LAWSUIT BRINGS DISSECTION OF FATAL SWAT RAID

The way the attorney for the family suing Baltimore County describes
it, heavily armed paramilitary police officers carrying ballistic
shields and dressed in camouflage stormed a suburban Dundalk house
over trace amounts of drugs without knocking and fatally shot a
"devoted mother and wife" armed with a legally registered handgun to
defend herself from intruders.

The way the attorney defending the police officers and the county
describes it, professionally trained members of the SWAT team raided
a suspected narcotics den containing marijuana and cocaine that was
occupied by a convicted murderer with access to weapons and a
teenager who had just shot another youth in a fight, resulting in the
shooting of a woman holding a gun who refused to comply with the
cop's commands.

Jurors in U.S. District Court in Baltimore will have to sort through
these conflicting stories through at least two weeks of testimony in
a civil wrongful death lawsuit filed by Charles Noel on behalf of his
wife's estate in the Jan. 21, 2005, shooting of 44-year-old Cheryl Lynn Noel.

Lawyers for both sides gave opening statements this week in a case
that not only raises questions about whether the shooting was
justified but also could, if the family gets its way, become a
referendum on whether police overuse dangerous, military-style raids
to serve search-and-arrest warrants.

The attorneys promised jurors they would hear from Cheryl Lynn Noel's
husband and other residents, from the police officers who planned the
raid and the one who fired the fatal shot, from experts who will say
the cops overreacted and from others who will testify the cops
handled the raid to perfection.

It is a rare opportunity to listen to cops and others dissect a raid
and a police shooting. More details on the case from the opening
trial salvos are on my blog this morning.

To the family's lawyer, Dundalk in 2005 was an oasis outside the
city; the county attorney described Dundalk as indistinguishable from
the worst parts of Baltimore, part of a "very violent city and a very
violent nation and a very violent world."

The investigation either started with a routine traffic stop of the
woman's son in which an officer found a single Percocet pill or
stemmed from a "growing prescription drug epidemic."

In one telling, Cheryl Lynn Noel was executed with a final "kill
shot" at close range to the center of her chest as she lay prone on
her bedroom floor, incapacitated from two other police bullets lodged
in the upper left and right parts of her body, fired by Officer
Carlos Artson the moment he entered her bedroom and confronted her
holding the gun. Or she was shot the third and final time after she
refused three orders from Artson to move away from the gun that had
fallen from her hand and instead edged closer to the weapon.

Family attorney Terrell N. Roberts III: "This woman did not have fair
warning that the police were entering her house" and thought her home
was being invaded. After she was shot twice, he said, "She was not
going for the gun. She was incapable of going for the gun."

Baltimore County attorney Paul M. Mayhew: "We do not apologize for
one minute." He said Sgt. Robert M. Gibbons, who ordered the SWAT
raid, "didn't think it was remotely safe to send a patrol officer
knocking on the door," given the drug evidence seized and the
occupants' violent criminal background.

Roberts reminded jurors that "we're not going after Osama bin Laden,"
and Mayhew reminded jurors that county cops are "not a terrorist organization."

Hyperbole aside, the case raises some interesting questions about
police caught in a drug war and whether the violence requires them to
sometimes act more like soldiers than peace officers.