Pubdate: Wed, 18 Mar 2009
Source: Baltimore Sun (MD)
Copyright: 2009 The Baltimore Sun Company
Contact:  http://www.baltimoresun.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/37
Author: Peter Hermann, Baltimore Crime Beat
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/raids.htm (Drug Raids)
Bookmark: http://mapinc.org/people/Cheryl+Lynn+Noel

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.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom