Community Commentary:

The recent million-dollar-plus verdict against the city of Glendale and two of its police officers has generated quite a bit of discussion of late (“Group seeks to review man’s jailing,” March 26). This issue arose from a civil rights lawsuit brought by an innocent man who was wrongfully accused of murder and who languished in one of Los Angeles’ most violent and notorious jails for eight months.

As has been reported in the Glendale News-Press, after all the parties had their day in court, a federal jury found the Glendale Police Department and the individual Glendale police officers’ conduct so egregious that they awarded the beleaguered young man roughly $1.16 million in damages, in addition to $150,000 in punitive damages from the individual officers.

Despite a fair and lengthy trial, Councilmen Frank Quintero and Dave Weaver have continued to profess the police officers’ innocence. Perhaps blinded by their own interests or biases, or simply engaging in political pandering, these misguided gentlemen have decided to personally reject the court’s verdict at the expense of their wrongfully incarcerated and traumatized constituent.

Quintero and Weaver need to be reminded that the judicial process is an integral part of our democratic system of checks and balances. Here, a federal jury received the city’s evidence and heard their arguments, issued its verdict, which the judge affirmed, making only an adjustment in the amount of damages. This is the only opinion that now counts.

At this point, Quintero’s and Weaver’s self-serving opinions about the validity of the case don’t matter and only serve to exacerbate a bad situation. The rightful authority to adjudicate justice, a judge and jury, spent considerable time examining the evidence and issued their decision. For some, this may be a bitter pill to swallow, but evidently our two council members need to be reminded that this is how the judicial system works in democracies.

In addition to the suffering of the original murder victim and his family, we now have the suffering of a man wrongly accused of the crime, not to mention a murderer at large in our community. But the damage our city incurred extends further beyond each of the victims or the city’s financial loss. The fact is that this incident marks yet one more fissure in the fragile social contract between Glendale citizens and their city government.