and Jose Garcia, denied the attack, Chief Wiles said, and told investigators they were not the ones who found her in the desert. A third officer, Lance Martel, said he was first on the scene. But Ms. Hollebeke stuck to her account, although she said Officers Machorro and Garcia initially gave her false names.
Officer Garcia's lawyer, Jim Darnell, called the complaint "absolute baloney" and said the two men had passed polygraph tests, although Ms. Hollebeke's lawyers say no such evidence has been produced. Mr. Machorro's lawyer, Joe Spencer, said that Ms. Hollebeke's account was marred by contradictions and that the two officers "never touched her.''
Nothing much happened on the case for four months, although in July 2002 Mr. Machorro's father, Albert Sr., a former police officer, was hired by Mr. Esparza as an investigator. "I was not aware of the connection when I hired him," Mr. Esparza said. In September 2002, Mr. Esparza declined to bring the case against the officers, giving as the official reason "crucial witness testimony not credible."
Barbara Novovitch contributed reporting from West Texas for this article.
Correction: June 12, 2004, Saturday
An article on June 4 about inquiries into whether the El Paso district attorney and the Police Department conspired to shield officers accused of brutality attributed a distinction to the city incorrectly. It is not the largest American city on the Mexican border; San Diego is.
Darren Hunt and his ilk in the local media have watched the suffering of El Pasoans and have either ignored it or slanted the reporting to shield the police and District Attorney Jaime Esparza. If Darren Hunt and the press had truly acted as watch dogs, things would be different in El Paso for everyone, not just Darren Hunt. The brutality endemic in the police department and the collusion of District Attorney Jaime Esparza had to be covered by an outside news source because the locals, i.e. Darren Hunt/KVIA, would not do it. The New York Times sent reporter Ralph Blumenthal to El Paso in May of 2004 to research the complaints, most specifically my client's, Nancy Hollebeke's. He spent days here talking to different people. Why did it take the New York Times to expose the problems here?
I called Mr. Blumenthal and asked him to come to El Paso specifically because the local press was purposefully ignoring the problem. And again, where are the local news stories since the NY Times' 2004 article. Since 2004, several El Pasoans have been shot and killed by the police and a settlement has been reached by the city on at least one of these cases that I know of. Where are the stories? Yet we have to watch Darren Hunt night after night ad nauseum getting arrested and roughed up as if this were the worst example of police brutality ever committed in El Paso, Texas.
The police sgt. in the Darren Hunt story was demoted. Readers of the NY Times article listed below should bear in mind that this sgt. was punished more than any officer involved in any of the horror stories recounted by Reporter Blumenthal. In fact, one of the officers involved in the police nightstick case has been promoted to trainer on the westside of town and officer Jose Garcia is in charge of the sexual offender registration department, irony of all ironies. The cop who shot the man at the Coronado Hotel 11 times last year, with most of the shots hitting the deceased in the BACK, was named officer of the year this year. Officer Louis Johnson, while on the stand in the middle of a hearing, was told by a district court judge, on the record, that she did not believe a word that was coming out of his mouth. After El Paso Mayor John Cook, Louis Johnson's boss, received a copy of the transcript, Louis Johnson was promptly promoted to sgt.
For memories that have faded or for people who were not tuned in at the time, here is the June 4, 2004, New York Times article which appeared on the front page of the National section. The story took up almost the entire front page and reports on corruption and brutality in the El Paso Police Department and the collusion of District Attorney Jaime Esparza. While all of this has been going on, where has Darren Hunt been? Why he has been spending his time and using the public airwaves chasing and reporting on car crashes.
Rarely Used Courts Investigate El Paso Police and District Attorney
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
Published: Friday, June 4, 2004
EL PASO - What happened in the Chihuahuan Desert that May night in 2002 may never be known for certain.
But here in the nation's largest city on the Mexican border, a teenager's complaint that she was sexually assaulted by two El Paso police officers who remained free while she was jailed has set off an extraordinary set of judicial investigations.
Two rarely invoked State Courts of Inquiry are trying to determine in part whether the El Paso district attorney and the Police Department conspired to shield officers accused of brutalizing people in at least six cases.
District Attorney Jaime Esparza and interim Police Chief Richard Wiles denied any wrongdoing and said they were cooperating with the inquiries. "I don't lose any sleep over the outcome," said Mr. Esparza, now serving his third term.
Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union say the investigations are overdue. "If you are a police officer in this town, you can violate criminal rights left and right and not get prosecuted," said Ed Hernandez, who with his wife, Maria, represents several plaintiffs.
Figures supplied by Chief Wiles suggest that dismissals from the department for use of excessive force were rare. From 1999 through March 2004, El Paso police officers made about 36,000 arrests, with 1,830 accusations of excessive force, which led to the dismissals of five officers and the resignations of two. In nearly all the other cases the complaints were ruled unsubstantiated or unfounded, with 84 cases still under investigation.
With city officials and the district attorney up for election every two or four years in this city of 638,000, the police department of some 1,100 officers and 300 civilians and all their dependents "constitute a pretty good voting bloc," said Sam Snoddy, another lawyer who represents people with complaints against the police. "The D.A. does not want to hack the police off."
Mr. Esparza said he recognized that critics saw his office as improperly close to the police. "The reputation of this office may be in some circles that we're giving the cops a break," he said, "but I think generally the reputation is we do what's right." He defended an unusual arrangement, which critics call unconstitutional, that has his office rather than a magistrate setting bail for many defendants.
The first inquest is set for June 14 with an open hearing into the case of the woman, Nancy Hollebeke, now 20. In an interview in her lawyer's office, Ms. Hollebeke said that on May 17, 2002, she had been drinking and smoking marijuana with friends, and was with them later at a party in the desert when two officers found her hiding behind shrubs, pulled down her pants and inserted fingers or an object into her vagina. A medical report said she had suffered "multiple abrasions to body and vaginal abrasion" and "a two-millimeter superficial tear" in her labia.
"I didn't think I'd make it home that night,&qu
ot; Ms. Hollebeke said. "I thought they'd leave me there, maybe kill me."
The officers were never charged. But four months after making her claims, Ms. Hollebeke was arrested on charges of filing a false report, a misdemeanor, and jailed for seven hours. Mr. Esparza later dropped the charges, "due to the ongoing Court of Inquiry." One of her lawyers, Michael R. Milligan, has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city, prosecutors and several police officers, including Chief Wiles and his predecessor, Carlos Leon.
Other cases under review by a second Court of Inquiry involve a woman who says she was raped by her husband, a police officer, who was exonerated without the district attorney ever calling her or other witnesses to testify before a grand jury; the former wife of a police officer who says he beat her and buzzed her house in a police plane; and a Marine corporal who says he was hit and jailed for no reason.
Some of the complainants, including Ms. Hollebeke, said police officers seemed to be stalking them after they made complaints. Chief Wiles, who took over in August 2003, acknowledged that the department's internal affairs unit did investigate members of the public in cases in which officers felt wrongly accused.
1 2 Next Page >
Among other cases brought as federal civil rights lawsuits, an illegal Mexican immigrant, Andrés Pérez Ruíz, claimed that police officers who stopped his car thrust a police baton up his rectum, causing severe injury. He settled for a city payment of $195,000. No officers were ever prosecuted. The case was sealed, and Mr. Ruiz's lawyer said he could not discuss it.
In another lawsuit, a 49-year-old construction worker said he suffered a stroke and crashed his van on Interstate 10 in 2002. When he could not obey police officers' commands to put his paralyzed hand on the wheel, said the man, Luis Maldonado, officers put a gun to his head, beat him, dragged him out of the car and doused him with pepper spray. He now needs a wheelchair, he said, because he was denied immediate treatment. The officers were never charged.
Judge Richard Roman of the 346th District Court of El Paso found cause for the first Court of Inquiry in January after lawyers for Ms. Hollebeke, Stuart Leeds and Theresa Caballero, said no other judge would hear her complaint. Judge Roman called it an easy decision. "Something was wrong," he said. "They presented me with a compelling set of facts." The region's presiding judge, Stephen B. Ables, granted the inquiry, appointing himself to preside and naming a former El Paso judge, Dick Alcala, to gather and present the facts. The second Court of Inquiry into the other cases is separate.
But whether the courts can issue indictments is not clear. "This is uncharted legal territory," said Judge Roman, who said that the 19th-century statute that allowed the courts had rarely been invoked for criminal inquiries. The scope of the inquiries may widen. Among those talked to by investigators is George DeAngelis, a former assistant police chief who voiced concerns in 1999 about possible infiltration of the department by Mexican drug cartels. An inquiry was quashed, Mr. DeAngelis said.
The Hollebeke case is a special flashpoint. Although the district attorney's office does not usually electronically record complainants, it videotaped Ms. Hollebeke straight from the hospital as she spoke to a detective, Brigitte Ballou, with prosecutors concealed behind a two-way mirror. Mr. Esparza said he would have been criticized if he had not made an exact record. His office insisted Ms. Hollebeke was notified of the videotaping; she says she was not and the tape reflects no such advisory.
It does show that after two hours of questioning, Detective Ballou left and later returned wearing a headset, through which she often seemed to be receiving instructions. She told Ms. Hollebeke at one point, "If there are discrepancies, it's going to be really hard on you - if you lie to a police officer you can be arrested."
Ms. Hollebeke, upset, said, "I don't feel you're on my side at all" and walked out.
The officers she named, Albert Machorro and Jose Garcia, denied the attack, Chief Wiles said, and told investigators they were not the ones who found her in the desert. A third officer, Lance Martel, said he was first on the scene. But Ms. Hollebeke stuck to her account, although she said Officers Machorro and Garcia initially gave her false names.
Officer Garcia's lawyer, Jim Darnell, called the complaint "absolute baloney" and said the two men had passed polygraph tests, although Ms. Hollebeke's lawyers say no such evidence has been produced. Mr. Machorro's lawyer, Joe Spencer, said that Ms. Hollebeke's account was marred by contradictions and that the two officers "never touched her.''
Nothing much happened on the case for four months, although in July 2002 Mr. Machorro's father, Albert Sr., a former police officer, was hired by Mr. Esparza as an investigator. "I was not aware of the connection when I hired him," Mr. Esparza said. In September 2002, Mr. Esparza declined to bring the case against the officers, giving as the official reason "crucial witness testimony not credible."
Barbara Novovitch contributed reporting from West Texas for this article.
Correction: June 12, 2004, Saturday
An article on June 4 about inquiries into whether the El Paso district attorney and the Police Department conspired to shield officers accused of brutality attributed a distinction to the city incorrectly. It is not the largest American city on the Mexican border; San Diego is.
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