“How is America going to justify this?” exclaimed
Bounkham Phonesavankh after a federal jury in Georgia acquitted the
former sheriff’s deputy whose perjured affidavit precipitated a SWAT
raid that nearly cost the life of his 19-month-old son.
The search warrant used to justify that raid was filed by then-Deputy Nikki Austin, who claimed that a “true and reliable informant” had conducted a controlled buy of $50 worth of crystal meth at the home several hours earlier from a potentially dangerous repeat offender named Wanis Thonetheva. The affidavit characterized Thoneteheva as armed and potentially dangerous, and claimed that lookouts had been stationed at the home – elements that supposedly justified a militarized midnight raid on a home where children were known to reside.
Every critical element of Austin’s affidavit was either a conscious lie or a culpable misrepresentation. Her “true and reliable” informant began working with the Mountain Judicial Circuit Criminal Narcotics Investigation and Suppression Team the day before the nearly fatal SWAT raid on the Phonesavanh family, which means that he had not proven his reliability. He claimed to have attempted a drug buy while in the company of his wife and roommate, neither of whom was working with the task force, and it was the roommate – not the informant – who supposedly made the purchase. As Autry later testified in court, she wasn’t even the primary author of the affidavit, which was drafted by her supervisor.
During her trial, Autry maintained that she didn’t lie, while conceding that some of the information in the affidavit wasn’t “entirely” accurate.
Literally thousands of people are in federal prison because of genuinely trivial inaccuracies in stories they told federal investigators. As a member of the privileged enforcement caste, however, Autry was spared punishment because the applicable legal standard required the prosecution to demonstrate that she acted “willfully” and with “reckless disregard” for the truth – and, more importantly, the prosecution had to overcome the reflexive deference to law enforcement that characterizes American juries, especially at the federal level.
Alecia Phonesavankh, the mother of the still-recovering child, believes that Autry’s acquittal – like the grotesque display of military force in the terrifying home invasion raid — reflects deeply entrenched racial bias toward her Laotian husband, in-laws, and child.
“It’s obvious I was the only person untouched in that house when they raided it,” Alecia said through angry tears following the verdict. “Why? Because I’m white. Why do they target Laotians and not me? Because I’m white. Why did we get a not guilty verdict? Because she [former Deputy Austin] is white!”
Another possible explanation is found in the carefully designed mechanisms that diffuse responsibility and impede accountability. Within hours of the raid, while Bou-Bou was in a medically induced coma as doctors struggled to stitch his chest back together, Habersham County Sheriff Joey Terrell issued a statement exonerating his officers of all misconduct.
Read more here
“How can we explain this? I thought this country was built with the truth, and not a bunch of corruption and lying like this. I almost lost my life, my family, my son.”
Phonesavankh’s namesake son, known by the nickname Bou-Bou, was nearly burned to death in his sleep by a flash-bang grenade hurled into his crib during a 2:00 a.m. no-knock SWAT raid by the Habersham County Sheriff’s Office on their home in Cornelia in May 2014.The search warrant used to justify that raid was filed by then-Deputy Nikki Austin, who claimed that a “true and reliable informant” had conducted a controlled buy of $50 worth of crystal meth at the home several hours earlier from a potentially dangerous repeat offender named Wanis Thonetheva. The affidavit characterized Thoneteheva as armed and potentially dangerous, and claimed that lookouts had been stationed at the home – elements that supposedly justified a militarized midnight raid on a home where children were known to reside.
Every critical element of Austin’s affidavit was either a conscious lie or a culpable misrepresentation. Her “true and reliable” informant began working with the Mountain Judicial Circuit Criminal Narcotics Investigation and Suppression Team the day before the nearly fatal SWAT raid on the Phonesavanh family, which means that he had not proven his reliability. He claimed to have attempted a drug buy while in the company of his wife and roommate, neither of whom was working with the task force, and it was the roommate – not the informant – who supposedly made the purchase. As Autry later testified in court, she wasn’t even the primary author of the affidavit, which was drafted by her supervisor.
During her trial, Autry maintained that she didn’t lie, while conceding that some of the information in the affidavit wasn’t “entirely” accurate.
Literally thousands of people are in federal prison because of genuinely trivial inaccuracies in stories they told federal investigators. As a member of the privileged enforcement caste, however, Autry was spared punishment because the applicable legal standard required the prosecution to demonstrate that she acted “willfully” and with “reckless disregard” for the truth – and, more importantly, the prosecution had to overcome the reflexive deference to law enforcement that characterizes American juries, especially at the federal level.
Alecia Phonesavankh, the mother of the still-recovering child, believes that Autry’s acquittal – like the grotesque display of military force in the terrifying home invasion raid — reflects deeply entrenched racial bias toward her Laotian husband, in-laws, and child.
“It’s obvious I was the only person untouched in that house when they raided it,” Alecia said through angry tears following the verdict. “Why? Because I’m white. Why do they target Laotians and not me? Because I’m white. Why did we get a not guilty verdict? Because she [former Deputy Austin] is white!”
Another possible explanation is found in the carefully designed mechanisms that diffuse responsibility and impede accountability. Within hours of the raid, while Bou-Bou was in a medically induced coma as doctors struggled to stitch his chest back together, Habersham County Sheriff Joey Terrell issued a statement exonerating his officers of all misconduct.
“I stand behind what our team did,” Terrell declared after consulting with the county DA’ s office and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. “There’s nothing to investigate, there’s nothing to look at. Bad things can happen. That’s just the world we live in.”
Public outrage eventually led to a Grand Jury inquest, which did little more than ratify the sheriff’s claims. Rather than preferring charges against the officials responsible for that crime, the grand jury suggested a handful of anodyne “reforms” and expressed satisfaction that the rouge task force that carried out the berserker raid has been subsumed into a state-wide counter-narcotics unit supervised by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.Read more here
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